Sun produces and ships their own compiler and IDE suite called Forte. From my understanding the executables it's compiler generates are still signficantly faster then what gcc produces for the sparc platform.
I have not seen the telltale GCC strings in executables for many of the proprietary software packages I've installed and used on Solaris over the years.
Ask anyone who has installed Oracle 8i or 9i on it's officially supported distro versions how easy and fun it is to get Oracle to install.
Applying patches to the _installer_ and hacking up scripts, screwing with compat libraries and the LD_* series of environment variables just to get the installer to run is not my idea of "supported".
The CEO of Dish Network spoke on tonight's "Charlie Chat".
The major topic of the show was the problem with Viacom and the following should be noticed:
- Apparently Viacom's use of the bottom scrolling message pissed off Dish Network completely and all of the language he used would seem to indicate it made them more willing to dig in and fight then before
- The CEO appologized several times but noted that they will most likely lose some customers if they lose the channel and that can't be avoided. In other words, more language that they will be digging in and fighting. Basically, they feel that can't make everyone happy... If Viacom channels stay with current proposed contract people who don't watch Viacom channels will be forced to pay much higher rates for junk channels and if those channels go some people will leave anyway.
- If the Viacom channels are lost they will reduce rates and carry other channels in their place (since they will free up capacity they will carry new channels)
- There was some mention that they might be considering lowering channels from higher priced packages into lower priced packages (some language kinda sounded like movie channels but they didn't say for sure)
- The channels are not gone yet and they are still working on a deal
As a Dish Network customer I'm willing to put up with a few days loss of Viacom crap if it means my bill won't have the obscene inflation that cable customers have to put up with. My Dish Network bill is $34.99 (only rising $1 in the last year) compared to the $65+ I'd have to pay Time Warner for a package with the channels I want.
In my eyes the cost of cable isn't worth it. For my viewing habits getting the highest level of Netflix subscription would be better then putting up with a $65 cable bill.
Viacom should get smacked for scrolling misleading messages to all the cable and sat TV networks. I am paying for content not for your propaganda.
As mentioned before, Dish Network subscribers concerned about the issue may wish to tune into "Charlie Chat" tonight at 9pm. Dish Network's CEO has a show on channel 100 or 101 once a month where customers can call in with questions. (If you miss the show it is rerun frequently).
I'm suprised no one has brought up the many other games available in the same genre.
One of them is Dark Age of Camelot. While not a perfect game itself its better then EQ in almost every regard. In fact sony hiding server populations and many of the newer features in EQ were pathetic ripoffs and "inspirations" copied from DAOC (much like many DAOC features were copied from EQ, UO, AC, etc). The released information about EQ2 looks more like DAOC rehashed then EQ... That should tell you something.
DAOC servers are broken down into three types. The first is the most numerous, Realm vs Realm. This is where there are three realms, each with their own PvE content, that fight over forts, etc against members of opposite realms. On these servers your "uberguilds" are no where near as obnoxious as on EQ because it takes team work and alliances and overall good relations with your fellow realmmates or else your leadership is going to be laughed off and you are not going to be invited to relic raids and similar.
The second server type is PvP. There are two servers, each where people can kill each other and travel freely between the three realms. I have to admit, it me its a pit of d00dness, but some people seem to really enjoy it.
The third server is Co-Operative (aka "CareBear" aka what most EQ people play). Here PvP is limited to formal duels and you can travel freely among all three realms. With the expansion pack and all three realms open to you there is _a lot_ of high quality content.
For more information you can poke around http://www.camelotherald.com. And while there poke around the server, guild, and character pages and note how pathetic it is to pay Sony $40/month for what Camelot gives to you for $12.95/month.
Some comments on EQ "problems" not present in DAOC:
- Training. Mobs pulled by other people not in your group leave you the hell alone and turn to their spawn points. This prevents _many_ problems that pissed off players, etc in EQ. If you don't touch a train, it doesn't touch you. (Of course in the dungeon Darkness Falls people have AE groups that often screw up and touch passing mobs and there are a few bugs, but its _nowhere_ near EQ)
- Death and corpses. No finding your corpse, no asking for a bind or finding a bind npc (which was added in response to DAOC), no corpse graveyards, no waiting five hours for a GM to help you figure out where the hell your corpse is. You die, you lay there and either wait up to X minutes for someone to rez you, or you release and go back to your bind point with all your gear. You just loose a relatively small amount of exp, a relatively small amount of money (to buy back the CON points you lost), and the time it takes to get back where you were.
- Camping - nowhere near as bad. There are plenty of spots to camp and wait lists are almost nonexistant except for one or two spots server wide (which I don't really understand considering there are many other spots but I guess people love killing the same mob over and over again for 10% more exp then other uncamped spots... *shrug*)
- Loot - loot from creatures killed by a group is randomly distributed between members of the group. Most servers have a code of honor about "need before greed" and most people happily/roll if there is a contention. If you (or your group) didn't do like 50%+ damage to it, you can't loot it. Also you don't get loot from grays so no farming the same spot forever.
Also camping for a day plus for loot is pretty rare. Crafting in DAOC is infinitely more viable and with armorcrafting and spellcrafting you can create some very nice suits of armor, etc with magic stats that rival anything you can get from a drop in the old world. (In the new world most of the drops from creatures are randomly generated items... so camping a particular spawn is kinda pointless)
- Quests - needed mobs respawn fast, almost all of them (with the exception of a couple stages of an epic quest) can be done alone. If multiple people have the same quest they can group and when the mob dies they will all get the same item.
- Kill stealing - very rare in comparison, the CSR (Customer Service Reps - aka EQ GM's) _do_ care and actually do crap about it. The game also has some safe guards built in dealing with looting, etc (see above)
- Customer Service - stuck/emergency game stopping appeals usually get a response in 5 to 10 minutes. Other lower priority requests get a response in anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. My average seems to be an hour. With that said, I have not had a reason to speak to a CSR in over four months. No lost corpses, no quests that didn't work, no kill stealing to complain about. How do I know the wait times? From speaking to others and you can actually type/appeal and it tells you the wait time and how many appeals in queue and how many CSRs.
- Faster repop rates - The "Uber" mobs pop a lot faster and are usually surrounded by so many pops that its near impossible to claim a spot for a prolonged period of time. I think the slowest repops are the three dragons, which are a tad under a day (but then again, people only tend to raid them once a week anyways).
- Level cap is 50. It wasn't raised by the expansion pack (*cough* kunark *cough*). Post-50 character development is done via realm points earned by killing enemies in RvR (or on the carebear server, killing the high level mobs that attack and take over the frontier forts). It takes _far_ less time to reach
- Content. Yep, EQ wins by shear numbers. But falls flat in comparison to the carebear server and expansion pack when it comes to content available to people who are not in uber guilds or are below level 50.
- Feel. On the RvR servers, the feeling is much friendlier for the most part. Guilds work together. There are arguments, and blow ups, alliances, etc... makes things interesting.
There is a lot more. But this is long enough already.:)
I played EQ for about 16 months and I've now played DAOC since its release. DAOC has proven to be much more fun, less iritating as a whole, with much more to do. I've rolled so many characters for fun on different servers in the same it took me to level up two EQ characters to a level where I would have had to invested a year or two and whored myself out to some guild to see the "end game".
There has always been an element of the growing linux userbase that decides to move to a *BSD for various reasons (most for real reasons, matters of preference, etc, other for less then admirable users but thats troll take). Some move back (quite a few users of new distros like Gentoo, etc are former *bsd users who moved back for some reason or another or run both happily)
Quite frankly I think BSD is enjoying the "wake" created by Linux much like migrating birds fly in the wake of others to make the trip easier, etc. The Linux camps attracts the bulk of new users to the Linux/BSD camp and some naturally spill over to the *BSDs. Is that a bad thing? Nope, its only natural. But it was the early Linux advocates and zealots who created the wake... It was their open and more inviting attitude and it was later the GPL and the growing wake produced by early Linux that attacted the corporate interest in Free Unix after the BSDs lost it due to lawsuits and attitude problems.
The Macs are a special case where you have loyal mac users who would quite frankly use anything Apple gave them as long as it got the job done. Your average mac user will probably see never even know the terminal window exists or if they do, they might mutter something like "oh its dos" or "wtf is this" and promptly close it.
Any "techies" moving to this form of BSD are greatly outnumbered by more "mainstream users" and I believe are stastically irrelevant. Also any "BSD developer" on Apple is either going to be using "non-BSD" apis or not doing anything involving GUIs or the nifty features that make Mac OS X different from Windows, KDE, etc.
As I said before, some BSD fans are overestimating the importance of BSD. I doubt it will ever make an appreciable dent in the server market compared to Linux, Windows, etc. Though it will be interesting to see how far the X-server servers go, the only reason I can see to buy one is the pretty case but its a server, so why pay for a proprietary server platform when we are trying to get off of others (*cough*sun*cough*).
1. The percentages were for _servers_. Sorry, but apple's server market share is like 0.00001% right now;P Every mac "server" I've seen so far in the "real world" is a lowend fileserver for a cluster macs hidden in some publishing office.
2. The only people (numerious enough to be of any statistical relevance) "migrating" to MacOS X are Mac desktop users upgrading from Macs and a small number of windows/linux/whatever converts (though judging from apple's sales figures those probably fall into "not statistically relevant")
3. I love when BSD fans latch onto Mac OS X and say stuff like "see! BSD is more used then Linux!" blah blah blah. Meanwhile most people don't give two hoots about any BSD parts of the OS (they don't see it, don't really program for it). And proprietary apple-only APIs are what developers use to get the most out of the hardware and operating system. Sorry, but your average well written native apple app is about as BSD as Windows NT is UNIX (tm) Photoshop for FreeBSD anyone? Yeah... I thought so...
Oh well... time to get mod'd ( -1, The Truth Hurts )
Hmmm... How is this different from EverQuest?
on
To The Pain
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· Score: 1
Nothing new... EQ has been a game of pain like that for years...;)
Whoops... I am sorry... I got your name mixed up with someone else. So ignore the stuff about "the other project". I would still recommend checking out portage though because it is more then just a rewrite of ports with python:)
You obviously havn't looked at portage or tried to use it. Its just a wee tad more powerful then BSD ports, but don't take my word for it;)
I have tried looking through your site and downloading some sample code and looked through it. All I see about your project is some "sample xml" and lots of comments about "sysadmins working together" and "value add".
Quite frankly all I see is some XML with little actual content (XML for the sake of XML?) and alot of hotair. Perhaps you could point me to a working example or a howto showing a sysadmin how to build a working production system using your... erm... technology?:)
(BTW, if you havn't I'd recommend playing with portage... you can even give it a whirl on an existing linux install, just chroot it per the instructions. it might give you a few ideas:)
Remember? That crap is still there... One of the oracle manuals lists about 10 or so default accounts and passwords... half of them I have no idea what they are for.
Thankfully I don't have to do much with oracle on the admin end because I'd have no clue to properly secure the bloated beast.
You could on some distributions. BTW, recent versions of PAM do support the wheel concept, its just not enabled by default in distributions like Redhat, etc. It can be enabled by modifying a couple files in/etc/pam.d or whichever directory your distro buts pam config files in.
The speed of apache vs IIS all depends on which content is being served. IIS is known to serve static content quite well but for dynamic content its a toss up depending on how your generating dynamic content... (perl, coldfusion, asp, etc?)
Sorry, but unless your using some crappy webserver that feels the need to fork() or spawn a crapload of threads just to handle a small number of requests (or your using badly written java) context switches are _not_ going to be your bottleneck.
The bottlenecks in intel systems compared to highend systems deal with disk i/o, SMP motherboard design limitations, etc... NOT context switching.
"The type of Unix may matter too. Large sites tend to use Linux, very large sites tend to use BSD. Moderate sites use Solaris (and only the smallest use IIS) in general"
How about backing up that BS with some numbers. I guess all those Fortune 500 companys running Solaris with Netscape server for their financial and sales sites are just "small sites"? Bah.
Get over yourselves, BSD is a niche OS run on a few token large sites which date back to the early 90s. New deployments are running the likes of Apache, Netscape, Zeus and IIS on Windows, Linux, Solaris and in a few cases on AIX and IBM's big iron.
Go ahead, prove me wrong with facts from reputable sources...
I didn't mean to "fake grass roots support". I'm just some minor developer among many. Gentoo wasn't my idea and I didn't write portage. I've just contributed ebuilds (aka portage packages) and support.
In the future I'll watch my grammar as I don't want to alarm the conspiracy freaks and possibly any BSD zealots who might be offended that something like Gentoo exists (not that I'm accusing you of either);)
I think it would be a good idea to point out that the GUI and autodetection system doesn't exist but the framework does exist and is part of portage.
Portage is a distribution building engine... it would actually be a great idea if someone wrote the GUI/hardware detection wizard... all it would have to do is just modify/etc/make.conf and the portage profile and tell portage to do its thing.
I'm afraid it really wouldn't be feasable for you to use it on another distribution. Portage _is_ the distribution. There is no seperation between packages in portage and/usr/src like there is in bsd.
Everything, including kernel, glibc, etc is part of portage. Portage is a distribution building engine that just happens to have default profiles (aka the profile for 1.0_rc6 basically _defines_ a 1.0_rc6 install) for those people who just want to use a distribution and not an engine;)
Hmmm... slashdot seemed to have eaten my first reply so here goes...
/usr/src != "in ports"
In gentoo's portage _every_ component of your system is a proper package thats part of portage. Through the use of portage's profile system _you_ can define which specific versions of which packages you want installed and considered to be "core". By editing a couple text files you can create your own profile where you define what is in the distribution. Portage is more then just a package management system, it can be used as a distribution creation system. Of course you don't need to worry about this if you don't, just use our default profile and you won't need to worry about any of this.
With portage you are not tied to any specific version of something considered core. We simply define a default profile that we believe is stable and "supported". The end user can go ahead and install gcc 3.0.x and try to build an entire system with it if he wants, its up to the user.
Once portage stabilizes (we are on 1.0_rc6 right now) distribution releases will be defined by just a few files in a profile directory. In a single portage tree you will have all the files required to build multiple releases of our distribution, the power of the profile system. If you have an existing install and want to upgrade to our current version you just change a single symlink and do a "emerge system" and it will update the packages we defined as being core. Nothing else is changed, etc.
Hope this gives you some idea why I might get a little touchy when someone tries to compare the seperation of/usr/src + buildworld and ports to the power of portage.:)
Anyone remotely interested in this should be checking out a fairly new distribution called Gentoo which is working towards their 1.0 release. You can build your entire system just by booting from a cd image, formatting, untaring a small build image, setting up network, and installing everything from their advanced ports like system called "portage". Its basically ports++ that forms the core of the distro (aka its not just for "third party packages").
It supports stuff like profiles, etc so by editing a few text files you can define your which specific packages and versions should be installed, etc (basically define your own distro;) Plus Gentoo is currently in the progress of testing its new dependency based init script system (no sysvinit or bsd init scripts here) and working on some other cool ideas.
Definatly check them out, there is no other distribution or OS quite like it!:)
32mb GTS may be for $120 but the 64mb DDR GTSs are nowhere to be seen for that price. Or am I missing something? If you can find a GTS 64mb for $150 from a well known vendor please do so... I would be estatic and would buy it right away:)
I've also seen quotes that Doom 3 at 800x600x32 with all the features will run at 30fps on a GeForce3... Though since I havn't seen a single a single interview where he discusses pure performance numbers yet, I'm treating it as a rather depressing rumor and one more reason not to pay more then $150 for a card that will only last a year or two until DX8 is in full force.
Small single player worked great for me... I was getting 30fps at 800x600x32 on a G400 (which is great considering how old the damn card is) but the minute I go online to servers which the browser say have 20 ping and 20+ people, etc performance goes to shit.
Even if they are not visible for me and I'm staring at the ground I get like 15fps (I was forced to turn it down to 640x480 for the 5fps gain... which in itself says something is seriously wrong)
I hope Sierra fixes it...:/
The bottleneck in Tribes 2 isn't the 3d card. Its the shitty engine. As I said before, have you even played the game? Checked the forums while people try like mad to get more then 30fps at 1024xwhatever on their GeForce2s?
Until Tribes2 is fixed we won't know what benefits the engine. Its a fun game with a fucked engine... glad I plopped down my $40... sigh...
Perhaps its the programmable T&L having to be emulated in software for the GF2s? Would memory bandwith be the issue (yeah... I'm sounding like a broken record:) See my post below.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun produces and ships their own compiler and IDE suite called Forte. From my understanding the executables it's compiler generates are still signficantly faster then what gcc produces for the sparc platform.
I have not seen the telltale GCC strings in executables for many of the proprietary software packages I've installed and used on Solaris over the years.
Ask anyone who has installed Oracle 8i or 9i on it's officially supported distro versions how easy and fun it is to get Oracle to install.
Applying patches to the _installer_ and hacking up scripts, screwing with compat libraries and the LD_* series of environment variables just to get the installer to run is not my idea of "supported".
The channels in question will come down at midnight tonight apparently.
The CEO of Dish Network spoke on tonight's "Charlie Chat".
The major topic of the show was the problem with Viacom and the following should be noticed:
- Apparently Viacom's use of the bottom scrolling message pissed off Dish Network completely and all of the language he used would seem to indicate it made them more willing to dig in and fight then before
- The CEO appologized several times but noted that they will most likely lose some customers if they lose the channel and that can't be avoided. In other words, more language that they will be digging in and fighting. Basically, they feel that can't make everyone happy... If Viacom channels stay with current proposed contract people who don't watch Viacom channels will be forced to pay much higher rates for junk channels and if those channels go some people will leave anyway.
- If the Viacom channels are lost they will reduce rates and carry other channels in their place (since they will free up capacity they will carry new channels)
- There was some mention that they might be considering lowering channels from higher priced packages into lower priced packages (some language kinda sounded like movie channels but they didn't say for sure)
- The channels are not gone yet and they are still working on a deal
As a Dish Network customer I'm willing to put up with a few days loss of Viacom crap if it means my bill won't have the obscene inflation that cable customers have to put up with. My Dish Network bill is $34.99 (only rising $1 in the last year) compared to the $65+ I'd have to pay Time Warner for a package with the channels I want.
In my eyes the cost of cable isn't worth it. For my viewing habits getting the highest level of Netflix subscription would be better then putting up with a $65 cable bill.
Viacom should get smacked for scrolling misleading messages to all the cable and sat TV networks. I am paying for content not for your propaganda.
As mentioned before, Dish Network subscribers concerned about the issue may wish to tune into "Charlie Chat" tonight at 9pm. Dish Network's CEO has a show on channel 100 or 101 once a month where customers can call in with questions. (If you miss the show it is rerun frequently).
I'm suprised no one has brought up the many other games available in the same genre.
/roll if there is a contention. If you (or your group) didn't do like 50%+ damage to it, you can't loot it. Also you don't get loot from grays so no farming the same spot forever.
/appeal and it tells you the wait time and how many appeals in queue and how many CSRs.
:)
One of them is Dark Age of Camelot. While not a perfect game itself its better then EQ in almost every regard. In fact sony hiding server populations and many of the newer features in EQ were pathetic ripoffs and "inspirations" copied from DAOC (much like many DAOC features were copied from EQ, UO, AC, etc). The released information about EQ2 looks more like DAOC rehashed then EQ... That should tell you something.
DAOC servers are broken down into three types. The first is the most numerous, Realm vs Realm. This is where there are three realms, each with their own PvE content, that fight over forts, etc against members of opposite realms. On these servers your "uberguilds" are no where near as obnoxious as on EQ because it takes team work and alliances and overall good relations with your fellow realmmates or else your leadership is going to be laughed off and you are not going to be invited to relic raids and similar.
The second server type is PvP. There are two servers, each where people can kill each other and travel freely between the three realms. I have to admit, it me its a pit of d00dness, but some people seem to really enjoy it.
The third server is Co-Operative (aka "CareBear" aka what most EQ people play). Here PvP is limited to formal duels and you can travel freely among all three realms. With the expansion pack and all three realms open to you there is _a lot_ of high quality content.
For more information you can poke around http://www.camelotherald.com. And while there poke around the server, guild, and character pages and note how pathetic it is to pay Sony $40/month for what Camelot gives to you for $12.95/month.
Some comments on EQ "problems" not present in DAOC:
- Training. Mobs pulled by other people not in your group leave you the hell alone and turn to their spawn points. This prevents _many_ problems that pissed off players, etc in EQ. If you don't touch a train, it doesn't touch you. (Of course in the dungeon Darkness Falls people have AE groups that often screw up and touch passing mobs and there are a few bugs, but its _nowhere_ near EQ)
- Death and corpses. No finding your corpse, no asking for a bind or finding a bind npc (which was added in response to DAOC), no corpse graveyards, no waiting five hours for a GM to help you figure out where the hell your corpse is. You die, you lay there and either wait up to X minutes for someone to rez you, or you release and go back to your bind point with all your gear. You just loose a relatively small amount of exp, a relatively small amount of money (to buy back the CON points you lost), and the time it takes to get back where you were.
- Camping - nowhere near as bad. There are plenty of spots to camp and wait lists are almost nonexistant except for one or two spots server wide (which I don't really understand considering there are many other spots but I guess people love killing the same mob over and over again for 10% more exp then other uncamped spots... *shrug*)
- Loot - loot from creatures killed by a group is randomly distributed between members of the group. Most servers have a code of honor about "need before greed" and most people happily
Also camping for a day plus for loot is pretty rare. Crafting in DAOC is infinitely more viable and with armorcrafting and spellcrafting you can create some very nice suits of armor, etc with magic stats that rival anything you can get from a drop in the old world. (In the new world most of the drops from creatures are randomly generated items... so camping a particular spawn is kinda pointless)
- Quests - needed mobs respawn fast, almost all of them (with the exception of a couple stages of an epic quest) can be done alone. If multiple people have the same quest they can group and when the mob dies they will all get the same item.
- Kill stealing - very rare in comparison, the CSR (Customer Service Reps - aka EQ GM's) _do_ care and actually do crap about it. The game also has some safe guards built in dealing with looting, etc (see above)
- Customer Service - stuck/emergency game stopping appeals usually get a response in 5 to 10 minutes. Other lower priority requests get a response in anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. My average seems to be an hour. With that said, I have not had a reason to speak to a CSR in over four months. No lost corpses, no quests that didn't work, no kill stealing to complain about. How do I know the wait times?
From speaking to others and you can actually type
- Faster repop rates - The "Uber" mobs pop a lot faster and are usually surrounded by so many pops that its near impossible to claim a spot for a prolonged period of time. I think the slowest repops are the three dragons, which are a tad under a day (but then again, people only tend to raid them once a week anyways).
- Level cap is 50. It wasn't raised by the expansion pack (*cough* kunark *cough*). Post-50 character development is done via realm points earned by killing enemies in RvR (or on the carebear server, killing the high level mobs that attack and take over the frontier forts). It takes _far_ less time to reach
- Content. Yep, EQ wins by shear numbers. But falls flat in comparison to the carebear server and expansion pack when it comes to content available to people who are not in uber guilds or are below level 50.
- Feel. On the RvR servers, the feeling is much friendlier for the most part. Guilds work together. There are arguments, and blow ups, alliances, etc... makes things interesting.
There is a lot more. But this is long enough already.
I played EQ for about 16 months and I've now played DAOC since its release. DAOC has proven to be much more fun, less iritating as a whole, with much more to do. I've rolled so many characters for fun on different servers in the same it took me to level up two EQ characters to a level where I would have had to invested a year or two and whored myself out to some guild to see the "end game".
There has always been an element of the growing linux userbase that decides to move to a *BSD for various reasons (most for real reasons, matters of preference, etc, other for less then admirable users but thats troll take). Some move back (quite a few users of new distros like Gentoo, etc are former *bsd users who moved back for some reason or another or run both happily)
Quite frankly I think BSD is enjoying the "wake" created by Linux much like migrating birds fly in the wake of others to make the trip easier, etc. The Linux camps attracts the bulk of new users to the Linux/BSD camp and some naturally spill over to the *BSDs. Is that a bad thing? Nope, its only natural. But it was the early Linux advocates and zealots who created the wake... It was their open and more inviting attitude and it was later the GPL and the growing wake produced by early Linux that attacted the corporate interest in Free Unix after the BSDs lost it due to lawsuits and attitude problems.
The Macs are a special case where you have loyal mac users who would quite frankly use anything Apple gave them as long as it got the job done. Your average mac user will probably see never even know the terminal window exists or if they do, they might mutter something like "oh its dos" or "wtf is this" and promptly close it.
Any "techies" moving to this form of BSD are greatly outnumbered by more "mainstream users" and I believe are stastically irrelevant. Also any "BSD developer" on Apple is either going to be using "non-BSD" apis or not doing anything involving GUIs or the nifty features that make Mac OS X different from Windows, KDE, etc.
As I said before, some BSD fans are overestimating the importance of BSD. I doubt it will ever make an appreciable dent in the server market compared to Linux, Windows, etc. Though it will be interesting to see how far the X-server servers go, the only reason I can see to buy one is the pretty case but its a server, so why pay for a proprietary server platform when we are trying to get off of others (*cough*sun*cough*).
Free clues for BSD fans:
;P Every mac "server" I've seen so far in the "real world" is a lowend fileserver for a cluster macs hidden in some publishing office.
1. The percentages were for _servers_. Sorry, but apple's server market share is like 0.00001% right now
2. The only people (numerious enough to be of any statistical relevance) "migrating" to MacOS X are Mac desktop users upgrading from Macs and a small number of windows/linux/whatever converts (though judging from apple's sales figures those probably fall into "not statistically relevant")
3. I love when BSD fans latch onto Mac OS X and say stuff like "see! BSD is more used then Linux!" blah blah blah. Meanwhile most people don't give two hoots about any BSD parts of the OS (they don't see it, don't really program for it). And proprietary apple-only APIs are what developers use to get the most out of the hardware and operating system. Sorry, but your average well written native apple app is about as BSD as Windows NT is UNIX (tm) Photoshop for FreeBSD anyone? Yeah... I thought so...
Oh well... time to get mod'd ( -1, The Truth Hurts )
Nothing new... EQ has been a game of pain like that for years...
Whoops... I am sorry... I got your name mixed up
with someone else. So ignore the stuff about "the other project". I would still recommend checking out portage though because it is more then just a rewrite of ports with python
Sigh... not a good night for me
You obviously havn't looked at portage or tried to use it. Its just a wee tad more powerful then BSD ports, but don't take my word for it
I have tried looking through your site and downloading some sample code and looked through it. All I see about your project is some "sample xml" and lots of comments about "sysadmins working together" and "value add".
Quite frankly all I see is some XML with little actual content (XML for the sake of XML?) and alot of hotair. Perhaps you could point me to a working example or a howto showing a sysadmin how to build a working production system using your
(BTW, if you havn't I'd recommend playing with portage... you can even give it a whirl on an existing linux install, just chroot it per the instructions. it might give you a few ideas
Remember? That crap is still there... One of the oracle manuals lists about 10 or so default accounts and passwords... half of them I have no idea what they are for.
Thankfully I don't have to do much with oracle on the admin end because I'd have no clue to properly secure the bloated beast.
You could on some distributions. BTW, recent versions of PAM do support the wheel concept, its just not enabled by default in distributions like Redhat, etc. It can be enabled by modifying a couple files in /etc/pam.d or whichever directory your distro buts pam config files in.
The speed of apache vs IIS all depends on which content is being served. IIS is known to serve static content quite well but for dynamic content its a toss up depending on how your generating dynamic content... (perl, coldfusion, asp, etc?)
Sorry, but unless your using some crappy webserver that feels the need to fork() or spawn a crapload of threads just to handle a small number of requests (or your using badly written java) context switches are _not_ going to be your bottleneck.
The bottlenecks in intel systems compared to highend systems deal with disk i/o, SMP motherboard design limitations, etc... NOT context switching.
"The type of Unix may matter too. Large sites tend to use Linux, very large sites tend to use BSD. Moderate sites use Solaris (and only the smallest use IIS) in general"
How about backing up that BS with some numbers. I guess all those Fortune 500 companys running Solaris with Netscape server for their financial and sales sites are just "small sites"? Bah.
Get over yourselves, BSD is a niche OS run on a few token large sites which date back to the early 90s. New deployments are running the likes of Apache, Netscape, Zeus and IIS on Windows, Linux, Solaris and in a few cases on AIX and IBM's big iron.
Go ahead, prove me wrong with facts from reputable sources...
I didn't mean to "fake grass roots support". I'm just some minor developer among many. Gentoo wasn't my idea and I didn't write portage. I've just contributed ebuilds (aka portage packages) and support.
;)
In the future I'll watch my grammar as I don't want to alarm the conspiracy freaks and possibly any BSD zealots who might be offended that something like Gentoo exists (not that I'm accusing you of either)
I think it would be a good idea to point out that the GUI and autodetection system doesn't exist but the framework does exist and is part of portage.
/etc/make.conf and the portage profile and tell portage to do its thing.
Portage is a distribution building engine... it would actually be a great idea if someone wrote the GUI/hardware detection wizard... all it would have to do is just modify
I'm afraid it really wouldn't be feasable for you to use it on another distribution. Portage _is_ the distribution. There is no seperation between packages in portage and /usr/src like there is in bsd.
;)
Everything, including kernel, glibc, etc is part of portage. Portage is a distribution building engine that just happens to have default profiles (aka the profile for 1.0_rc6 basically _defines_ a 1.0_rc6 install) for those people who just want to use a distribution and not an engine
Hmmm... slashdot seemed to have eaten my first reply so here goes...
/usr/src + buildworld and ports to the power of portage. :)
/usr/src != "in ports"
In gentoo's portage _every_ component of your system is a proper package thats part of portage. Through the use of portage's profile system _you_ can define which specific versions of which packages you want installed and considered to be "core". By editing a couple text files you can create your own profile where you define what is in the distribution. Portage is more then just a package management system, it can be used as a distribution creation system. Of course you don't need to worry about this if you don't, just use our default profile and you won't need to worry about any of this.
With portage you are not tied to any specific version of something considered core. We simply define a default profile that we believe is stable and "supported". The end user can go ahead and install gcc 3.0.x and try to build an entire system with it if he wants, its up to the user.
Once portage stabilizes (we are on 1.0_rc6 right now) distribution releases will be defined by just a few files in a profile directory. In a single portage tree you will have all the files required to build multiple releases of our distribution, the power of the profile system. If you have an existing install and want to upgrade to our current version you just change a single symlink and do a "emerge system" and it will update the packages we defined as being core. Nothing else is changed, etc.
Hope this gives you some idea why I might get a little touchy when someone tries to compare the seperation of
Anyone remotely interested in this should be checking out a fairly new distribution called Gentoo which is working towards their 1.0 release. You can build your entire system just by booting from a cd image, formatting, untaring a small build image, setting up network, and installing everything from their advanced ports like system called "portage". Its basically ports++ that forms the core of the distro (aka its not just for "third party packages").
;) Plus Gentoo is currently in the progress of testing its new dependency based init script system (no sysvinit or bsd init scripts here) and working on some other cool ideas.
:)
It supports stuff like profiles, etc so by editing a few text files you can define your which specific packages and versions should be installed, etc (basically define your own distro
Definatly check them out, there is no other distribution or OS quite like it!
BTW, the url is http://www.gentoo.org
32mb GTS may be for $120 but the 64mb DDR GTSs are nowhere to be seen for that price. Or am I missing something? If you can find a GTS 64mb for $150 from a well known vendor please do so... I would be estatic and would buy it right away :)
I've also seen quotes that Doom 3 at 800x600x32 with all the features will run at 30fps on a GeForce3... Though since I havn't seen a single a single interview where he discusses pure performance numbers yet, I'm treating it as a rather depressing rumor and one more reason not to pay more then $150 for a card that will only last a year or two until DX8 is in full force.
Small single player worked great for me... I was getting 30fps at 800x600x32 on a G400 (which is great considering how old the damn card is) but the minute I go online to servers which the browser say have 20 ping and 20+ people, etc performance goes to shit. Even if they are not visible for me and I'm staring at the ground I get like 15fps (I was forced to turn it down to 640x480 for the 5fps gain... which in itself says something is seriously wrong) I hope Sierra fixes it... :/
The bottleneck in Tribes 2 isn't the 3d card. Its the shitty engine. As I said before, have you even played the game? Checked the forums while people try like mad to get more then 30fps at 1024xwhatever on their GeForce2s? Until Tribes2 is fixed we won't know what benefits the engine. Its a fun game with a fucked engine... glad I plopped down my $40... sigh...
Perhaps its the programmable T&L having to be emulated in software for the GF2s? Would memory bandwith be the issue (yeah... I'm sounding like a broken record :) See my post below.