Cyrix dead, Winchip dead, AMD has had the COO bail out and is hemorrhaging money like mad. All this because of Intel and their basic viciousness and inability to coexist with competition. And you think everyone should make nice with them _now_ that they are finally stepping into almost complete monopoly for CPUs? I do have one of their CPUs in the house.:P Brought home the pet 486 from work that I've been putting linux on. However, the main computer is non-Intel. It's a Mac. I like Macs, but isn't it kind of pathetic that the only choice you have other than Intel is to go use Macs? (yes, I know, Athlon. Yes, please go and buy lots of them. AMD deserves better than the stomping they are getting. I don't think being better will save them, so buy _now_ before it's too late.) I've never been so pleased to be running a 604e as now, when the whole x86 market is being systematically exterminated. I'll just keep on supporting PPCs, seeing as I already have the Mac and the software to run on them. Things are already nasty on x86, good luck being able to afford Alpha machines (and people say Macs are expensive!) and if you're still supporting Intel, well, just think about what your money is doing, won't you? One hand supports Linux, for now- the other's killing all your hardware choices as fast as it can.
And it's not '3dfx' stuff- yes, Altivec is vector registers, i.e. four 32-bit values can be changed with one instruction, but these are general purpose registers, and Apple is already trying to figure out ways to use these 'fscking huge' registers in anything from screen update to memory management to Quicktime to yada yada yada- sky's the limit! If you can get a 128-bit chunk of it into the register, you can do it faster. One convolution kernel ran something like 200x faster on Altivec because it happened to coincide with register operations. Because these registers are general purpose, there's every reason to expect that gcc/egcs can be told about them, and hackers can find ways to make use of them- ideally by telling compilers how to optimize so the vector processors/huge registers get used. At that point, any PPC Linux users can simply recompile favorite applications to get them running markedly faster- and recompile the kernel to get that running markedly faster- something that MacOS users will only see indirectly, with system updates and with Quicktime. Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing about this...
Hey, don't look at me: I'm running MacOS 8 too. Apparently it is a great deal more reliable over extended uptimes (such as two days) than Win98 according to some of the Windows advocates' own postings. I dualboot LinuxPPC, not on a network. That seems to be very much in line with people's experience- I've sometimes had X crash. I knew I could telnet in- if only I was on a network. X stopped being so delicate when I started using a different version of Netscape. I am emphatically on the geeky slashdot weasels' side in this discussion. It's always _next_ year's Microsoft product that is supposed to be wonderful. I contest even the suggestion that MS office applications are so wonderful. That's nonsense. We are talking about a word processor that has consistently had a habit of embedding invisible control characters _in_band_ so that you could delete across a font or style change and have following characters change their style... hell, _Simpletext_ gets that one right. The situation is this: MS is not worthy of trust. At all. So are we to be complete blind, brainless idiots who cannot learn from experience, or do we start paying attention to outside information coming in? All of that tends to add up to one fact: nobody can overpromise or underdeliver like Microsoft. Under such conditions, can you seriously advocate taking any of their claims at face value?
You talk like somebody who registered a bunch of.com names and is trying to hock them on ebay;P I grabbed airwindows.com a long time ago to guard against just such people as you:P so nyaaah! (no, I did not homestead a directory on slashdot. oops:) ) And it doesn't have anything to do with Windows(tm), it's just an interesting juxtaposition originally meant as a metaphor for high end audio equipment, years ago:)
You talk like somebody who registered a bunch of.com names and is trying to hock them on ebay;P I grabbed airwindows.com a long time ago to guard against just such people as you:P so nyaaah! And it doesn't have anything to do with Windows(tm), it's just an interesting juxtaposition originally meant as a metaphor for high end audio equipment, years ago:)
Are you kidding? Try maybe one and a half cents if you didn't know what you were signing and didn't have a good lawyer- and if you did, there are plenty of other artists out there who'll sign. There have been cases of _negative_ money, as in #1 with a bullet artists who incurred such heavy touring costs against royalties and gave away so many points that they ended up substantially in debt. It would not be very hard at all for a totally anarchistic MP3 underground to do as well by the artists as the record industry does. In some cases it would be as simple as not mugging the artist;P hey, my debt for doing this art is not as bad as it was on a major label! this kicks ass, beavis!;P
Artists pay for their own promotion. Did you really think the record company _pays_ for promotion? It's a loan- against royalties. Damn... do some research. Even back in the 80s, labels provided no such humonguous revenue stream to artists. If you wanted to break even then you had to go at it very much with the mindset of providing a huge amount of support, promotion and facilitation _up_ _front_ on your own dime, and if that worked then you had a chance at that amazing one and a half percent which is what you end up with after the dust settles. I hardly think things have gotten _better_ here at the end of the Nineties... Sorry: you're buying into a worldview the labels want you to see. Try talking with some musicians, or indie producers, or people who hold seminars to teach you how to actually break even. Your mind might snap, but better that than to get eviscerated by your own naivete.
The artist doesn't make any money anyway and usually ends up sunk deep in debt for the privilege of playing the game, so who cares?:P Yes I do mean the one on the cover of Rolling Stone. Go talk to Nuno Bettencourt, or any of the charming innocents on the pop charts. Better yet, go talk to Steve Albini.
Negroponte was/is cool. Negroponte is a _huckster_ and makes little pretense to be anything else. He lives to sell ya wild ideas, and he's good at coming up with perspectives which are far out- and he's one of the first people to flip out at the shoddiness of proprietary software, at a time when it was mostly still a lovefest! 5.07, July 97, 'Digital Obesity'- one of the few bright spots in the notoriously pathetic 'The Long Boom' issue, notable for its crazed Tinkerbell ethic in which all we had to do was wish REALLY REALLY hard that the world will be lovely, and Tinkerbell will make it so. (Another bright spot was 'Where Computers Go To Die'- another guy _doing_ something positive) Two years later exactly, an antitrust case is holding the industry hostage one way or another, hardware manufacturers are hemorrhaging money, and we have Linux: in other words, the only people doing okay are those who DID SOMETHING, and Wired, who advocated the Tinkerbell ethic, is dead. I daresay Negroponte is still doing his thing, though- more power to him. Rob, ever thought of giving Negroponte article posting privs? Wired was a _blend_ of visionaries, hucksters and total fools. Quittner was a pretty cool journalist. Negroponte is a lovely huckster. And in the end, Wired was never as hip as it thought it was. It was much like Usenet- a crapshoot, unjudgeable as a whole, hopelessly inconsistent.
Yeah- that was it. I have issues from the one with Preppie pink and green colors and Viacom as Beavis and Butthead, to 6.01 ('Change Is Good'). Wired was colorful and had surprisingly little to say. One of the reasons I liked it was that it never really surprised me- it would showcase things I already knew, or work itself into fits of slathering ecstacy over people who were kind of like me, and it all seemed attainable. I seemed to be, not the Wired Professional, but one of the weirdo geek people that they worshipped. (was kinda cool;) ) The single issue that clobbered Wired for me was that asinine Well issue- it really revealed who was running the show, and I was disgusted. How could anyone be so self-absorbed as to specify a Bethlehem BBS from which all sprang? The very concept was absurd and inappropriate. The 'Apple- Pray' issue also annoyed me in different ways- I've been using Macs for years, but that is _not_ the way to treat Apple. They were _not_ some spiritual homeland for obscure willowy people who can't handle technology- they are just a computer manufacturer who do some things differently, some things well, some things not so well. Using their wares IS NOT a religious issue, it's a CHOICE that people are more or less free to make, barring 'trust' actions to freeze out real choice in the industry. The tradeoffs and gains and losses are quite real and it's perfectly plausible for someone to choose Mac stuff just because they feel like it- worship just don't enter into it! So this issue, too, bugged me. In the end I just stopped getting it. Slashdot is what Wired thought it was trying to be. My Wired magazines are bits of history on the shelf. One day they will have the same cachet as my tattered Creative Computings:)
If _you_ wrote the GPLed program then they become the co-owner of it, for all intents and purposes. They cannot take it away from you, but they can re-release that code under any license they please, or as public domain, because they have total license to redistribute, edit or make derivative works. So basically, if there is GPLed source on Geocities, it is now forked- Geocities has the right to release their 'snapshot' of the work under any license or as public domain or as totally proprietary, because they have the same basic rights as a software author. They can't do this if _you_ are not the author, they can't do it re: listings of other people's GPLed software, but for stuff where the author is the poster, they have the same rights as the author- they cannot pull it from circulation or undo the GPL but they can issue it under other licenses or public domain. That is the only reasonable explanation of their rights re: GPL.
RMS would be the anchor- like a stake in the ground- symbolizing where we have 'no ground to give'. He can be untroubled more easily- his purpose is to _stand_ _his_ _ground_ and though he might not agree with distractions, he can stand his ground whatever else happens. ESR would be like a bird, for instance a hawk out looking for prey to capture into the Open Source Way. He's willing to make concessions- because he is totally unconcerned with 'ground' and is mostly interested in the next tactical victory. It wouldn't trouble him if the whole landscape got moved to somewhere else as long as he could still catch business for Open Source. This is why they will never agree, and why ESR's going to always be more frazzled by it- RMS can be irate or serene about this far-ranging ESR, but his job is to stand his ground and keep part of the movement anchored, which he does, and knows it. ESR, on the other hand, has an easy time when the prey is near home territory, but what about when there are opportunities far afield? There's a _stake_ driven into the other end of the movement, and when ESR tries to take it all on the road in search of greener pastures, it _doesn't_ _move_! So ESR is doomed to frustration, because he speaks for (or on behalf of) a movement that simply will not leave its own territory to search for more opportunity. RMS is trying to guarantee an ideological homeland, and can do it (does do it) merely by standing his ground and sticking by his popular licenses- ESR is trying to maximise acquisitions and cares nothing for land-based values, and he _can't_ grab every opportunity because some people refuse to let go of that 'homeland'. I sympathise with ESR's plight, even though I am (for reasons of my own) quite seriously anchored with RMS. I think it's a shame that ESR can't move and negotiate as freely as he'd clearly like to. It's like keeping a hawk and tying a long string to its leg- *yank*. However, I do think that if we were all hawks, we'd end up scattered before the wind, eventually exterminated as pests for lack of any strong place to hold our ground from. ESR's vision alone is like open source as countless flocks of passenger pigeons. Certainly there was a time when these darkened the skies with their flocks- but where are they now? RMS's vision, alone, is an enclave. I prefer that to the potential extinction of the competing vision- but I do think it's useful to have both around, and to be able to pick a spot between the anchor and the hawk that suits my comfort.
"Linux has a much lower per-process overhead than NT does, therefore making multithreading within the same process merely an alternative to multi-process multitasking" Bingo: and for what it's worth, MacOS has much worse per-process overhead and context switching time than either (I use it, and I never ask too much of it- works fine for running an application or two) It's good to see glimpses of reality through the onslaught of mindless technical hype. Because NT threading is a necessity and works pretty well, suddenly it's a requirement and nothing else can work- if NT was the one with really good multiprocess multitasking, and Linux was the one with mad threading, multithreading would be called an ugly hack and we'd be hearing about locks until our brains ran out our ears;P Thanx Paranoid: good reality check.
Sorry, you've just blown your credibility entirely. I've been over this many times. I've been illustrating a caching strategy that is guaranteed to beat linux- it may or may not be what the tested version of NT is using, but it is _orthoganal_ to CPU scheduling issues and threading. It's very amusing that you get a 'score: 2 Insightful' on this comment- methinks I sense self-effacing geeks trying to be humble at all costs here. What I'm talking about is a strategy that's flat guaranteed to produce faster throughput- at the cost of totally obliterating latency and potentially never _choosing_ to serve certain pages, regardless of CPU usage. This _is_ a problem if you're not running benchmarks, and Linux+Apache uses a much more expensive strategy which will never be as fast as this 'caching from hell', or drop connections as willingly. Frankly, you should have stopped with the 'get equal priority', because your continuing only illustrated that you have no idea what's being talked about. This is not a strategy for CPU utilization- that's orthoganal. It's a strategy for choosing which requests to serve and which requests to ignore for the time being- and if this is so hard to understand, I imagine the tested version of NT _is_ doing this because (a) Microsoft people are _not_ stupid, and (b) Microsoft people will always cheat given the opportunity. This is a pyrrhic cheat- you can't use it on a real web server. It has nothing to do with CPU scheduling and is purely a hack to optimize benchmarks for intranet requests. And you, TummyX, are attempting to mislead, but probably you simply don't understand enough to realize it- you are behaving as if little CPU scheduling/threading issues have profound global effects that overcome choice of algorithm. I could specify an algorithm for NT that (given an impossibly fast load of requests) ignored everything but the requests for _one_ page, and never tried to do anything but spit out that page to the requesters, trashing all other requests quickly and efficiently. This is likely to be a simpler task than keeping track of what's _really_ happening- and as long as that one page's requests alone can come fast enough, this algorithm would beat both Linux and NT- serving only one page as fast as it possibly could and wasting no time keeping track of anything else. Of course, this is useless- but it would win. Now, are you going to come back and (as your interesting posting history suggests) assert again that there is no such thing as algorithms and NT is just a large vat which you throw requests at and fish web pages out of- and that CPU scheduling is the only consideration in doing this, because the only algorithm that exists is serve-upon-request? If so, you're not only a fool, but you have no idea when you've been spanked. Please illustrate exactly when the ip stack of Linux sits around caching http requests instead of serving them, as you claim...
Re:It means what? (Was:Static page requests, BAH!.
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NT vs. Linux: Again
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No, NT was modified to be app.specific to serve as many static pages as quickly as possible without regard to latency. It is possible that the tested version was in fact pushed so far in this direction that, if you made a single request for a page otherwise unrequested, it would be ignored and not serve the page. _THAT_ is what I, at least, am implying. Why? Because I spelled out the algorithm capable of defeating normal web servers on these terms- and if you go by only bandwidth, 'mad caching' wins very big. As long as you can keep the requests coming and the granularity isn't so big as to have the server waiting for more requests too often, it pays to _not_ serve pages until you have a whole raft of identical ones to whack out in a loop. This strategy of not serving pages when asked is of course insanity for _real_ use, but by God is it a winning strategy for benchmarks! Instead of keeping all the pages in RAM, or going through a complicated prioritizing system and trying to keep latency down, you ignore all that and just count requests- and when you serve, you just do a tight loop using the same data over and over. It's beautiful, even if it is pretty useless for doing anything other than winning benchmarks- in normal use most requests will be delayed, because they're being saved up for optimal serving at a later time. One way of telling if this is happening would be if the request latency varies wildly even though conditions aren't changing. Again: I for one am implying that NT was tweaked for this test into a form that bears no resemblance to a web server- and Linux will never, ever catch up to it without similarly discarding any concern for the actual requests. Paying no attention to latency is just faster- checking on times costs, sorting costs, and serving pages upon requests totally bypasses the gains you get from caching and spitting out identical pages in quick succession. The trouble is, as I said, this course of optimization leads directly away from realworld performance and towards a thing that only works with benchmarks... Does anybody, anywhere, have records on the statistical distribution of latency re. this NT optimization, compared to the tested Apache setup? Will they talk about latency at all, or try very hard to make no comment on it? Are there any records on _regular_ NT latency that might provide a clue? My experience trying to download from NT servers does suggest that latency varies wildly...
Hell, I've already explained how to do that. It's not rocket science. Just cache _everything_ until you can whang off great bursts of identical pages, and then never send anything until at least a hundred identical requests have stacked up. I flat guarantee that this would push more bandwidth, probably a lot more. It's basically completely disowning any concern for latency and placing no value at all on the individual requests. Any particular request could sit for _hours_ and given enough traffic on other pages the bandwidth would still maim Linux, on any hardware with enough RAM to keep track of all the queues and hold the pages. None of this is real value. It's really naive to behave as if there is only one performance metric and faster can only mean faster. Computer hacking is full of cheats, and this is a beauty. I would not be surprised to learn that NT does this _mildly_, right out of the box. Of course, if you really want to win, the winning strategy is to take out any checks for idle or old requests and totally go by nothing but the queues- and to a point, it also would help to make the granularity of it really big- say, 1000 or 10,000 requests before the server pays attention and serves them all in a crazed ASM loop. That, of course, depends on whether the load is heavy enough to justify such large queues. It's awfully naive to behave as if 'fast is just fast' when there are clear optimizations available that _only_ benefit benchmarks, to the extent that you can optimize so heavily as to lose any pretense of functionality for the purported task. This cache trick would qualify for that- there's no denying that if you totally ignore latency it's possible to make the speed go up. Unfortunately, people will pay for latency- it translates to the server being responsive, rather than not. If a server is insanely fast at the expense of latency, it still won't _seem_ fast because the likelihood of waiting around in the cache becomes very strong, and the upper lag limit is as much as you're willing to tolerate. The extreme case is a ubermondoultrafast NT server- optimised in such a way that the majority of requests sit there for minutes waiting for the queue to lengthen. This would be less of a problem if the site consisted of only one or two pages, but they should be fairly small and static to allow for the machinegun-like output.
It doesn't matter if it made NT unstable. I am telling you now that it is possible to trade off latency for overall hit volume. For the most primitive example, to really illustrate the point, consider this- say looking up a page takes X amount of time, and serving it takes Y amount. You'd think that all requests would go XY, XY, XY like that. Instead, set up a caching system thusly: all requests form into queues- and _only_ when a queue has 1000 requests does it get served, all at once like YYYYYYYYYYYYY. There is no attention paid to the queues other than this 1000 request limit. This arrangement would beat Linux. Soundly. Severely. If given an insanely fast barrage of mixed requests, it will keep the bandwidth hopping with 1000-hit bursts, far faster than Linux could hope to approach. Of course, if one of those pages has only 900 requests, those requests _sit_ there. Forever. _Never_ being served. Does latency begin to make more sense now? Linux is clearly not caching as aggressively as NT. The question that needs to be asked is this- is NT, for the purposes of these benches, pursuing a caching scheme that is unacceptable for normal use? I have illustrated a setup that will beat Linux, might even beat NT- but which is useless for realworld tasks. But there is no arguing that (properly tweaked) this arrangement will run faster, how fast depending on just how efficient the 'Y' phase of repetitively sending a page to different clients can be made. And none of this so much as mentions the fact that if you put it on the web, most people would get _no_ response from the server at all, as it would be waiting to fill up its caches before acting. Benchmark priorities are irreconcilably different with realworld priorities...
Hang on a second- 'hooks' doesn't tell you much. What I'd guess is that NT is doing some very funky caching so it can serve pages in bursts. Here's what I'd do if I was NT: save up requests in queues until I could load up a given page and whang it out to a bunch of clients without even blinking or pausing. I'd have everybody sitting around waiting for me to be happy with the size of the queue, and I'd be real busy trying to make bigger queues the better to whang out a pre-loaded page over and over as fast as I possibly could. If I was Linux, I would try to keep track of what queues were forming, and rush about trying _not_ to let any of the lines get too big. Considering that people want not to wait when they get web pages, doesn't it seem preferable to pay a lot more attention to latency than MS is willing to? There are genuinely conflicting interests here. To begin really obliterating the benchmarks, it becomes increasingly important to not waste much time caring about if anybody's been waiting too long- you _want_ them cooling their heels in line, that way you can gear up and do whole lines in mass-production fashion. Lastly, picture what happens when there isn't so much of a line. Linux happily serves the customer. NT _first_ looks to see if it can make the customer get in line and wait for others like 'im...
What about latency? Is there an interest in not hitting a statistical percentage of your users with lag from hell or a forgotten connection? If the NT box gives _you_ the short end of the stick, do you really care that it's serving lots of other people faster than Linux would, when Linux would have got around to you sooner? Is it worth an additional quarter of a second penalty for most people to spare _you_ and others the occasional zombie act? Scheduling costs. Giving individual requests a sort of value costs if you compare it to thinking of them only as percentage points. I don't care if NT never crashed, did CGI scripts and was tweakable by VT100- if it places its own 'score' ahead of the fair distribution of load over the pending requests it's responsible for, I don't want it. It's like having a heart that pumps 200% better, 99.9% of the time, but the other 0.1% of the time it forgets to pump for a couple minutes. The priorities are totally out of whack here.
This is a weird, amped-up benchmark most closely approximating a really small but insanely trafficky intranet. I certainly do not routinely see NT boxes performing in such a manner in the real world- and I think it's a very fair question whether even these crazy 4-way 4-ethernet-card monsters would stand up to real world conditions acceptably. I understand one issue is latency- in other words, if it is faster for NT to serve 200 pages to one place and have another request sitting there for 20 seconds, it does it unhesitatingly to get the numbers measuring higher. Apache apparently is much more willing to pay attention to that one request sitting around getting old, and to balance out the load so that nobody gets too lagged. Of course, this is not being tested for. This has nothing to do with MS having better people: it is almost entirely due to tradeoffs being made entirely in favor of benchmarks just to get to a place where they can produce numbers like this and have people saying, "I suspect it's just a matter of Microsoft having a greater number of highly qualified people working on the system". Never forget that the benchmarks are by their very nature an exceedingly narrow view of what the job really is. As such, the numbers become meaningless- not only meaningless in the sense of 'I don't care, I'm sick of rebooting the thing', but meaningless in the sense of producing realworld results that measure up to what the benches suggest. It strongly appears that NT servers are capable of flurries of extreme activity, but also lag pockets and serious unreliability issues- in other words, even if the machine has not crashed, your chances of getting guaranteed good response are not that great- the NT server is busy running around serving something it has cached to people in line after you, because doing that increases its benchmarks drastically. This consoles you not;)
"MS Word does not, after all, go off on its own and find other files on your system and convert them to Word format without your permission. Your data gets into a Microsoft format only because you put it there." Don't speak too soon, AC. Microsoft products go off and seize control of certain file types when installed on Windows (which has only one default for each type). On the Mac, Microsoft products seize control of the file typing apparatus so that all _future_ downloads of said types are assigned to the Microsoft application. Lastly, Microsoft products can be unsafe to 'try out' because they import other data and silently change important things to a proprietary MS way, literally destroying the original data and taking the new data captive. This last behavior is well known to Web designers experimenting with big cgi-laden sites and trying out Frontpage- suddenly it's all.asp and the original scripts are nowhere to be seen, and the whole site has to be basically rebuilt from scratch. All it would take is for one of these products to go looking for likely candidates for importing, in much the same way that Windows installers might look for likely unrecognized disk space for formatting. You are very naive if you think Microsoft products do not actively try to seize and hold control. The only thing stopping them from exhibiting no limits at all, is public outrage. And the public gets tired and cynical after a while...
How many people died fighting Standard Oil? This decline was not an easy natural thing. The reason antitrust law exists is to help these things straighten out _without_ so much shattering of families, loss of life, hired thugs charging picket lines with sawed off pool cues or shotguns. You are underplaying the simple historical fact that these, too, were undeclared wars- of a savagery we are not used to in our present day society- with acts of desperation that we are not driven to. Yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Cyrix dead, Winchip dead, AMD has had the COO bail out and is hemorrhaging money like mad. All this because of Intel and their basic viciousness and inability to coexist with competition. And you think everyone should make nice with them _now_ that they are finally stepping into almost complete monopoly for CPUs? :P Brought home the pet 486 from work that I've been putting linux on. However, the main computer is non-Intel. It's a Mac. I like Macs, but isn't it kind of pathetic that the only choice you have other than Intel is to go use Macs? (yes, I know, Athlon. Yes, please go and buy lots of them. AMD deserves better than the stomping they are getting. I don't think being better will save them, so buy _now_ before it's too late.)
I do have one of their CPUs in the house.
I've never been so pleased to be running a 604e as now, when the whole x86 market is being systematically exterminated. I'll just keep on supporting PPCs, seeing as I already have the Mac and the software to run on them. Things are already nasty on x86, good luck being able to afford Alpha machines (and people say Macs are expensive!) and if you're still supporting Intel, well, just think about what your money is doing, won't you? One hand supports Linux, for now- the other's killing all your hardware choices as fast as it can.
And it's not '3dfx' stuff- yes, Altivec is vector registers, i.e. four 32-bit values can be changed with one instruction, but these are general purpose registers, and Apple is already trying to figure out ways to use these 'fscking huge' registers in anything from screen update to memory management to Quicktime to yada yada yada- sky's the limit! If you can get a 128-bit chunk of it into the register, you can do it faster. One convolution kernel ran something like 200x faster on Altivec because it happened to coincide with register operations.
Because these registers are general purpose, there's every reason to expect that gcc/egcs can be told about them, and hackers can find ways to make use of them- ideally by telling compilers how to optimize so the vector processors/huge registers get used. At that point, any PPC Linux users can simply recompile favorite applications to get them running markedly faster- and recompile the kernel to get that running markedly faster- something that MacOS users will only see indirectly, with system updates and with Quicktime.
Personally, I'm looking forward to hearing about this...
Hey, don't look at me: I'm running MacOS 8 too. Apparently it is a great deal more reliable over extended uptimes (such as two days) than Win98 according to some of the Windows advocates' own postings.
I dualboot LinuxPPC, not on a network. That seems to be very much in line with people's experience- I've sometimes had X crash. I knew I could telnet in- if only I was on a network. X stopped being so delicate when I started using a different version of Netscape.
I am emphatically on the geeky slashdot weasels' side in this discussion. It's always _next_ year's Microsoft product that is supposed to be wonderful. I contest even the suggestion that MS office applications are so wonderful. That's nonsense. We are talking about a word processor that has consistently had a habit of embedding invisible control characters _in_band_ so that you could delete across a font or style change and have following characters change their style... hell, _Simpletext_ gets that one right.
The situation is this: MS is not worthy of trust. At all. So are we to be complete blind, brainless idiots who cannot learn from experience, or do we start paying attention to outside information coming in? All of that tends to add up to one fact: nobody can overpromise or underdeliver like Microsoft. Under such conditions, can you seriously advocate taking any of their claims at face value?
No no- flailover. :)
That's when one machine breaks, and then flails about until the other ones go down with it
You talk like somebody who registered a bunch of .com names and is trying to hock them on ebay ;P :P so nyaaah! :) ) And it doesn't have anything to do with Windows(tm), it's just an interesting juxtaposition originally meant as a metaphor for high end audio equipment, years ago :)
I grabbed airwindows.com a long time ago to guard against just such people as you
(no, I did not homestead a directory on slashdot. oops
You talk like somebody who registered a bunch of .com names and is trying to hock them on ebay ;P :P so nyaaah! :)
I grabbed airwindows.com a long time ago to guard against just such people as you
And it doesn't have anything to do with Windows(tm), it's just an interesting juxtaposition originally meant as a metaphor for high end audio equipment, years ago
Not really- once you've repaid the studio time out of royalties, the promotion out of royalties, the fscking tour bus rental out of royalties....
Are you kidding? Try maybe one and a half cents if you didn't know what you were signing and didn't have a good lawyer- and if you did, there are plenty of other artists out there who'll sign. There have been cases of _negative_ money, as in #1 with a bullet artists who incurred such heavy touring costs against royalties and gave away so many points that they ended up substantially in debt. It would not be very hard at all for a totally anarchistic MP3 underground to do as well by the artists as the record industry does. In some cases it would be as simple as not mugging the artist ;P hey, my debt for doing this art is not as bad as it was on a major label! this kicks ass, beavis! ;P
Artists pay for their own promotion. Did you really think the record company _pays_ for promotion? It's a loan- against royalties. Damn... do some research. Even back in the 80s, labels provided no such humonguous revenue stream to artists. If you wanted to break even then you had to go at it very much with the mindset of providing a huge amount of support, promotion and facilitation _up_ _front_ on your own dime, and if that worked then you had a chance at that amazing one and a half percent which is what you end up with after the dust settles. I hardly think things have gotten _better_ here at the end of the Nineties...
Sorry: you're buying into a worldview the labels want you to see. Try talking with some musicians, or indie producers, or people who hold seminars to teach you how to actually break even. Your mind might snap, but better that than to get eviscerated by your own naivete.
The artist doesn't make any money anyway and usually ends up sunk deep in debt for the privilege of playing the game, so who cares? :P Yes I do mean the one on the cover of Rolling Stone. Go talk to Nuno Bettencourt, or any of the charming innocents on the pop charts. Better yet, go talk to Steve Albini.
Negroponte was/is cool. Negroponte is a _huckster_ and makes little pretense to be anything else. He lives to sell ya wild ideas, and he's good at coming up with perspectives which are far out- and he's one of the first people to flip out at the shoddiness of proprietary software, at a time when it was mostly still a lovefest! 5.07, July 97, 'Digital Obesity'- one of the few bright spots in the notoriously pathetic 'The Long Boom' issue, notable for its crazed Tinkerbell ethic in which all we had to do was wish REALLY REALLY hard that the world will be lovely, and Tinkerbell will make it so. (Another bright spot was 'Where Computers Go To Die'- another guy _doing_ something positive)
Two years later exactly, an antitrust case is holding the industry hostage one way or another, hardware manufacturers are hemorrhaging money, and we have Linux: in other words, the only people doing okay are those who DID SOMETHING, and Wired, who advocated the Tinkerbell ethic, is dead. I daresay Negroponte is still doing his thing, though- more power to him. Rob, ever thought of giving Negroponte article posting privs?
Wired was a _blend_ of visionaries, hucksters and total fools. Quittner was a pretty cool journalist. Negroponte is a lovely huckster. And in the end, Wired was never as hip as it thought it was. It was much like Usenet- a crapshoot, unjudgeable as a whole, hopelessly inconsistent.
Yeah- that was it. ;) ) :)
I have issues from the one with Preppie pink and green colors and Viacom as Beavis and Butthead, to 6.01 ('Change Is Good').
Wired was colorful and had surprisingly little to say. One of the reasons I liked it was that it never really surprised me- it would showcase things I already knew, or work itself into fits of slathering ecstacy over people who were kind of like me, and it all seemed attainable. I seemed to be, not the Wired Professional, but one of the weirdo geek people that they worshipped. (was kinda cool
The single issue that clobbered Wired for me was that asinine Well issue- it really revealed who was running the show, and I was disgusted. How could anyone be so self-absorbed as to specify a Bethlehem BBS from which all sprang? The very concept was absurd and inappropriate.
The 'Apple- Pray' issue also annoyed me in different ways- I've been using Macs for years, but that is _not_ the way to treat Apple. They were _not_ some spiritual homeland for obscure willowy people who can't handle technology- they are just a computer manufacturer who do some things differently, some things well, some things not so well. Using their wares IS NOT a religious issue, it's a CHOICE that people are more or less free to make, barring 'trust' actions to freeze out real choice in the industry. The tradeoffs and gains and losses are quite real and it's perfectly plausible for someone to choose Mac stuff just because they feel like it- worship just don't enter into it! So this issue, too, bugged me.
In the end I just stopped getting it. Slashdot is what Wired thought it was trying to be. My Wired magazines are bits of history on the shelf. One day they will have the same cachet as my tattered Creative Computings
If _you_ wrote the GPLed program then they become the co-owner of it, for all intents and purposes. They cannot take it away from you, but they can re-release that code under any license they please, or as public domain, because they have total license to redistribute, edit or make derivative works.
So basically, if there is GPLed source on Geocities, it is now forked- Geocities has the right to release their 'snapshot' of the work under any license or as public domain or as totally proprietary, because they have the same basic rights as a software author. They can't do this if _you_ are not the author, they can't do it re: listings of other people's GPLed software, but for stuff where the author is the poster, they have the same rights as the author- they cannot pull it from circulation or undo the GPL but they can issue it under other licenses or public domain.
That is the only reasonable explanation of their rights re: GPL.
RMS would be the anchor- like a stake in the ground- symbolizing where we have 'no ground to give'. He can be untroubled more easily- his purpose is to _stand_ _his_ _ground_ and though he might not agree with distractions, he can stand his ground whatever else happens.
ESR would be like a bird, for instance a hawk out looking for prey to capture into the Open Source Way. He's willing to make concessions- because he is totally unconcerned with 'ground' and is mostly interested in the next tactical victory. It wouldn't trouble him if the whole landscape got moved to somewhere else as long as he could still catch business for Open Source.
This is why they will never agree, and why ESR's going to always be more frazzled by it- RMS can be irate or serene about this far-ranging ESR, but his job is to stand his ground and keep part of the movement anchored, which he does, and knows it. ESR, on the other hand, has an easy time when the prey is near home territory, but what about when there are opportunities far afield? There's a _stake_ driven into the other end of the movement, and when ESR tries to take it all on the road in search of greener pastures, it _doesn't_ _move_! So ESR is doomed to frustration, because he speaks for (or on behalf of) a movement that simply will not leave its own territory to search for more opportunity. RMS is trying to guarantee an ideological homeland, and can do it (does do it) merely by standing his ground and sticking by his popular licenses- ESR is trying to maximise acquisitions and cares nothing for land-based values, and he _can't_ grab every opportunity because some people refuse to let go of that 'homeland'.
I sympathise with ESR's plight, even though I am (for reasons of my own) quite seriously anchored with RMS. I think it's a shame that ESR can't move and negotiate as freely as he'd clearly like to. It's like keeping a hawk and tying a long string to its leg- *yank*.
However, I do think that if we were all hawks, we'd end up scattered before the wind, eventually exterminated as pests for lack of any strong place to hold our ground from. ESR's vision alone is like open source as countless flocks of passenger pigeons. Certainly there was a time when these darkened the skies with their flocks- but where are they now?
RMS's vision, alone, is an enclave. I prefer that to the potential extinction of the competing vision- but I do think it's useful to have both around, and to be able to pick a spot between the anchor and the hawk that suits my comfort.
"Linux has a much lower per-process overhead than NT does, therefore making multithreading within the same process merely an alternative to multi-process multitasking" ;P
Bingo: and for what it's worth, MacOS has much worse per-process overhead and context switching time than either (I use it, and I never ask too much of it- works fine for running an application or two) It's good to see glimpses of reality through the onslaught of mindless technical hype. Because NT threading is a necessity and works pretty well, suddenly it's a requirement and nothing else can work- if NT was the one with really good multiprocess multitasking, and Linux was the one with mad threading, multithreading would be called an ugly hack and we'd be hearing about locks until our brains ran out our ears
Thanx Paranoid: good reality check.
Sorry, you've just blown your credibility entirely. I've been over this many times. I've been illustrating a caching strategy that is guaranteed to beat linux- it may or may not be what the tested version of NT is using, but it is _orthoganal_ to CPU scheduling issues and threading. It's very amusing that you get a 'score: 2 Insightful' on this comment- methinks I sense self-effacing geeks trying to be humble at all costs here.
What I'm talking about is a strategy that's flat guaranteed to produce faster throughput- at the cost of totally obliterating latency and potentially never _choosing_ to serve certain pages, regardless of CPU usage. This _is_ a problem if you're not running benchmarks, and Linux+Apache uses a much more expensive strategy which will never be as fast as this 'caching from hell', or drop connections as willingly.
Frankly, you should have stopped with the 'get equal priority', because your continuing only illustrated that you have no idea what's being talked about. This is not a strategy for CPU utilization- that's orthoganal. It's a strategy for choosing which requests to serve and which requests to ignore for the time being- and if this is so hard to understand, I imagine the tested version of NT _is_ doing this because (a) Microsoft people are _not_ stupid, and (b) Microsoft people will always cheat given the opportunity. This is a pyrrhic cheat- you can't use it on a real web server. It has nothing to do with CPU scheduling and is purely a hack to optimize benchmarks for intranet requests.
And you, TummyX, are attempting to mislead, but probably you simply don't understand enough to realize it- you are behaving as if little CPU scheduling/threading issues have profound global effects that overcome choice of algorithm. I could specify an algorithm for NT that (given an impossibly fast load of requests) ignored everything but the requests for _one_ page, and never tried to do anything but spit out that page to the requesters, trashing all other requests quickly and efficiently. This is likely to be a simpler task than keeping track of what's _really_ happening- and as long as that one page's requests alone can come fast enough, this algorithm would beat both Linux and NT- serving only one page as fast as it possibly could and wasting no time keeping track of anything else.
Of course, this is useless- but it would win.
Now, are you going to come back and (as your interesting posting history suggests) assert again that there is no such thing as algorithms and NT is just a large vat which you throw requests at and fish web pages out of- and that CPU scheduling is the only consideration in doing this, because the only algorithm that exists is serve-upon-request?
If so, you're not only a fool, but you have no idea when you've been spanked. Please illustrate exactly when the ip stack of Linux sits around caching http requests instead of serving them, as you claim...
No, NT was modified to be app.specific to serve as many static pages as quickly as possible without regard to latency. It is possible that the tested version was in fact pushed so far in this direction that, if you made a single request for a page otherwise unrequested, it would be ignored and not serve the page.
_THAT_ is what I, at least, am implying. Why? Because I spelled out the algorithm capable of defeating normal web servers on these terms- and if you go by only bandwidth, 'mad caching' wins very big. As long as you can keep the requests coming and the granularity isn't so big as to have the server waiting for more requests too often, it pays to _not_ serve pages until you have a whole raft of identical ones to whack out in a loop. This strategy of not serving pages when asked is of course insanity for _real_ use, but by God is it a winning strategy for benchmarks! Instead of keeping all the pages in RAM, or going through a complicated prioritizing system and trying to keep latency down, you ignore all that and just count requests- and when you serve, you just do a tight loop using the same data over and over. It's beautiful, even if it is pretty useless for doing anything other than winning benchmarks- in normal use most requests will be delayed, because they're being saved up for optimal serving at a later time. One way of telling if this is happening would be if the request latency varies wildly even though conditions aren't changing.
Again: I for one am implying that NT was tweaked for this test into a form that bears no resemblance to a web server- and Linux will never, ever catch up to it without similarly discarding any concern for the actual requests. Paying no attention to latency is just faster- checking on times costs, sorting costs, and serving pages upon requests totally bypasses the gains you get from caching and spitting out identical pages in quick succession. The trouble is, as I said, this course of optimization leads directly away from realworld performance and towards a thing that only works with benchmarks...
Does anybody, anywhere, have records on the statistical distribution of latency re. this NT optimization, compared to the tested Apache setup? Will they talk about latency at all, or try very hard to make no comment on it? Are there any records on _regular_ NT latency that might provide a clue? My experience trying to download from NT servers does suggest that latency varies wildly...
Hell, I've already explained how to do that. It's not rocket science. Just cache _everything_ until you can whang off great bursts of identical pages, and then never send anything until at least a hundred identical requests have stacked up. I flat guarantee that this would push more bandwidth, probably a lot more. It's basically completely disowning any concern for latency and placing no value at all on the individual requests. Any particular request could sit for _hours_ and given enough traffic on other pages the bandwidth would still maim Linux, on any hardware with enough RAM to keep track of all the queues and hold the pages.
None of this is real value. It's really naive to behave as if there is only one performance metric and faster can only mean faster. Computer hacking is full of cheats, and this is a beauty. I would not be surprised to learn that NT does this _mildly_, right out of the box. Of course, if you really want to win, the winning strategy is to take out any checks for idle or old requests and totally go by nothing but the queues- and to a point, it also would help to make the granularity of it really big- say, 1000 or 10,000 requests before the server pays attention and serves them all in a crazed ASM loop. That, of course, depends on whether the load is heavy enough to justify such large queues.
It's awfully naive to behave as if 'fast is just fast' when there are clear optimizations available that _only_ benefit benchmarks, to the extent that you can optimize so heavily as to lose any pretense of functionality for the purported task. This cache trick would qualify for that- there's no denying that if you totally ignore latency it's possible to make the speed go up. Unfortunately, people will pay for latency- it translates to the server being responsive, rather than not. If a server is insanely fast at the expense of latency, it still won't _seem_ fast because the likelihood of waiting around in the cache becomes very strong, and the upper lag limit is as much as you're willing to tolerate. The extreme case is a ubermondoultrafast NT server- optimised in such a way that the majority of requests sit there for minutes waiting for the queue to lengthen. This would be less of a problem if the site consisted of only one or two pages, but they should be fairly small and static to allow for the machinegun-like output.
It doesn't matter if it made NT unstable.
I am telling you now that it is possible to trade off latency for overall hit volume. For the most primitive example, to really illustrate the point, consider this- say looking up a page takes X amount of time, and serving it takes Y amount. You'd think that all requests would go XY, XY, XY like that. Instead, set up a caching system thusly: all requests form into queues- and _only_ when a queue has 1000 requests does it get served, all at once like YYYYYYYYYYYYY. There is no attention paid to the queues other than this 1000 request limit.
This arrangement would beat Linux. Soundly. Severely. If given an insanely fast barrage of mixed requests, it will keep the bandwidth hopping with 1000-hit bursts, far faster than Linux could hope to approach.
Of course, if one of those pages has only 900 requests, those requests _sit_ there. Forever. _Never_ being served.
Does latency begin to make more sense now?
Linux is clearly not caching as aggressively as NT. The question that needs to be asked is this- is NT, for the purposes of these benches, pursuing a caching scheme that is unacceptable for normal use? I have illustrated a setup that will beat Linux, might even beat NT- but which is useless for realworld tasks. But there is no arguing that (properly tweaked) this arrangement will run faster, how fast depending on just how efficient the 'Y' phase of repetitively sending a page to different clients can be made. And none of this so much as mentions the fact that if you put it on the web, most people would get _no_ response from the server at all, as it would be waiting to fill up its caches before acting.
Benchmark priorities are irreconcilably different with realworld priorities...
Hang on a second- 'hooks' doesn't tell you much.
What I'd guess is that NT is doing some very funky caching so it can serve pages in bursts. Here's what I'd do if I was NT: save up requests in queues until I could load up a given page and whang it out to a bunch of clients without even blinking or pausing. I'd have everybody sitting around waiting for me to be happy with the size of the queue, and I'd be real busy trying to make bigger queues the better to whang out a pre-loaded page over and over as fast as I possibly could.
If I was Linux, I would try to keep track of what queues were forming, and rush about trying _not_ to let any of the lines get too big.
Considering that people want not to wait when they get web pages, doesn't it seem preferable to pay a lot more attention to latency than MS is willing to? There are genuinely conflicting interests here. To begin really obliterating the benchmarks, it becomes increasingly important to not waste much time caring about if anybody's been waiting too long- you _want_ them cooling their heels in line, that way you can gear up and do whole lines in mass-production fashion.
Lastly, picture what happens when there isn't so much of a line. Linux happily serves the customer. NT _first_ looks to see if it can make the customer get in line and wait for others like 'im...
What about latency? Is there an interest in not hitting a statistical percentage of your users with lag from hell or a forgotten connection? If the NT box gives _you_ the short end of the stick, do you really care that it's serving lots of other people faster than Linux would, when Linux would have got around to you sooner? Is it worth an additional quarter of a second penalty for most people to spare _you_ and others the occasional zombie act? Scheduling costs. Giving individual requests a sort of value costs if you compare it to thinking of them only as percentage points. I don't care if NT never crashed, did CGI scripts and was tweakable by VT100- if it places its own 'score' ahead of the fair distribution of load over the pending requests it's responsible for, I don't want it. It's like having a heart that pumps 200% better, 99.9% of the time, but the other 0.1% of the time it forgets to pump for a couple minutes. The priorities are totally out of whack here.
This is a weird, amped-up benchmark most closely approximating a really small but insanely trafficky intranet. ;)
I certainly do not routinely see NT boxes performing in such a manner in the real world- and I think it's a very fair question whether even these crazy 4-way 4-ethernet-card monsters would stand up to real world conditions acceptably.
I understand one issue is latency- in other words, if it is faster for NT to serve 200 pages to one place and have another request sitting there for 20 seconds, it does it unhesitatingly to get the numbers measuring higher. Apache apparently is much more willing to pay attention to that one request sitting around getting old, and to balance out the load so that nobody gets too lagged. Of course, this is not being tested for.
This has nothing to do with MS having better people: it is almost entirely due to tradeoffs being made entirely in favor of benchmarks just to get to a place where they can produce numbers like this and have people saying, "I suspect it's just a matter of Microsoft having a greater number of highly qualified people working on the system". Never forget that the benchmarks are by their very nature an exceedingly narrow view of what the job really is. As such, the numbers become meaningless- not only meaningless in the sense of 'I don't care, I'm sick of rebooting the thing', but meaningless in the sense of producing realworld results that measure up to what the benches suggest. It strongly appears that NT servers are capable of flurries of extreme activity, but also lag pockets and serious unreliability issues- in other words, even if the machine has not crashed, your chances of getting guaranteed good response are not that great- the NT server is busy running around serving something it has cached to people in line after you, because doing that increases its benchmarks drastically. This consoles you not
Not a problem. :) :) :)
RMS lent me _his_ copy
Thank you, RMS!
"MS Word does not, after all, go off on its own and find other files on your system and convert them to Word format without your permission. Your data gets into a Microsoft format only because you put it there." .asp and the original scripts are nowhere to be seen, and the whole site has to be basically rebuilt from scratch.
Don't speak too soon, AC. Microsoft products go off and seize control of certain file types when installed on Windows (which has only one default for each type). On the Mac, Microsoft products seize control of the file typing apparatus so that all _future_ downloads of said types are assigned to the Microsoft application. Lastly, Microsoft products can be unsafe to 'try out' because they import other data and silently change important things to a proprietary MS way, literally destroying the original data and taking the new data captive. This last behavior is well known to Web designers experimenting with big cgi-laden sites and trying out Frontpage- suddenly it's all
All it would take is for one of these products to go looking for likely candidates for importing, in much the same way that Windows installers might look for likely unrecognized disk space for formatting.
You are very naive if you think Microsoft products do not actively try to seize and hold control. The only thing stopping them from exhibiting no limits at all, is public outrage. And the public gets tired and cynical after a while...
How many people died fighting Standard Oil?
This decline was not an easy natural thing. The reason antitrust law exists is to help these things straighten out _without_ so much shattering of families, loss of life, hired thugs charging picket lines with sawed off pool cues or shotguns.
You are underplaying the simple historical fact that these, too, were undeclared wars- of a savagery we are not used to in our present day society- with acts of desperation that we are not driven to.
Yet.