So far, Solaris 9 isn't too bad (got it running on a semi-old Ultra 10) and OpenSSH works quite well. I just need to update it to the latest version and start playing around with keys and OTP.
Though it would go against our current plans, which is to move from the Sun E450 (sorely underused running Solaris 2.6) and a desktop running as a server (FreeBSD 4.1.1) to three 1U servers running FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE (and of course OpenSSH 3.4p1). The reason for the change is we are running out of rack space and we want to standardize on BSD (Linux was an option but since we already had other FreeBSD servers, it would be easier to have a single build of FreeBSD, configure scripts, shell scripts, etc. to focus on).
Unfortunately, not a lot of managers know the difference between Open Source software and Freeware. Also many like to think that Open Source software and Freeware do not include any form of support other than other geeks and that cannot be dependant on. I had a manager like that and it really pissed me off. Thankfully, that person is no longer my manager but rather someone who is happy that Open Source software is being used where stability is key.
If the businesses who do not use "freeware" (OSS + Freeware) because it isn't proven, then they are hypocrites if they start using Apache. Of course, those managers would most likely opt for Windows + IIS than say Solaris + Apache. Solaris + Covalent Apache would be a compromise.
Prices and links to Monarch Computers. I was quite surprised with the prices, I thought they'd be in the $125-$150 range. I my dual AMD shopping at Monarch (built a dual MP 1600+ on a tyan tiger mobo in december for a friend), you can hit pricewatch for price comparison, but I've found Monarch to be fairly representative.
As stated in an earlier post, the reason why the motherboards cost so much is that the 760MP/MPX chipsets are quite complex and expensive (the northbridge has around 900+ pins if my memory serves me right) and due to the number of traces required by not only the northbridge but also the 64-bit PCI slots.
The newer 760-MPX chipset (last I heard) still has isses with the southbridge's USB 2.0 and most motherboards ship with an add-in card. I can't recommend it because I'm not sure if the chipset checks for MPs or not.
The southbridge only has USB 1.1, not 2.0, but it did have some problems with the USB controller. A second stepping (B, IIRC) has been in production and on several motherboards and it has fixed the issue with the USB controller. Unfortunately, it looks like the MP and the MPX chipsets are running into issues with the Promise FastTrack ATA RAID controllers (one mention of it here.
I didn't think a 340W power supply would cut it. The two power supplies that I have used on a dual Athlon setup were a 430W then upgraded it to a 550W. Of course, the server has 2x2000+ MPs, 1GB of RAM, 5x 7200RPM IDE hard drives, Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID controller. The 430W power supply had little trouble maintaining a decent +12V level, the move to the 550W resolved that problem and it has another fan to help suck some of the heat out.
I'm looking into a dual Athlon system myself (right now, I have a dual P2-400 system... only reason is that dual AMD K6-2/K6-3's were not possible and there were no other decent alternatives) but I may wait a little bit longer until either the T-Breds get settled down or when the Bartons (supposedly with 512K L2 cache) is released and settled down.
ASUS (A7M266-D) and IWill (MPX2) also make dual Athlon motherboards, though I'm not sure how much they cost. I think Abit and Gigabyte have announced if not released dual Athlon motherboards. Yes, they are not as cheap as the dual Socket 370 (or even Slot 1) motherboards on the Intel side of things, but part of the cost disparity is the complexity of the 760MP/760MPX chipset (the chipset requires two sets of traces to the two processors since the EV6 bus protocol is point-to-point rather than shared like the AGTL/GTL/GTL+ used by the Intel processors) and the 64-bit PCI slots.
I'm guessing that a lot of the dual P3 processor motherboards are only 4-layer whereas the dual Athlon boards are more likely to be 6 (or even 8) layers due to the enormous number of traces and the power comsumption required for all of the components.
BTW - You can run a dual Athlon setup with a ~430W power supply, just make sure that it is one of the AMD (or motherboard manufacturer) recommended ones and can reliably provide enough current across the necessary voltage rails.
I personally don't find a problem with that considering that they also publish books on Oracle, IBM/Lotus, Solaris, Cisco and other non-open source products..NET is a nice step forward from Visual Basic and maybe C++, but it still falls behind in some (many/all?) areas that Java, C++ and other languages.
I agree speaking as an owner of an IBM ThinkPad T21. Sure, the T21 is not the lightest or the heaviest laptop in the market, but it has all of the features that I care for (integrated Ethernet/Modem, dual PC Card/CardBus Type II slots, 14" LCD, DVD-ROM, dual boot between Win2K and FreeBSD [the latter for my development stuff and the former to access the company VPN device]).
I personally think that the uber-thin/uber-light laptops tend to be flimsy, a pain to deal with at times (mostly ones that do not include a decent CD-ROM/DVD-ROM from the manufacturer, sucks when you need to boot off of a CD on a laptop with a USB CD-ROM and no BIOS support to boot from USB devices). I also do not want to deal with people who lose their I/O dongles (a la some Toshiba Portege laptops) and come whining to me that they do not have access to the network (network port is on the dongle) and cannot used the standardized Intel/Xircom RealPort cards since it only has a single Type II slot.
There are scenarios where ultra-thin laptops are required, but I try to avoid recommending them as much as possible.
A car would help for commutes and the like, but they do not quite help if you are carrying stuff around in an airport or within a corporate building between meetings. Airport lines can be quite a nasty bit or dealing with going to different gates of a flight has been delayed, changed, or cancelled but then picked up by a different airline. In that case, a little rolling caddy (of whatever they are called) can be helpful but a pain to work with a times.
The other option could be storing the documents in PDF format, printing them out and then handing them to the proper people. For books... eBooks aren't the best option in many cases, so you are stuck there:)
The last time I checked, the Nintendo Gamecube was MIPS 5000-based, which is an enhancement of the 64-bit MIPS 4000 core.
I think you have the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube mixed up. According to Nintendo, the Nintendo 64 has a customized MIPS R4000 whereas the Gamecube has an IBM Power PC-based processor.
I do not know what the main processor in the PS2 is derived from, but MIPS does ring a tiny bell.
The connection between the north and southbridges with desktop chipsets do start at PCI speeds and go all the way up to 266MB/s for the current Intel and Via (the latter using V-link) chipsets and much higher the chipset maker uses AMD's HyperTransport (right now, it looks like nVidia is the main desktop chipset maker that is using it, but SiS is also looking into using it in the Hammer chipsets).
Server chipsets usually are more complex and can provide multiple high-speed interconnects between the "northbridge" and the different "southbridge" chips (like the Intel E7500 chipset supports a total of three 1Gbyte/sec connections between the northbridge, the MCH, and I/O controllers, two of which support PCI-X hubs that provide up to 1Gbyte/sec to the expansion boards).
Oops... forgot to mention that the currently available chipsets that support one or more PCI-X busses include the Intel E7500 and the ServerWorks Grand Champion (GC) series (either the HE or the LE, depending on the number of processors required).
The "northbridge" of the Intel E7500 supports two PCI-X busses (more information about the chipset can be found here.
The ServerWorks GC series support for PCI-X start from 2 independent busses (the GC-SL) up to six PCI-X busses (the GC-HE). Specs on the ServerWorks stuff is located here.
I'm not completely sure if the AMD Hammer chipsets will include PCI-X support initially, but if one were to give up AGP 8x (which isn't really needed on a server) then you can turn that into a PCI-X bus to support a single 10 Gig Ethernet controller.
Of course, there is still the bottleneck of the memory subsystem which can make or break a high-end system.
The highest speed PCI-X (64-bit @ 133Mhz) is capable of reaching ~1GByte/sec which is just about the speed of 10 Gig Ethernet. There was/is the promise of Araphoe (sp?) that resembles AMD's HyperTransport but would be used for expansion cards rather than a chip-to-chip pathway.
The other bottleneck with even high-end Intel-based servers could easily choke when dealing with not only 10 Gig Ethernet but also add Fiber Channel, multiple channels of Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI RAID, etc., since the memory bandwidth (and processor bus speed?) would then become the possibly the next bottleneck. RISC servers don't have that much of a problem just yet, but sooner or later it will be.
USB 1.1 transfers at a maximum rate of 12Mbit/sec whereas USB 2.0 (which the T/M uses, at least according to the story write-up) can transfer at a maximum rate of 480Mbit/sec (or 60MByte/sec).
It looks like Slashdot jumped the gun a wee bit too early... the official announcement hasn't been made on their site yet even though the linked Release Notes and other files have been posted here.
I guess it's a good thing about having a script that automatically updates the source tree and does the make world every other night:)
Or more preciously, they sold the hard drive division to Maxtor and focused on tape and NAS (through Snap Server) technologies. You can still by Fireballs and the Atlas models, except they have been rebranded as Maxtor.
I personally think this is great news for those who are running FreeBSD on desktops or workstations for development as well as some Office use. Sure, there is KOffice, Abi Word, Gnumeric and a plethora of other office tools (individual programs or as a suite), but OpenOffice.org 1.0 does a nice job of combining the pieces together.
I've been running Star Office 5.2 (through the Linux compatibility layer) for several months now... it definitely has been very handy to recover data from corrupted Excel and Word documents... as well as to view spreadsheets from people that I'm not so sure about (since OO and SO do not support VB macros, I don't have to worry about worms and the such).
I'm currently downloading and will be building OO with GCC 3.2... hopefully all will go well. Thanks definitely go to the guys helping out with getting the port from entirely broken status to work in -STABLE!
The guys at PDA Buzz covered the release of the Communicator. It looks like the transfer rate of the device is more likely to be 9600bps here in the US rather than the stated 14.4Kbps (due to cell network differences).
The two things that I wished that the communicator had are: tri-band GSM for better roaming and GPRS for faster data transfers (which would provide better web page load times and possibly more audio or other data to be transferred.
It may not be a financial advantage in the sense of avoiding the Microsoft tax, but think of the cost of keeping Windows and Office up-to-date on those machines (applying patches, service packs) as well as dealing with anti-virus software in case somebody opened up an infected Excel XP spreadsheet or a Word document with infected macros.
It's an option for those who are sick of Windows/Office and want some alternative and a bit of relief about not worrying if opening a message in Outlook or a nasty bug ridden web page destroying the machine, if not others machines or the servers (a la Nimda).
I've ran into some problems with decoding Word 2000 files myself, but I was able to extract the data that I needed, made the changes and saved it into XHTML (I was converting and updating some of the procedures to a web-friendly format).
Getting rid of the dependencies on Windows is always a tough one, mostly since many (most?) educational software is released for Windows (and Mac). I wonder if some of the software would run under Wine or the Crossover plugin... (I don't follow the Windows emulation stuff very often since I primarily run Unix, be it BSD, Solaris or Linux, on servers that don't really run desktop apps.)
I think this is great news, primarily for those schools in the NW who were targetted with audits by Microsoft as they are moving towards Linux. Not only do they have a more stable/secure environment to work in but also a very nice office suite... for gratis.
So far, I'm quite impressed with OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my Windows machine, though some of the files that I need to open won't since it doesn't work with Macros or data pulls from a SQL Server or an Access file.
Although a Windows XP install (be it Home or Professional) can be smaller than a full install of [insert-your-favorite-distribution] Linux, Mac OS X with Developer Tools, or FreeBSD... but what you don't get in a standard Windows XP install are:
C/C++ Compiler
Perl, Python, or any other scripting languages
source files or balls
A lot of utilities and tools that can do anything to your liking
Mail client and server software (like Sendmail, Pine, Mutt, etc.)
and many other things that I just can't think of off of the top of my head. There are some things that are quite bloated in a full Linux or FreeBSD install (KDE 2/3, Gnome, StarOffice) but Windows XP doesn't even include basic spreadsheet, presentation or decent graphics programs (think of KOffice as an equivalent to Microsoft Works or the like).
Slashdot Mirror
heh... true :)
So far, Solaris 9 isn't too bad (got it running on a semi-old Ultra 10) and OpenSSH works quite well. I just need to update it to the latest version and start playing around with keys and OTP.
Though it would go against our current plans, which is to move from the Sun E450 (sorely underused running Solaris 2.6) and a desktop running as a server (FreeBSD 4.1.1) to three 1U servers running FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE (and of course OpenSSH 3.4p1). The reason for the change is we are running out of rack space and we want to standardize on BSD (Linux was an option but since we already had other FreeBSD servers, it would be easier to have a single build of FreeBSD, configure scripts, shell scripts, etc. to focus on).
Unfortunately, not a lot of managers know the difference between Open Source software and Freeware. Also many like to think that Open Source software and Freeware do not include any form of support other than other geeks and that cannot be dependant on. I had a manager like that and it really pissed me off. Thankfully, that person is no longer my manager but rather someone who is happy that Open Source software is being used where stability is key.
If the businesses who do not use "freeware" (OSS + Freeware) because it isn't proven, then they are hypocrites if they start using Apache. Of course, those managers would most likely opt for Windows + IIS than say Solaris + Apache. Solaris + Covalent Apache would be a compromise.
Solaris 9 does use OpenSSH for its "Solaris Secure Shell". They mention it on this page.
I didn't think a 340W power supply would cut it. The two power supplies that I have used on a dual Athlon setup were a 430W then upgraded it to a 550W. Of course, the server has 2x2000+ MPs, 1GB of RAM, 5x 7200RPM IDE hard drives, Adaptec 2400A IDE RAID controller. The 430W power supply had little trouble maintaining a decent +12V level, the move to the 550W resolved that problem and it has another fan to help suck some of the heat out.
I'm looking into a dual Athlon system myself (right now, I have a dual P2-400 system... only reason is that dual AMD K6-2/K6-3's were not possible and there were no other decent alternatives) but I may wait a little bit longer until either the T-Breds get settled down or when the Bartons (supposedly with 512K L2 cache) is released and settled down.
ASUS (A7M266-D) and IWill (MPX2) also make dual Athlon motherboards, though I'm not sure how much they cost. I think Abit and Gigabyte have announced if not released dual Athlon motherboards. Yes, they are not as cheap as the dual Socket 370 (or even Slot 1) motherboards on the Intel side of things, but part of the cost disparity is the complexity of the 760MP/760MPX chipset (the chipset requires two sets of traces to the two processors since the EV6 bus protocol is point-to-point rather than shared like the AGTL/GTL/GTL+ used by the Intel processors) and the 64-bit PCI slots.
I'm guessing that a lot of the dual P3 processor motherboards are only 4-layer whereas the dual Athlon boards are more likely to be 6 (or even 8) layers due to the enormous number of traces and the power comsumption required for all of the components.
BTW - You can run a dual Athlon setup with a ~430W power supply, just make sure that it is one of the AMD (or motherboard manufacturer) recommended ones and can reliably provide enough current across the necessary voltage rails.
BTW - O'Reilly has more books on Java programming than .NET programming, and with quite a few Python books.
And let's not get started on how many Perl books they have published. ;-)
I agree speaking as an owner of an IBM ThinkPad T21. Sure, the T21 is not the lightest or the heaviest laptop in the market, but it has all of the features that I care for (integrated Ethernet/Modem, dual PC Card/CardBus Type II slots, 14" LCD, DVD-ROM, dual boot between Win2K and FreeBSD [the latter for my development stuff and the former to access the company VPN device]).
I personally think that the uber-thin/uber-light laptops tend to be flimsy, a pain to deal with at times (mostly ones that do not include a decent CD-ROM/DVD-ROM from the manufacturer, sucks when you need to boot off of a CD on a laptop with a USB CD-ROM and no BIOS support to boot from USB devices). I also do not want to deal with people who lose their I/O dongles (a la some Toshiba Portege laptops) and come whining to me that they do not have access to the network (network port is on the dongle) and cannot used the standardized Intel/Xircom RealPort cards since it only has a single Type II slot.
There are scenarios where ultra-thin laptops are required, but I try to avoid recommending them as much as possible.
A car would help for commutes and the like, but they do not quite help if you are carrying stuff around in an airport or within a corporate building between meetings. Airport lines can be quite a nasty bit or dealing with going to different gates of a flight has been delayed, changed, or cancelled but then picked up by a different airline. In that case, a little rolling caddy (of whatever they are called) can be helpful but a pain to work with a times.
:)
The other option could be storing the documents in PDF format, printing them out and then handing them to the proper people. For books... eBooks aren't the best option in many cases, so you are stuck there
I do not know what the main processor in the PS2 is derived from, but MIPS does ring a tiny bell.
The connection between the north and southbridges with desktop chipsets do start at PCI speeds and go all the way up to 266MB/s for the current Intel and Via (the latter using V-link) chipsets and much higher the chipset maker uses AMD's HyperTransport (right now, it looks like nVidia is the main desktop chipset maker that is using it, but SiS is also looking into using it in the Hammer chipsets).
Server chipsets usually are more complex and can provide multiple high-speed interconnects between the "northbridge" and the different "southbridge" chips (like the Intel E7500 chipset supports a total of three 1Gbyte/sec connections between the northbridge, the MCH, and I/O controllers, two of which support PCI-X hubs that provide up to 1Gbyte/sec to the expansion boards).
The "northbridge" of the Intel E7500 supports two PCI-X busses (more information about the chipset can be found here.
The ServerWorks GC series support for PCI-X start from 2 independent busses (the GC-SL) up to six PCI-X busses (the GC-HE). Specs on the ServerWorks stuff is located here.
I'm not completely sure if the AMD Hammer chipsets will include PCI-X support initially, but if one were to give up AGP 8x (which isn't really needed on a server) then you can turn that into a PCI-X bus to support a single 10 Gig Ethernet controller.
Of course, there is still the bottleneck of the memory subsystem which can make or break a high-end system.
The highest speed PCI-X (64-bit @ 133Mhz) is capable of reaching ~1GByte/sec which is just about the speed of 10 Gig Ethernet. There was/is the promise of Araphoe (sp?) that resembles AMD's HyperTransport but would be used for expansion cards rather than a chip-to-chip pathway.
The other bottleneck with even high-end Intel-based servers could easily choke when dealing with not only 10 Gig Ethernet but also add Fiber Channel, multiple channels of Ultra 160 or Ultra 320 SCSI RAID, etc., since the memory bandwidth (and processor bus speed?) would then become the possibly the next bottleneck. RISC servers don't have that much of a problem just yet, but sooner or later it will be.
USB 1.1 transfers at a maximum rate of 12Mbit/sec whereas USB 2.0 (which the T/M uses, at least according to the story write-up) can transfer at a maximum rate of 480Mbit/sec (or 60MByte/sec).
I guess it's a good thing about having a script that automatically updates the source tree and does the make world every other night :)
I personally think this is great news for those who are running FreeBSD on desktops or workstations for development as well as some Office use. Sure, there is KOffice, Abi Word, Gnumeric and a plethora of other office tools (individual programs or as a suite), but OpenOffice.org 1.0 does a nice job of combining the pieces together.
I've been running Star Office 5.2 (through the Linux compatibility layer) for several months now... it definitely has been very handy to recover data from corrupted Excel and Word documents... as well as to view spreadsheets from people that I'm not so sure about (since OO and SO do not support VB macros, I don't have to worry about worms and the such).
I'm currently downloading and will be building OO with GCC 3.2... hopefully all will go well. Thanks definitely go to the guys helping out with getting the port from entirely broken status to work in -STABLE!
The two things that I wished that the communicator had are: tri-band GSM for better roaming and GPRS for faster data transfers (which would provide better web page load times and possibly more audio or other data to be transferred.
No wonder Microsoft calls the GPL a viral thing... ick! But I wouldn't want Shared Sores either.
It may be a pirate's nightmare but it's an audiophile's wet dream :)
I'm not sure if mental institutions are eligible right now :) /end humor
It may not be a financial advantage in the sense of avoiding the Microsoft tax, but think of the cost of keeping Windows and Office up-to-date on those machines (applying patches, service packs) as well as dealing with anti-virus software in case somebody opened up an infected Excel XP spreadsheet or a Word document with infected macros.
It's an option for those who are sick of Windows/Office and want some alternative and a bit of relief about not worrying if opening a message in Outlook or a nasty bug ridden web page destroying the machine, if not others machines or the servers (a la Nimda).
I've ran into some problems with decoding Word 2000 files myself, but I was able to extract the data that I needed, made the changes and saved it into XHTML (I was converting and updating some of the procedures to a web-friendly format).
Getting rid of the dependencies on Windows is always a tough one, mostly since many (most?) educational software is released for Windows (and Mac). I wonder if some of the software would run under Wine or the Crossover plugin... (I don't follow the Windows emulation stuff very often since I primarily run Unix, be it BSD, Solaris or Linux, on servers that don't really run desktop apps.)
I think this is great news, primarily for those schools in the NW who were targetted with audits by Microsoft as they are moving towards Linux. Not only do they have a more stable/secure environment to work in but also a very nice office suite... for gratis.
So far, I'm quite impressed with OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my Windows machine, though some of the files that I need to open won't since it doesn't work with Macros or data pulls from a SQL Server or an Access file.
- C/C++ Compiler
- Perl, Python, or any other scripting languages
- source files or balls
- A lot of utilities and tools that can do anything to your liking
- Mail client and server software (like Sendmail, Pine, Mutt, etc.)
and many other things that I just can't think of off of the top of my head. There are some things that are quite bloated in a full Linux or FreeBSD install (KDE 2/3, Gnome, StarOffice) but Windows XP doesn't even include basic spreadsheet, presentation or decent graphics programs (think of KOffice as an equivalent to Microsoft Works or the like).Just my $0.015