I think MS is convinced that W*ndows is so much nicer to use than Un*x that everyone will fall over themselves to run away from Un*x to W*ndows as soon as W*ndows starts to even begin to appear as if it might address some Un*x capabilities.
So, for damn near 6 years MS has been saying "Un*x killer, Un*x killer." as NT becomes marginally better and thus more Un*x like.
Some people even believed them, and believed them again, and again, even though it was so much obvious bunk. Now it seems the refrain is growing weak as the Un*x killer gets ever more big fat and ugly.
Meanwhile they didn't notice the NT killer that came out of the Un*x camp. This killer isn't crying "Wolf!" either.
Nah! Canada only taxes ordinary people to death. Corporations and the Very Rich are another matter altogether.
I imagine Ottawa would bend over backwards for Mr. Bill and his minions should MS choose to move north to BC. Imagine what they'd do for him if he moved to Quebec. Back Orifice comes to mind.
> "... great OS for servers with a limited number > of processors, usually less than 16"
Much ado about Nitting.
Great OS for servers? *cough cough* That's highly debatable as anyone knows. Adequate - well OK.
Less than 16? Well, that's true, as 4 16 is a true statement. Less than 4 is more accurate. I've heard rumours of 4+ proc Wintel servers roaming the woods in the Pacific Northwest, but I've never seen much evidence apart from a few footprints and a bad fuzzy video. But 16? I'd sooner believe Sasquatch wanders onto the Redmond campus for high tea with Bill on Thursday afternoons. Call me a cynic.
> David Brin should love them too, since they show > the triumph of the commoner
Preface: I love Tolkien's works.
Now... There's little _common_ about TLotR characters. The whole thing reeks of noble birthrights and bloodlines and even downright racism.
OK, Sam is a commoner, and he is a slow, rustic, hire hand most loyal to his master like any good common lout should be. As for the rest, read on:
1) Frodo is a scion of a wealthy family on his dad's side (Baggins). He is a scion of a noble family on his mother's (Brandybuck). He is related to yet another noble family (Took) on both sides. Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took are therefore also nobles.
2) Aragorm is a real cool guy because he is the lineal descendent of kings from about 3000 years back. As a descendent of Luthien, he is the noblest of the noble, even by Elf standards.
3) Gimli is a noble dwarf of Durin's brood, a most noble dwarf family.
4) Legolas is the son of Thranduil, who is a noble Elf of Doriath and thus of the same noble ilk as Celeborn.
5) Galadriel is a member of the royal house of Finarfin. She is the grand-daughter of Finwe the King of the Noldor.
6) The men of Gondor encountered by Frito and Spam (sic) were "goodly men": pale skinned and grey eyed.
7) Bad men are usually swart (dark) or sallow or slit eyed: all orclike features.
There's more for Lucas to like than Brin. Maybe that's why Star Wars (New Hope) seems so Tolkienesque in so many ways.
1) Use ssh 1.x not 2.x if cost is an issue. 2) If rdist, then use 6.1.5 with ssh. 3) Consider rsync with ssh.
I've used combinations of the above for several host-to-host tasks in several situations. Anything from zapping around system updates to zapping around content updates.
Gotta say it always does what I need it to, given a wee bit of scripting, and it's relatively cheap.
> Is Unix really any harder than any other command line?
No, but it's _different_.
Before Windows was anything better than whipped cream on a road apple, most DOS aficionados could use a DOS (command.com) CLI and even write.bat files. Even then they feared the Unix CLI, not because it was a CLI, but because it was a _different_ CLI.
At about the same time, I hated the VMS CLI because it was so different from the Unix one, not because it was difficult or ugly. I also disliked the DOS CLI as useless because I found it was too unhelpful and annoying for its limited usefulness.
DOS/Windows users may eventually come to like the Unix shells once they get used to the rather simple scheme of "where all the files are" which is, of course, different from the more confusing but more familiar "maybe here, maybe there, depends on the app" file schema of Windows.
New users find it easier than Windows converts because they have no blinding preconceptions.
I wholly agree. I think once the GUI learning curve for GUI centric systems is passed, one can easily become frustrated because there's nowhere else to go.
On the other hand, with the fore-mentioned veritas Volume Manager, going beyond the complex GUI to the even more complex CLI (all those nasty vx* commands) is a last resort only. That particular CLI is so nasty and ugly that even seasoned Unix admins prefer to use the nasty ugly vxva GUI.
For the average user, a bicycle is perfect for small load, short haul tasks. But for users with more demanding needs, the multi-user, multi-tasking car may be a better bet. Bikes may be flashier and zippier in most single user tasks, but cannot easily scale beyond two wheels and one user.
The venerable cars and trucks of this world still dominate the heavier tasks. Cars aren't even available with less than a 2 user license and four active wheels. Trucks are even known to scale up to 18 wheels or even larger with the load shared evenly by all wheels. Hybrid vehicles called buses are known to handle up to 60 concurrent users with no effect on overall performance.
It still amuses car and truck drivers that the bicycle oriented press even thought the time of cars and trucks was over and bikes would soon be handling all aspects of transport, even at the enterprise level. 6 years after the introduction of Bike-NT (a motorcycle), cars, buses and trucks still do the vast majority of real transport.
After all, as we've learned time and again. Bike-NT and all bikes have a much higher risk of fatal crashes.
Weird logic. First you say we don't have heroes any more then you rhyme off several modern folk heroes within the free and open software community.
The nature of heroes changes. Once upon a time is was Moses, or Alfred the Great, or Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill.
Now times are more complex and the simple warrior leader hero model of old no longer works in this post industrial age, unless you watch too much Xena or Hercules on TV. In which case you worship fictional heros from another age, no applicabilty to present day reality there.
Torvalds et al are today's heroes because they inspire people in a modern complex world. They take on real empires armed only with the swords of their wits.
Heroism isn't dead, it just changes to mirror the times.
It's great that some nice folks are trying to show how little the Mindcraft study means when viewed in the cold light of reality. We can also expect some other nice folks to show how Linux and NT uptimes and general reliability compare in real world settings.
Unfortunately, it won't matter much in the PHB world.
I imagine that for the next 5 years or so, whenever I am in a meeting where server issues are being discussed, the pro-MS types will repeatedly and consistently drag out the Mindcraft study to back their claims and nobody will want to hear about any other study talking about real world conditions. If I do bring them up, somebody will say "Oh Mike, we know you are an anti-MS bigot, your studies are nothing but sour grapes pressed out after the Mindcraft benchmark clearly showed Linux to be inferior."
Am I being too cynical?
Think about it, Mindcraft benchmarked the specific scenarios where NT performance is better and left out all other scenarios. Clearly even before the "study" MS had run a whole suite of tests and chosen the specific scenarios to be publicly benchmarked by their independent vassal. These results are then broadcast loud and clear to all the check signing PHBs, and the Linux folks have to acknowledge their validity because the Linux camp willingly participated in a skewed study. We got duped and from now on, this will be THE valid study of NT vs. Linux. All other tests will be too late and too bad. Vexed to nightmare by MS-Marketing.
Oh yeah, they used Linux powered PA-RISC systems to calculate ballistic tables during the War. How silly of me to have forgotten.
> And for those in england that think they wouldn't be speaking german without US help, get a > history book.
Fine advice for all, including Yanks (and I'm not a Brit). The _fact_ of the matter is, by time the US got involved in the war, the Brits and their Commonwealth allies had already fought off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and had sunk enough U-Boats to keep those supplies coming in from their suppoerter across the Atlantic, Canada.
The US helped to _win_ the war, _after_ the Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, Canucks and others beat themselves and the Germans bloody while maintaining one safe haven in Europe: the UK. The Yanks entered a 3 year old war nice and fresh and helped to end it. BTW, if the UK had been beaten during the first 3 years of the war, the US would have had no safe haven in which to build up its forces.
Go read that history book now, and maybe read one that wasn't printed in the US. Those all show the US doing it single handedly. Not true in the slightest, whatever you may think.
When every systems vendor and their dogs jumped on the NT bandwagon (rolls along 22 hours a day, six days a week) all except for Sun, the Sun folks were proud to say they were the only vendor they stayed the course on Open Systems. (meanwhile I was pulling my hair out with SunOS to Solaris migration, but that's another story).
Now it's 5 odd years later and Lo! Systems vendors are hopping on another bandwagon, and its an Open one to boot! But where is Sun? Maybe they're spouting lip service but can I order a Sun box with Linux pre-loaded?
I work with Solaris as a career and I think it's a great server OS, but it annoys me as a desktop. Sure, if work would let me replace CDE with something else (no preference indicated) and pile on a pile of OSS tools, maybe I'd be less annoyed.
And so it stands. Sun is work and Linux is tech hobby. Sun does not support my tech hobby while everyone else seems to be only too eager to come along for the ride.
IBM Dell, HP, SGI: they're already on board. Will Sun be the last?
It says it was compared to 35 _men_ and 56 _women_ who had normal intellect when they died. That makes it 91 people, slightly better than 35.
It also says these features are listed nowhere on any known atlas of brain features. So they referred to the existing knowledge base as well.
I'd say that helps a wee bit, eh?
BTW, there is no mention of overall cranial capacity and if you check the other articles, the weight of A.E.'s brain was in the "normal" range. They refer specifically to unusual features, not overall size.
Be sure you absorbed the findings presented in any paper before calling someone else's study crud.
... "Linux-capable" rather than "Linux-qualified" I'd go further. Anyone who is CLI capable on any given Unix is very quickly comfortable doing CLI on any other Unix. If you're familiar with GNU tools on other Unixen it also adds to the comfort level. The differences between Unixen are most often with vendor specific tools or annoyances like using different filenames and dir hierarchies. In this context, what exactly is "Linux Qualified?" -MikeR-
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I think MS is convinced that W*ndows is so much nicer to use than Un*x that everyone will fall over themselves to run away from Un*x to W*ndows as soon as W*ndows starts to even begin to appear as if it might address some Un*x capabilities.
So, for damn near 6 years MS has been saying "Un*x killer, Un*x killer." as NT becomes marginally better and thus more Un*x like.
Some people even believed them, and believed them again, and again, even though it was so much obvious bunk. Now it seems the refrain is growing weak as the Un*x killer gets ever more big fat and ugly.
Meanwhile they didn't notice the NT killer that came out of the Un*x camp. This killer isn't crying "Wolf!" either.
It's gonna be interesting.
> Canada will tax them to death
Nah! Canada only taxes ordinary people to death. Corporations and the Very Rich are another matter altogether.
I imagine Ottawa would bend over backwards for Mr. Bill and his minions should MS choose to move north to BC. Imagine what they'd do for him if he moved to Quebec. Back Orifice comes to mind.
-MWR-
> "... great OS for servers with a limited number
> of processors, usually less than 16"
Much ado about Nitting.
Great OS for servers? *cough cough* That's highly debatable as anyone knows. Adequate - well OK.
Less than 16? Well, that's true, as 4 16 is a true statement. Less than 4 is more accurate. I've heard rumours of 4+ proc Wintel servers roaming the woods in the Pacific Northwest, but I've never seen much evidence apart from a few footprints and a bad fuzzy video. But 16? I'd sooner believe Sasquatch wanders onto the Redmond campus for high tea with Bill on Thursday afternoons. Call me a cynic.
-MWR-
> David Brin should love them too, since they show
... There's little _common_ about TLotR characters. The whole thing reeks of noble birthrights and bloodlines and even downright racism.
...
> the triumph of the commoner
Preface: I love Tolkien's works.
Now
OK, Sam is a commoner, and he is a slow, rustic, hire hand most loyal to his master like any good common lout should be. As for the rest, read on:
1) Frodo is a scion of a wealthy family on his dad's side (Baggins). He is a scion of a noble family on his mother's (Brandybuck). He is related to yet another noble family (Took) on both sides. Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took are therefore also nobles.
2) Aragorm is a real cool guy because he is the lineal descendent of kings from about 3000 years back. As a descendent of Luthien, he is the noblest of the noble, even by Elf standards.
3) Gimli is a noble dwarf of Durin's brood, a most noble dwarf family.
4) Legolas is the son of Thranduil, who is a noble Elf of Doriath and thus of the same noble ilk as Celeborn.
5) Galadriel is a member of the royal house of Finarfin. She is the grand-daughter of Finwe the King of the Noldor.
6) The men of Gondor encountered by Frito and Spam (sic) were "goodly men": pale skinned and grey eyed.
7) Bad men are usually swart (dark) or sallow or slit eyed: all orclike features.
There's more for Lucas to like than Brin. Maybe that's why Star Wars (New Hope) seems so Tolkienesque in so many ways.
Just ranting for fun, Ta
-MWR-
Gotta agree with a lot of posts above.
1) Use ssh 1.x not 2.x if cost is an issue.
2) If rdist, then use 6.1.5 with ssh.
3) Consider rsync with ssh.
I've used combinations of the above for several host-to-host tasks in several situations. Anything from zapping around system updates to zapping around content updates.
Gotta say it always does what I need it to, given a wee bit of scripting, and it's relatively cheap.
-M
> Is Unix really any harder than any other command line?
.bat files. Even then they feared the Unix CLI, not because it was a CLI, but because it was a _different_ CLI.
No, but it's _different_.
Before Windows was anything better than whipped cream on a road apple, most DOS aficionados could use a DOS (command.com) CLI and even write
At about the same time, I hated the VMS CLI because it was so different from the Unix one, not because it was difficult or ugly. I also disliked the DOS CLI as useless because I found it was too unhelpful and annoying for its limited usefulness.
DOS/Windows users may eventually come to like the Unix shells once they get used to the rather simple scheme of "where all the files are" which is, of course, different from the more confusing but more familiar "maybe here, maybe there, depends on the app" file schema of Windows.
New users find it easier than Windows converts because they have no blinding preconceptions.
It's all based on what you're used to.
I wholly agree. I think once the GUI learning curve for GUI centric systems is passed, one can easily become frustrated because there's nowhere else to go.
On the other hand, with the fore-mentioned veritas Volume Manager, going beyond the complex GUI to the even more complex CLI (all those nasty vx* commands) is a last resort only. That particular CLI is so nasty and ugly that even seasoned Unix admins prefer to use the nasty ugly vxva GUI.
-M
For the average user, a bicycle is perfect for small load, short haul tasks. But for users with more demanding needs, the multi-user, multi-tasking car may be a better bet. Bikes may be flashier and zippier in most single user tasks, but cannot easily scale beyond two wheels and one user.
The venerable cars and trucks of this world still dominate the heavier tasks. Cars aren't even available with less than a 2 user license and four active wheels. Trucks are even known to scale up to 18 wheels or even larger with the load shared evenly by all wheels. Hybrid vehicles called buses are known to handle up to 60 concurrent users with no effect on overall performance.
It still amuses car and truck drivers that the bicycle oriented press even thought the time of cars and trucks was over and bikes would soon be handling all aspects of transport, even at the enterprise level. 6 years after the introduction of Bike-NT (a motorcycle), cars, buses and trucks still do the vast majority of real transport.
After all, as we've learned time and again. Bike-NT and all bikes have a much higher risk of fatal crashes.
-M
Weird logic. First you say we don't have heroes any more then you rhyme off several modern folk heroes within the free and open software community.
The nature of heroes changes. Once upon a time is was Moses, or Alfred the Great, or Horatio Nelson, or Winston Churchill.
Now times are more complex and the simple warrior leader hero model of old no longer works in this post industrial age, unless you watch too much Xena or Hercules on TV. In which case you worship fictional heros from another age, no applicabilty to present day reality there.
Torvalds et al are today's heroes because they inspire people in a modern complex world. They take on real empires armed only with the swords of their wits.
Heroism isn't dead, it just changes to mirror the times.
-M
> What he meant was that the Highlander series didn't bother to wait 'till Highlander III (The
> Apology) to suck really bad
I agree. That is what he meant, and I agree, Highlander II more than sucked wind. I'm amazed you even bothered to watch HL-III.
It's great that some nice folks are trying to show how little the Mindcraft study means when viewed in the cold light of reality. We can also expect some other nice folks to show how Linux and NT uptimes and general reliability compare in real world settings.
Unfortunately, it won't matter much in the PHB world.
I imagine that for the next 5 years or so, whenever I am in a meeting where server issues are being discussed, the pro-MS types will repeatedly and consistently drag out the Mindcraft study to back their claims and nobody will want to hear about any other study talking about real world conditions. If I do bring them up, somebody will say "Oh Mike, we know you are an anti-MS bigot, your studies are nothing but sour grapes pressed out after the Mindcraft benchmark clearly showed Linux to be inferior."
Am I being too cynical?
Think about it, Mindcraft benchmarked the specific scenarios where NT performance is better and left out all other scenarios. Clearly even before the "study" MS had run a whole suite of tests and chosen the specific scenarios to be publicly benchmarked by their independent vassal. These results are then broadcast loud and clear to all the check signing PHBs, and the Linux folks have to acknowledge their validity because the Linux camp willingly participated in a skewed study. We got duped and from now on, this will be THE valid study of NT vs. Linux. All other tests will be too late and too bad. Vexed to nightmare by MS-Marketing.
*sigh*
Oh yeah, they used Linux powered PA-RISC systems to calculate ballistic tables during the War. How silly of me to have forgotten.
> And for those in england that think they wouldn't be speaking german without US help, get a
> history book.
Fine advice for all, including Yanks (and I'm not a Brit). The _fact_ of the matter is, by time the US got involved in the war, the Brits and their Commonwealth allies had already fought off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain and had sunk enough U-Boats to keep those supplies coming in from their suppoerter across the Atlantic, Canada.
The US helped to _win_ the war, _after_ the Brits, Kiwis, Aussies, Canucks and others beat themselves and the Germans bloody while maintaining one safe haven in Europe: the UK. The Yanks entered a 3 year old war nice and fresh and helped to end it. BTW, if the UK had been beaten during the first 3 years of the war, the US would have had no safe haven in which to build up its forces.
Go read that history book now, and maybe read one that wasn't printed in the US. Those all show the US doing it single handedly. Not true in the slightest, whatever you may think.
There now I'm off topic.
It makes me wonder....
When every systems vendor and their dogs jumped on the NT bandwagon (rolls along 22 hours a day, six days a week) all except for Sun, the Sun folks were proud to say they were the only vendor they stayed the course on Open Systems. (meanwhile I was pulling my hair out with SunOS to Solaris migration, but that's another story).
Now it's 5 odd years later and Lo! Systems vendors are hopping on another bandwagon, and its an Open one to boot! But where is Sun? Maybe they're spouting lip service but can I order a Sun box with Linux pre-loaded?
I work with Solaris as a career and I think it's a great server OS, but it annoys me as a desktop. Sure, if work would let me replace CDE with something else (no preference indicated) and pile on a pile of OSS tools, maybe I'd be less annoyed.
And so it stands. Sun is work and Linux is tech hobby. Sun does not support my tech hobby while everyone else seems to be only too eager to come along for the ride.
IBM Dell, HP, SGI: they're already on board. Will Sun be the last?
-MikeR-
It was 91 brains. 35 male, 56 female.
Spouting off an opinion about someone else's study when you glossed over their paper and got the numbers wrong is really bad science.
Whoa whoa! Tabernac!
It says it was compared to 35 _men_ and 56 _women_ who had normal intellect when they died. That makes it 91 people, slightly better than 35.
It also says these features are listed nowhere on any known atlas of brain features. So they referred to the existing knowledge base as well.
I'd say that helps a wee bit, eh?
BTW, there is no mention of overall cranial capacity and if you check the other articles, the weight of A.E.'s brain was in the "normal" range. They refer specifically to unusual features, not overall size.
Be sure you absorbed the findings presented in any paper before calling someone else's study crud.
> Lord save us if we ever see a squadron of flying elephants....
Yeah, like in Niven&Pournelle's -Footfall-? Those flying elephants sure caused a lotta trouble.
... "Linux-capable" rather than "Linux-qualified" I'd go further. Anyone who is CLI capable on any given Unix is very quickly comfortable doing CLI on any other Unix. If you're familiar with GNU tools on other Unixen it also adds to the comfort level. The differences between Unixen are most often with vendor specific tools or annoyances like using different filenames and dir hierarchies. In this context, what exactly is "Linux Qualified?" -MikeR-