AIX, borrowing from the IBM's other operating systems I presume, likes to implement IBM terms and the whole lets-make-a-command-for-every-piddly-function-with -lots-of-weird-switches. Actually, AIX took commands & switches from both SysV and BSD. I've never used AS/400s, so I don't know about that, but there wasn't *anything* in MVS or VM that I remember that looks like it went to AIX.
I thought one of the *Unix* ideals was small, single-purpose tools that can be strung together. So why is a command for every function a problem for someone who uses a "real" Unix?
Don't even try to argue the "Just use SMIT" argument, some of us find the use of GUIs or even quasi GUIs a weakness, especially in times of crisis. Some of us find the solving of problems to be of more importance that command-line macho. Whether during crisis or otherwise.
What happens when SMIT doesn't work or is unavailable? Or even worse, your ODM got blown away and you don't have backups? I never use the X version of smit, and I've never had tty smit not work. Ever. Of course, if it didn't, I'd use the command line (which I do most of the time anyway). If you don't have backups, recovery under any OS is, uh, difficult.
So competent admins take backups.
Is *every* tool you use installed by default? It ticks me off that the man pages aren't on by default, but it ain't that difficult to install them on new systems -- we have to set up a bunch of other stuff anyway, so our scripts do man pages along with that other stuff.
As for man page format, who cares? 'man' displays 'em, under AIX, Solaris, or whatever. When was the last time you needed to look at the unformatted versions?
Last I remember, Linux isn't officially a Unix -- no certification, and none is planned. So what is it that makes an OS Unix? Because you say so?
WWI and WWII both bolster my point. They were both viewed by most Western nations as unjust. So you're saying that most of Europe accepted the French attempt to annex Spain in 1700 as justifiable, and England, Austria, Prussia, and Holland fought them for the heck of it? Come on; there was a blatant attempt to expand France's empire, and the other powers were threatened, so they fought. This hardly seems an example of the "moratorium on conquering other nations" that you seem to think happened around 1500. The two World Wars were no different -- they were continuations of power struggles that had been happening for centuries, and they were started for acceptable reasons, according to the folks that started them.
South Africa has yet to join the Western world as a premier nation. Once again, read a book or two. "South Africa" was an area, not a nation, in 1800 -- the area was controled by the "civilized" Dutch (who had taken it from the native residents, who had an "inferior" society that deserved to be conquered, according to the Europeans of the time) and the British (another "civilized" society, from what I can gleam from your posts) wanted the land to (A) protect their trade routes to India -- so they could continue to exploit the land they had conquered during the 1700's, (B) get the diamonds disoovered in the 1860s, and (C) get the gold discovered in the 1880s. Two "civilized" nations fighting for territory & resources, 300+ years after you seem to think that kind of thing stopped. Oh, by the way -- one of the factors in the Mogul empire being weakened enough for the British to conquer India was the invasions (starting around 1739) from Afghanistan. Sounds like they had a society that was dominant, in some respect.
Unfortunately for the would-be winners of today's conflicts, however, these types of things are no longer accepted. THAT'S MY FREAKIN' POINT! Bullshit. The winners today will accept the conflicts as proper, just as the winners in any previous war think they were right. And those winners will write the history books just like they always do, and the books will demonstrate the correctness of the winners' actions. Do you think the Native Americans thought the Anglo-European "civilization" from the USA had the right to conquer them? Do you think Hitler went to his grave relieved that those other guys stopped his "threat to freedom/democracy"?
I'm actually advocating that they [cultures] be allowed to make their own determination of which direction to grow in That's a real nice idea, but it hasn't ever happened to date, nor is it going to, as long as humans are in charge. No society is so isolated that they can determine their own path -- one or more of their neighbors decides that they need somthing the other guys have, or that their "uncivilized" society needs help, or some other reason. I don't like it, I don't think it's Right, but it has happened for centuries, hasn't stopped, and will continue to happen. Partially because somebody always thinks they have a simple answer to a complex problem.
This post is so ignorant, I don't know where to start. Exactly when in the "...around the 1800's or so" did today's "civilized" nations stop trying to conquer each other? Was that before or after the 1918 end of World War I, or the 1945 end of World War II (which, by the way, had some disturbing views on various races)? Was South Africa not "civilized" during the 1899-1902 Boer war? When did the USA acquire "civilized" status -- before or after we all but exterminated dozens of Native American cultures in the name of expansion? I'd go on, but I'd probably overwhelm your ability to use the index in a history book.
Before the 1500's, England (and France, et al.) were involved in horrendous civil wars with human rights violations on both sides Does this mean that the civil wars fought after the 1500's (American Revolution, French Revolution, arguable the British-American war of 1812, and others) didn't happen? Or that "human rights violations" didn't occur during these wars?
It just seems Afghanistan (and others) are still in this phase of development, and that by interfering with this, we're actually harming their growth as a culture. This statement is so offensive, I don't know how to respond (of course, I'll try anyway). How on earth did you get so arrogant that you think you would know what "culture growth" is (other than what's probably in your refigerator)? You seem to be implying that anyone not in your culture must be (A) "lower" than you, and (B) needs to improve to your level. Exactly what do you think Arab/Muslim culture was doing during the 1500's and before? Other than real science, technology, preservation of history, etc.? Yes, and some of the bad things "civilized cultures" do as well.
Just to spell it out for you, I'll state it: I'm not trying to equate any "culture" (past and/or present) to another, or judge "civilized" vs. the alternative. I'm just ranting at your arrogant, Anglo-Saxon (or European, I'm not sure which. They're NOT the same, you moron) bias.
Go back and burn some more books. Apparently, that's all you've ever done with them.
But beyond that, exactly how are they supposed to develop new hardware without having an OS to run on it and verify it's working as planned?
Any place that has to develop a full-blown OS to test their hardware needs new diagnostic programmers -- and new management. Quickly. A full OS (MacOS, Linux, whatever) is waaaay too complicated to reliably test HW -- you spend too much time trying to figure out if you have an OS bug or a HW bug.
Functional Test Programs need to be complex, but nowhere near as complex as an OS. And yes, I've been paid to do this.
Maybe that's why Intel's CPUs are so expensive -- they've been using Windows to debug them.:-)
You made your point with capitalized letters but still.. If everything has failed and you have nothing to loose why not give it a shot?
If everything else has failed & you haven't found the problem, you haven't tried everything. Granted, there are things like memory leaks that won't purge themselves, or total hangs where the box is unresponsive, but if you're in there looking at the system, you should be (a) finding and fixing, or (b) recording everything you can to find the problem later.
Because sometimes, in my experience, you do have to reboot. You've got 2,000 users sitting on their thumbs and the regulatory commission wants data & is going to fine you for every hour you're late and the division VP is on the conference call wanting to "help" and.... It may be better to reboot & get the thing back up and running, but even so, do not assume you've fixed the problem.
Except in Windows, for those problems that don't require a re-install.:-)
...the RS/6000 (Which isn't a whole lot more than a Power Macintosh)....
Uh, the G4's are pretty hefty, and on the low end of the RS/6000-pSeries lines some of the systems are small, but there's a tad bit of difference between a 4-PCI slot, 1 CPU system (even with 1.5 GB memory) and a 24-CPU, 96GB system with 56 PCI slots, etc.
Besides, those black cases & keyboards are way cooler than wimpy pastels, and how do you rack-mount the Mac?:-)
Yes, you can buy (or lease) them this way. IBM, Sun, and HP all have this feature available on one or more of their "midrange" systems; I don't know about any other co. 'cause we only use those 3.
Not only was it during the summer, but Armstrong & Aldrin's lunar walk was in the evening. I vividly remember sitting in my parent's living room watching (got to stay up late & everything).
See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1969-059A.html for a chronology.
dublin had a nice response to this, but let me add a couple of things:
With the LVM I'm familiar with (AIX), you can tell which physical partitions are being used by a file system. I don't recall ever needing to know the specific disk block number for a file. I've been working with Unix since 1992 & have been a SysAdmin for most of that time.
If you don't want your file system spread all over the disk, in AIX you can set up the logical volume as contiguous space. You can tell it *exactly* which physical partitions to use.
Spanning multiple volumes doesn't necessarily "multiply the risk of data loss" -- if you do it correctly, you'll reduce your risk, since you have multiple copies of the data on different disks.
Apparently, much of the rest of the Unix world didn't think AIX's LVM was "poorly designed" or "half-baked". The Veritas volume manager was based on the same concepts; have you looked at the sales growth Veritas has been having lately?
In our experience (I work for a large telecommunications company) LVMs *very clearly* decrease the complexity of systems management. If the Unix flavor for a system doesn't have a LVM built-in, we *always* install one. Certainly you can cause problems with LVMs with inadequate training, but one can screw up filesystems with base-level commands too, if they're not careful and/or don't know what they're doing.
Having said that, the USPTO is obviously (to me, anyway) been granting patents for things that are way beyond "useful", "process", "machine". Go to http://www.patents.ibm.com & check out US Patent # 5443036, titled "Method of exercising a cat." Basically, someone with too much time and/or money patented using a laser pointer to play with a cat.
Somewhere along the line, the folks involved with the Patent Process (has this been patented? Maybe I should submit....:-) have lost sight of what patents are for. Leaving the door wide open for one-click and its ilk.
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AIX, borrowing from the IBM's other operating systems I presume, likes to implement IBM terms and the whole lets-make-a-command-for-every-piddly-function-with -lots-of-weird-switches.
Actually, AIX took commands & switches from both SysV and BSD. I've never used AS/400s, so I don't know about that, but there wasn't *anything* in MVS or VM that I remember that looks like it went to AIX.
I thought one of the *Unix* ideals was small, single-purpose tools that can be strung together. So why is a command for every function a problem for someone who uses a "real" Unix?
Don't even try to argue the "Just use SMIT" argument, some of us find the use of GUIs or even quasi GUIs a weakness, especially in times of crisis.
Some of us find the solving of problems to be of more importance that command-line macho. Whether during crisis or otherwise.
What happens when SMIT doesn't work or is unavailable? Or even worse, your ODM got blown away and you don't have backups?
I never use the X version of smit, and I've never had tty smit not work. Ever. Of course, if it didn't, I'd use the command line (which I do most of the time anyway). If you don't have backups, recovery under any OS is, uh, difficult. So competent admins take backups.
Is *every* tool you use installed by default? It ticks me off that the man pages aren't on by default, but it ain't that difficult to install them on new systems -- we have to set up a bunch of other stuff anyway, so our scripts do man pages along with that other stuff.
As for man page format, who cares? 'man' displays 'em, under AIX, Solaris, or whatever. When was the last time you needed to look at the unformatted versions?
Last I remember, Linux isn't officially a Unix -- no certification, and none is planned. So what is it that makes an OS Unix? Because you say so?
Uh, the 690 runs either AIX 5.1 or Linux in any partition.
As for the "crappy", I'll worry about that opinion when 10-year olds actually run anything in the real world.
WWI and WWII both bolster my point. They were both viewed by most Western nations as unjust.
So you're saying that most of Europe accepted the French attempt to annex Spain in 1700 as justifiable, and England, Austria, Prussia, and Holland fought them for the heck of it? Come on; there was a blatant attempt to expand France's empire, and the other powers were threatened, so they fought. This hardly seems an example of the "moratorium on conquering other nations" that you seem to think happened around 1500. The two World Wars were no different -- they were continuations of power struggles that had been happening for centuries, and they were started for acceptable reasons, according to the folks that started them.
South Africa has yet to join the Western world as a premier nation.
Once again, read a book or two. "South Africa" was an area, not a nation, in 1800 -- the area was controled by the "civilized" Dutch (who had taken it from the native residents, who had an "inferior" society that deserved to be conquered, according to the Europeans of the time) and the British (another "civilized" society, from what I can gleam from your posts) wanted the land to (A) protect their trade routes to India -- so they could continue to exploit the land they had conquered during the 1700's, (B) get the diamonds disoovered in the 1860s, and (C) get the gold discovered in the 1880s. Two "civilized" nations fighting for territory & resources, 300+ years after you seem to think that kind of thing stopped. Oh, by the way -- one of the factors in the Mogul empire being weakened enough for the British to conquer India was the invasions (starting around 1739) from Afghanistan. Sounds like they had a society that was dominant, in some respect.
Unfortunately for the would-be winners of today's conflicts, however, these types of things are no longer accepted. THAT'S MY FREAKIN' POINT!
Bullshit. The winners today will accept the conflicts as proper, just as the winners in any previous war think they were right. And those winners will write the history books just like they always do, and the books will demonstrate the correctness of the winners' actions. Do you think the Native Americans thought the Anglo-European "civilization" from the USA had the right to conquer them? Do you think Hitler went to his grave relieved that those other guys stopped his "threat to freedom/democracy"?
I'm actually advocating that they [cultures] be allowed to make their own determination of which direction to grow in
That's a real nice idea, but it hasn't ever happened to date, nor is it going to, as long as humans are in charge. No society is so isolated that they can determine their own path -- one or more of their neighbors decides that they need somthing the other guys have, or that their "uncivilized" society needs help, or some other reason. I don't like it, I don't think it's Right, but it has happened for centuries, hasn't stopped, and will continue to happen. Partially because somebody always thinks they have a simple answer to a complex problem.
every country that has ever attempted to explode a nuclear device has succeeded on the first try.
Really? How do you know this "fact"?
This post is so ignorant, I don't know where to start. Exactly when in the "...around the 1800's or so" did today's "civilized" nations stop trying to conquer each other? Was that before or after the 1918 end of World War I, or the 1945 end of World War II (which, by the way, had some disturbing views on various races)? Was South Africa not "civilized" during the 1899-1902 Boer war? When did the USA acquire "civilized" status -- before or after we all but exterminated dozens of Native American cultures in the name of expansion? I'd go on, but I'd probably overwhelm your ability to use the index in a history book.
Before the 1500's, England (and France, et al.) were involved in horrendous civil wars with human rights violations on both sides
Does this mean that the civil wars fought after the 1500's (American Revolution, French Revolution, arguable the British-American war of 1812, and others) didn't happen? Or that "human rights violations" didn't occur during these wars?
It just seems Afghanistan (and others) are still in this phase of development, and that by interfering with this, we're actually harming their growth as a culture.
This statement is so offensive, I don't know how to respond (of course, I'll try anyway). How on earth did you get so arrogant that you think you would know what "culture growth" is (other than what's probably in your refigerator)? You seem to be implying that anyone not in your culture must be (A) "lower" than you, and (B) needs to improve to your level. Exactly what do you think Arab/Muslim culture was doing during the 1500's and before? Other than real science, technology, preservation of history, etc.? Yes, and some of the bad things "civilized cultures" do as well.
Just to spell it out for you, I'll state it: I'm not trying to equate any "culture" (past and/or present) to another, or judge "civilized" vs. the alternative. I'm just ranting at your arrogant, Anglo-Saxon (or European, I'm not sure which. They're NOT the same, you moron) bias.
Go back and burn some more books. Apparently, that's all you've ever done with them.
But beyond that, exactly how are they supposed to develop new hardware without having an OS to run on it and verify it's working as planned?
:-)
Any place that has to develop a full-blown OS to test their hardware needs new diagnostic programmers -- and new management. Quickly. A full OS (MacOS, Linux, whatever) is waaaay too complicated to reliably test HW -- you spend too much time trying to figure out if you have an OS bug or a HW bug.
Functional Test Programs need to be complex, but nowhere near as complex as an OS. And yes, I've been paid to do this.
Maybe that's why Intel's CPUs are so expensive -- they've been using Windows to debug them.
You made your point with capitalized letters but still.. If everything has failed and you have nothing to loose why not give it a shot?
:-)
If everything else has failed & you haven't found the problem, you haven't tried everything. Granted, there are things like memory leaks that won't purge themselves, or total hangs where the box is unresponsive, but if you're in there looking at the system, you should be (a) finding and fixing, or (b) recording everything you can to find the problem later.
Because sometimes, in my experience, you do have to reboot. You've got 2,000 users sitting on their thumbs and the regulatory commission wants data & is going to fine you for every hour you're late and the division VP is on the conference call wanting to "help" and.... It may be better to reboot & get the thing back up and running, but even so, do not assume you've fixed the problem.
Except in Windows, for those problems that don't require a re-install.
...the RS/6000 (Which isn't a whole lot more than a Power Macintosh)....
:-)
Uh, the G4's are pretty hefty, and on the low end of the RS/6000-pSeries lines some of the systems are small, but there's a tad bit of difference between a 4-PCI slot, 1 CPU system (even with 1.5 GB memory) and a 24-CPU, 96GB system with 56 PCI slots, etc.
Besides, those black cases & keyboards are way cooler than wimpy pastels, and how do you rack-mount the Mac?
Yes, you can buy (or lease) them this way. IBM, Sun, and HP all have this feature available on one or more of their "midrange" systems; I don't know about any other co. 'cause we only use those 3.
Not only was it during the summer, but Armstrong & Aldrin's lunar walk was in the evening. I vividly remember sitting in my parent's living room watching (got to stay up late & everything).
See http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/tmp/1969-059A.html for a chronology.
Swapfile: grows if you need more. If you _need_ more, why would it then be shrunk later?
Uh, maybe when I close apps....
So all of these Microchannel RS/6000 systems we currently have in our data centers aren't really there?
dublin had a nice response to this, but let me add a couple of things:
With the LVM I'm familiar with (AIX), you can tell which physical partitions are being used by a file system. I don't recall ever needing to know the specific disk block number for a file. I've been working with Unix since 1992 & have been a SysAdmin for most of that time.
If you don't want your file system spread all over the disk, in AIX you can set up the logical volume as contiguous space. You can tell it *exactly* which physical partitions to use.
Spanning multiple volumes doesn't necessarily "multiply the risk of data loss" -- if you do it correctly, you'll reduce your risk, since you have multiple copies of the data on different disks.
Apparently, much of the rest of the Unix world didn't think AIX's LVM was "poorly designed" or "half-baked". The Veritas volume manager was based on the same concepts; have you looked at the sales growth Veritas has been having lately?
In our experience (I work for a large telecommunications company) LVMs *very clearly* decrease the complexity of systems management. If the Unix flavor for a system doesn't have a LVM built-in, we *always* install one. Certainly you can cause problems with LVMs with inadequate training, but one can screw up filesystems with base-level commands too, if they're not careful and/or don't know what they're doing.
Having said that, the USPTO is obviously (to me, anyway) been granting patents for things that are way beyond "useful", "process", "machine". Go to http://www.patents.ibm.com & check out US Patent # 5443036, titled "Method of exercising a cat." Basically, someone with too much time and/or money patented using a laser pointer to play with a cat.
:-) have lost sight of what patents are for. Leaving the door wide open for one-click and its ilk.
Somewhere along the line, the folks involved with the Patent Process (has this been patented? Maybe I should submit....