I agree that the real reason for this is because Mindcraft's reputation is in tatters.
However, as long as they are using a RAID card which is known to perform poorly with Linux, it can hardly be considered to be a "fair" test. The Mylex and ICP-Vortex cards used by VA Research and others are known to be fast and stable with both Linux and NT, and would undoubtedly be what is installed in any Linux server of this size.
The network configuration may be a problem too, but we don't know enough about the network cards used to be able to tell.
An interesting thing is to see whether mod_mmap_static (a new module for Apache which pre-maps files into memory) would greately increase Apache's ability to serve files swiftly. Otherwise we already know that IIS trounces Apache soundly in serving files.
Remember, Linux does not have to beat NT in order to win. All Linux has to do is get numbers high enough so that Linux can be considered credible. If Linux is within 10% of NT in Samba performance, and within 20% of NT in Apache performance, Microsoft can tout those results all they want -- all it will be is free advertising for Linux. Remember, performance is only one reason for choosing Linux. The most important reason, FREEDOM, freedom from onerous licensing restrictions, freedom from being at the mercy of one monopolistic company, that reason is one that Microsoft will never "get" because Microsoft is about everything BUT freedom.
Yep, hardware compatibility is an issue. My first thought upon seeing the original Mindcraft benchmark was "Man, that Dell SUCKS, I wonder how much Mindcraft would charge to compare it against one of our Linux Hardware Solutions machines?". My second thought, of course, was that if we wanted to do such a comparison it would be better to choose a more professional organization than Mindcraft (I was NOT impressed by the unprofessional conduct of Mindcraft -- both the test itself and the reporting of the results were conducted in an extremely unprofessional manner).
We weren't told what brand of network card is being used (if it is a PNIC-based one the PNIC has transmitter lockup problems under Linux), but the AMI MegaRaid is still pretty aweful under Linux. The latest version at least will do concurrent requests (the last version serialized requests -- i.e., you could not issue a new SCSI request until the previous one had returned its results), but it is still very immature compared to the ICP-Vortex or Mylex drivers used by most Linux hardware vendors.
In reality, people wanting this class of machine are going to buy it from someone with a track record, like VA Research, they're not going to buy an off-the-shelf box and install Linux on it themselves.
The biggest "X" flaw is not related to the core protocol, which is okay, but, rather, with the add-on libraries and such, most of which are terrible and very difficult to use. The core "X" protocol itself is a reasonably good network-transparent device driver interface. But anybody who thinks that "C" and Motif are a competitor to Visual C++ and MFC from an ease-of-use, ease of programming, or pure power standpoint is smoking crack.
Of course GTK and QT are a reasonable response to that, and as GTK matures and QT becomes more politically acceptable, expect things to change rapidly...
Whoops, I better tell that to our mail and web servers, which have been up for over six months straight...
Methinks the large number of testimonials of extensive Linux uptime means that xBSD advocates saying that Linux is "unreliable" are acting from jealousy over the popularity of Linux, rather than from a technical standpoint.
Small/cheap monitors can be gotten for under $80 from various Korean manufacturers. True, this means you won't sell a complete computer system for $150 or so, but you can sell much of one for that price.
Hard drives, the other part of the equation, are a different story. The cheapest price I've seen on a currently produced hard drive is around $110.(Can't build a company on closeouts and remainders, which are the only things I've seen cheaper).
Still, it should be relatively easy to get a $299 price minus monitor, $399 with monitor. By comparison, a Commodore 64 costed $199 and its 1541 disk drive costed $199 during its brief burst of popularity during the early 80's. So even if Sir Clive aimed at the $399 price point for the whole package, history shows that it's a viable price point. Especially if the final package is a bit more useful than the woeful Commodore 64 (which was a great little hacker toy if you enjoyed 6502 assembly language and wire-wrapping your own circuit boards to plug into the socket on the rear, but otherwise was pretty useless for anything but simple crude games).
Coleco Adam was a different story. Each one costed about $800 to make and was priced at $599. So they lost money on each one, but made it up in volume (snicker).
Intel has one that works with the California PC Products NLX chassis. Unfortunately, according to our guy who researched the NLX formfactor, Intel has decided not to offer that motherboard in a "boxed" formfactor, they are only offering it to OEM's.
We also looked at ASUS's NLX board, but we couldn't find a NLX chassis that would fit its daughterboard format. Perhaps Elan Vital (ASUS's case-making arm) has such a chassis? in any event we're past the point of researching such things at LHS, for obvious reasons (busily morphing into an east coast sales & support center for VA).
Dual power supplies? Cheap? I want a billion dollars too, but it's unlikely I'll get it:-(.
I just pulled down my California PC Products catalog and it looks like they'll sell you a case with dual power supplies -- but it'll cost. They have one that'll fit a standard ATX case, but it looks like the price on that thing is well over $350 (retail in my catalog is $408). Pretty pricey just for a power supply:-(.
You might want to check them out at http://www.calpc.com, by the way. Some serious sh*t there. Only folks I've ever encountered who have a case that'll hold more than 30 drives (but check the shipping weight and dimensions on that thing -- it's HUGE!).
A properly designed case will cool your computer's components much better with the case on than with it off. This is especially important for 10,000RPM hard drives, which tend to run hot. You can cook one of those guys by running with the case off. Bay coolers help, but they too depend upon fans drawing hot air out the back in order to properly cool the drives. On some systems I've had to do some pretty strange airflow modifications to get things to cool right (amazing what you can do with clear tape and extra fans), all of which depend upon the case being on.
In other words: if you're leaving your case off, CHECK THE TEMPERATURE OF YOUR DRIVES! If they're hot, make sure your case ventilates properly (i.e. that there's air holes where the air will naturally flow over the top of the drive), and put the cover backon your case.
This isn't as important with modern IDE drives as it is with 36gb SCSI drives, which make enough heat to barbecue a pig, but it's still better to be safe than to shorten the life of your drive due to poor cooling.
The problem with the ARM platform is software. Most people use their laptops for word processing and spreadsheets while "on the road". WP is available for the StrongArm (if you buy a Netwinder), but no professional-quality spreadsheets are available yet.
On the other hand, I do agree that the Intel chips burn too much juice. I have been looking at a thin client that uses the IDT Winchip C2 processor (instruction-set-compatible with the Pentium) and it's not all that speedy, but it does work well with Linux, burns less than 1/3rd the power of a Mobile Pentium II (but still twice as much as a StrongArm), and has a floating point processor (a slow one, but still faster than emulating FP in software). This would be an excellent chip for a Linux laptop. It puzzles me that no laptop vendors seem interested in using it, instead going to bigger, more power guzzling technologies that require batteries so heavy that you need a card to carry some of the latest "laptops" (or else you have a bettery life of five minutes). Maybe they figure they need those huge batteries anyhow to power 15.1" LCD displays... or maybe tech geeks just aren't interested in a low-power laptop?
I have no inside information on this (I am not a VA Research employee -- yet), but I think you may see something come out of the Flextronics manufacturing agreement here. Flextronics is great at turning out large quantities of standard boxen for a low price.
Interestingly enough, the configuration of a low-end IDE-based firewall machine is quite similar to that of a home machine -- just replace the second network card with a sound card, and voila!
Just bear in mind that you are not the only one with such concerns. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that one reason Larry wanted LHS is in order to bring some hard-core Linux people on-board so that these kinds of concerns can get hashed out internally in a way that benefits the Linux community. My impression is that the top guys at VA Research are well aware that without the support of the Linux community, they're just another computer company in a market already swamped with computer companies.
So geeks are "the ultimate in conformists"? So it doesn't "bother you that US economic and political life is built on the backs of these people"?
Speak for yourself.
The rant on apartheid in America (on my web page) is clear enough, as is the fact that I co-founded a group to bring a park to my economically-depressed hometown (spent a ton of my own money to do it too), spent a couple of years teaching in economically depressed areas, and otherwise have done my part to try to make this world a better place. Yes, I get nervous about dealing with people (and I have discovered the hard way to NEVER give television interviews, they make me look really REALLY dorky, to only give written press interviews), but so it goes.
Sure, there are geeks out there who don't care about anything except whether they can get a dual PIII system with their next paycheck, but don't paint all geeks with the same brush.
I graduated high school in 1982. I was the self-professed "weird kid" of the class, yet I don't remember any of the torture that others here talk about. Sure there was occasional picking by some of the more insecure types, I got in a couple of fights with kids who picked on me (which sounds ludicrous, considering that I must have weighed a whole 98 pounds at the time, but it was more for effect than anything else -- I was careful to do it within sight of a teacher, and those were the days when teachers actually broke up fights and when administrators assigned appropriate punishments rather than calling the cops), but other than that people pretty much left me alone. In fact, if I'd allowed it, there's quite a few people who would have become close friends rather than aquaintances, and I'm talking about from all sorts of people, from the chess club intelligensia to some of the athletes. My mother tells me now, over 15 years later, that she had one of my classmates, one of the popular ones, in the hospital (she is a nurse) and he told her that he respected the way I followed my own drummer rather than allowing other people to tell me how to think. I remember the kid. Great kid. Thought so at the time too. A real person, a caring person, and a jock who took time to say hello and include me in conversations from time to time. And his variety was the majority.
My thought is that society as a whole has become more intolerant since then. Ronny Raygun came into power teaching that selfishness was good, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition came around preaching their message of intolerance and hate (the Christ that I follow would have reacted in anger at the way these people take his name in vain), and "loners" have been painted by the media as dangerous and unbalanced. And the teaching corps has declined in quality dramatically -- I got the last of the 60's generation teachers when I was in high school (i.e., they entered teaching in the 1950's and 1960's, when opportunities for smart women were pretty limited). My teachers would have never tolerated the wanton brutality that I have seen on this board, and the administrators back then backed up the teacher.
One last thing: I am a nerdy white guy, and I spent a couple of years as a nerdy white guy teacher before leaving the profession because the stress was giving me ulcers. I would NEVER have tolerated any of the abuse that has been tossed around on this board. I was a lousy disciplinarian, but the students knew my beliefs, and knew that beyond that boundary boojums lay, and knew that I would not be intimidated when it came to those core beliefs. It saddens me that there are teachers with no backbone out there who allow such evil to happen in today's day and age.
What we should do is build a moral society, a society where violence is not condoned with a blink and a nod by the "authorities". I am maddened every time I see one of these "child rearing experts" say that the parent should not intervene when his/her child is physically assaulted by other children because "children must learn to get along with one another". Assault is a crime, not a lesson. It does not matter whether you are three years old or thirty years old, it is not to be condoned or accepted. (Although obviously the punishment must be different!).
Toleration, non-violence, charity, and duty towards others needs to be taught from the beginning, rather than having kids allowed to run wild because they "must learn how to get along with one another". One thing I learned from teaching "behavior disordered" students was that kids aren't born as civilized beings -- those behaviors are learned behaviors, they can and should be taught, and we should be demanding that they be taught. I think we can do without "esteem enhancement" courses and "drug education" courses if our kids are taught how to be tolerant, thoughtful, helpful people from the beginning. Some kids are taught that by their parents. But it is obvious that too many are not, and that too many teachers and administrators have relinquished their duty to civilize their charges in favor of dubious theories of child rearing (said dubious theories incidentally making their life easier, since they now have an excuse to ignore the fact that some students are making life hell for the "weird kid" minority).
Too bad the "mainstream" media seems clueless. Has anybody noticed that the bigger the readership, the more clueless the magazine? Compare Salon Magazine with Slate, for example...
I agree with your assessment of where Red Hat is, at this particular time. Bob Young is brilliant, but he is not a manager. Luckily it appears that he is getting the kind of management help he needs to turn Red Hat into the kind of company that he wants. (I'm not forgetting Marc Ewing in all of this, BTW, but Marc has always been more comfortable with the technical side of things and left the business side to Bob).
The "suits" can destroy a startup if they're not careful. But I'm betting on Bob and Marc and Donny and Erik and etc. keeping these managers on track so that they can create a corporate structure without destroying what makes Red Hat special.
Red Hat *IS* expanding into new lines of business -- the Linux support business. They have made a start, but creating the kind of support organization that the Fortune 500 wants and expects for its enterprise-class operating systems takes money. A *LOT* of money. When a company needs to add capacity to their payroll system they want a support engineer from the OS vendor on site to help them plan and execute the move. Calling Red Hat Support down in North Carolina just won't cut it for enterprise-class systems.
There are other things I would say here, but I really can't at the moment. Just try to think how IBM retains the loyalty of their mainframe customers, and what a Linux-oriented company would have to do in order to get that same level of loyalty out of their customers.
Obviously you are not an accounting geek. It's been years since I studied accounting (late 80's), but I do remember that there are tons of acronyms used for all sorts of seemingly trivial things. (One which computer geeks might recognize is LIFO vs. FIFO valuation of inventory, which is very important for detirmining gross margin but which also has cash flow complications which can bite you if you don't watch out, and that line of thought leads to a number of other acronyms by folks who actually listened in their Finance 101 course!).
My comment was as an outsider looking at Red Hat snapping up all of these executives who are experienced at taking companies through the IPO stage.
Frankly, there was probably a half dozen other people thinking the same thing the moment they saw who Red Hat's latest aquisition was.
I have no inside knowledge of Red Hat and whether or not they are planning an IPO anytime soon. I don't think they have their ducks in a row yet for an IPO at the moment, but they may within six months. From what little I know of Red Hat Corporate, they are having difficulties dealing with their growth, and these new aquisitions may simply be Bob bringing on board people who know how to manage a company that's as big as Red Hat (Bob is a VERY bright guy, but somewhat 'scatterbrained' as we put it down here in North Carolina, i.e., not the kind of detail-minded person needed to do the actual day to day business of managing a company that's gotten as big as Red Hat).
On the other hand, no matter how much the people at Red Hat deny it, the IPO *will* come. Very few startups can make the investments needed to create a major corporation without massive amounts of venture capital money (which comes with IPO strings attached). If Red Hat wants to create a professional support organization with outside reps and etc., like is needed if Linux is going to attack the enterprise, they're going to need money. A *LOT* of money.
I think many people in the Linux community don't realize just what kind of support the Fortune 500 demands and expects for their enterprise systems. Red Hat's telephone support is a start, but many of the very largest companies expect someone to come ON SITE to fix things -- immediately, if not sooner. We in the Linux community have come a long way. But this war is not over, and there are still many battles to be fought -- and most of those battles take money. Lots of money. IPO-type money, eventually, because if you get enough money out of venture capitalists to make it happen, they will demand IPO sooner or later.
Note that Bob Young may be annoyed, but not necessarily truthful. He may have answered the question like that because he was thinking "Duh, stupid, if I told you the REAL answer then I'd be in trouble with the FTC!".
The Feds have very strict rules about IPO's, and if you don't follow them exactly, you get hit with a big stick.
Please note that this report was (deliberately?) released a week before Comdex, when most Linux vendors were running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to get everything straight for their Comdex displays. And most of the top people for Linux vendors have been at Comdex all of this week, while the home offices are understaffed and slowly going crazy because there's not enough people to do everything that's needed to keep the business running...
Given all of that, it's a little early for sponsored benchmarking by members of the Linux community. This stuff takes time, and if it's a choice between doing Comdex right and repeating a discredited benchmark, doing Comdex right comes up at the top of the list every time.
Isn't that what I said in the "Mindcraft Reality Check"?
There are valid limits to Linux scalability, problems that need fixing, and honest benchmarking can help us find those limits. Unfortunately, Mindcraft's benchmarking was so flawed by misconduct and poor judgment that it is not useful for that purpose.
BTW, I do agree with the Microsoft spokesman who said that he was certain that NT would have come out on top even with an honest test. I suspect the SAMBA results would have been quite competitive, within 3% (more or less) of the NT numbers, but the Apache server has never been known for its static file serving speed (though mod_mmap_static may change that!). On the other hand, there is a big difference between the 5%-10% advantage that I bet Mindcraft would have found, and the ridiculous numbers that they actually reported. They actually shot themselves in the foot here, because if they'd reported the real numbers, the Slashdot Crowd would have howled, but Jeremy Allison and other technical heavyweights would have stayed on the sidelines working on fixing the problems found, and the media would have ignored the Slashdot Crowd.
Just count it as another example of Microsoft Arrogance (tm) outweighing their good sense. It's amazing how such bright people can do such stupid things.
Slashdot Mirror
Linus has a quad Xeon as his home computer!
But: It's an Intel box (sold by VA Research, the former Linux Hardware Solutions, Micron, and others), rather than a Dill.
I agree that the real reason for this is because Mindcraft's reputation is in tatters.
However, as long as they are using a RAID card which is known to perform poorly with Linux, it can hardly be considered to be a "fair" test. The Mylex and ICP-Vortex cards used by VA Research and others are known to be fast and stable with both Linux and NT, and would undoubtedly be what is installed in any Linux server of this size.
The network configuration may be a problem too, but we don't know enough about the network cards used to be able to tell.
An interesting thing is to see whether mod_mmap_static (a new module for Apache which pre-maps files into memory) would greately increase Apache's ability to serve files swiftly. Otherwise we already know that IIS trounces Apache soundly in serving files.
Remember, Linux does not have to beat NT in order to win. All Linux has to do is get numbers high enough so that Linux can be considered credible. If Linux is within 10% of NT in Samba performance, and within 20% of NT in Apache performance, Microsoft can tout those results all they want -- all it will be is free advertising for Linux. Remember, performance is only one reason for choosing Linux. The most important reason, FREEDOM, freedom from onerous licensing restrictions, freedom from being at the mercy of one monopolistic company, that reason is one that Microsoft will never "get" because Microsoft is about everything BUT freedom.
Yep, hardware compatibility is an issue. My first thought upon seeing the original Mindcraft benchmark was "Man, that Dell SUCKS, I wonder how much Mindcraft would charge to compare it against one of our Linux Hardware Solutions machines?". My second thought, of course, was that if we wanted to do such a comparison it would be better to choose a more professional organization than Mindcraft (I was NOT impressed by the unprofessional conduct of Mindcraft -- both the test itself and the reporting of the results were conducted in an extremely unprofessional manner).
We weren't told what brand of network card is being used (if it is a PNIC-based one the PNIC has transmitter lockup problems under Linux), but the AMI MegaRaid is still pretty aweful under Linux. The latest version at least will do concurrent requests (the last version serialized requests -- i.e., you could not issue a new SCSI request until the previous one had returned its results), but it is still very immature compared to the ICP-Vortex or Mylex drivers used by most Linux hardware vendors.
In reality, people wanting this class of machine are going to buy it from someone with a track record, like VA Research, they're not going to buy an off-the-shelf box and install Linux on it themselves.
The biggest "X" flaw is not related to the core protocol, which is okay, but, rather, with the add-on libraries and such, most of which are terrible and very difficult to use. The core "X" protocol itself is a reasonably good network-transparent device driver interface. But anybody who thinks that "C" and Motif are a competitor to Visual C++ and MFC from an ease-of-use, ease of programming, or pure power standpoint is smoking crack.
Of course GTK and QT are a reasonable response to that, and as GTK matures and QT becomes more politically acceptable, expect things to change rapidly...
Whoops, I better tell that to our mail and web servers, which have been up for over six months straight...
Methinks the large number of testimonials of extensive Linux uptime means that xBSD advocates saying that Linux is "unreliable" are acting from jealousy over the popularity of Linux, rather than from a technical standpoint.
Small/cheap monitors can be gotten for under $80 from various Korean manufacturers. True, this means you won't sell a complete computer system for $150 or so, but you can sell much of one for that price.
Hard drives, the other part of the equation, are a different story. The cheapest price I've seen on a currently produced hard drive is around $110.(Can't build a company on closeouts and remainders, which are the only things I've seen cheaper).
Still, it should be relatively easy to get a $299 price minus monitor, $399 with monitor. By comparison, a Commodore 64 costed $199 and its 1541 disk drive costed $199 during its brief burst of popularity during the early 80's. So even if Sir Clive aimed at the $399 price point for the whole package, history shows that it's a viable price point. Especially if the final package is a bit more useful than the woeful Commodore 64 (which was a great little hacker toy if you enjoyed 6502 assembly language and wire-wrapping your own circuit boards to plug into the socket on the rear, but otherwise was pretty useless for anything but simple crude games).
Coleco Adam was a different story. Each one costed about $800 to make and was priced at $599. So they lost money on each one, but made it up in volume (snicker).
-E
Intel has one that works with the California PC Products NLX chassis. Unfortunately, according to our guy who researched the NLX formfactor, Intel has decided not to offer that motherboard in a "boxed" formfactor, they are only offering it to OEM's.
We also looked at ASUS's NLX board, but we couldn't find a NLX chassis that would fit its daughterboard format. Perhaps Elan Vital (ASUS's case-making arm) has such a chassis? in any event we're past the point of researching such things at LHS, for obvious reasons (busily morphing into an east coast sales & support center for VA).
-E
Dual power supplies? Cheap? I want a billion dollars too, but it's unlikely I'll get it :-(.
:-(.
I just pulled down my California PC Products catalog and it looks like they'll sell you a case with dual power supplies -- but it'll cost. They have one that'll fit a standard ATX case, but it looks like the price on that thing is well over $350 (retail in my catalog is $408). Pretty pricey just for a power supply
You might want to check them out at http://www.calpc.com, by the way. Some serious sh*t there. Only folks I've ever encountered who have a case that'll hold more than 30 drives (but check the shipping weight and dimensions on that thing -- it's HUGE!).
A properly designed case will cool your computer's components much better with the case on than with it off. This is especially important for 10,000RPM hard drives, which tend to run hot. You can cook one of those guys by running with the case off. Bay coolers help, but they too depend upon fans drawing hot air out the back in order to properly cool the drives. On some systems I've had to do some pretty strange airflow modifications to get things to cool right (amazing what you can do with clear tape and extra fans), all of which depend upon the case being on.
In other words: if you're leaving your case off, CHECK THE TEMPERATURE OF YOUR DRIVES! If they're hot, make sure your case ventilates properly (i.e. that there's air holes where the air will naturally flow over the top of the drive), and put the cover backon your case.
This isn't as important with modern IDE drives as it is with 36gb SCSI drives, which make enough heat to barbecue a pig, but it's still better to be safe than to shorten the life of your drive due to poor cooling.
The problem with the ARM platform is software. Most people use their laptops for word processing and spreadsheets while "on the road". WP is available for the StrongArm (if you buy a Netwinder), but no professional-quality spreadsheets are available yet.
On the other hand, I do agree that the Intel chips burn too much juice. I have been looking at a thin client that uses the IDT Winchip C2 processor (instruction-set-compatible with the Pentium) and it's not all that speedy, but it does work well with Linux, burns less than 1/3rd the power of a Mobile Pentium II (but still twice as much as a StrongArm), and has a floating point processor (a slow one, but still faster than emulating FP in software). This would be an excellent chip for a Linux laptop. It puzzles me that no laptop vendors seem interested in using it, instead going to bigger, more power guzzling technologies that require batteries so heavy that you need a card to carry some of the latest "laptops" (or else you have a bettery life of five minutes). Maybe they figure they need those huge batteries anyhow to power 15.1" LCD displays... or maybe tech geeks just aren't interested in a low-power laptop?
Hmm, they have the guy behind the powerbook onboard as their VP of engineering.
Major Clue?
I have no inside information on this (I am not a VA Research employee -- yet), but I think you may see something come out of the Flextronics manufacturing agreement here. Flextronics is great at turning out large quantities of standard boxen for a low price.
Interestingly enough, the configuration of a low-end IDE-based firewall machine is quite similar to that of a home machine -- just replace the second network card with a sound card, and voila!
Just bear in mind that you are not the only one with such concerns. My understanding (which may be wrong) is that one reason Larry wanted LHS is in order to bring some hard-core Linux people on-board so that these kinds of concerns can get hashed out internally in a way that benefits the Linux community.
My impression is that the top guys at VA Research are well aware that without the support of the Linux community, they're just another computer company in a market already swamped with computer companies.
So geeks are "the ultimate in conformists"? So it doesn't "bother you that US economic and political life is built on the backs of these people"?
Speak for yourself.
The rant on apartheid in America (on my web page) is clear enough, as is the fact that I co-founded a group to bring a park to my economically-depressed hometown (spent a ton of my own money to do it too), spent a couple of years teaching in economically depressed areas, and otherwise have done my part to try to make this world a better place. Yes, I get nervous about dealing with people (and I have discovered the hard way to NEVER give television interviews, they make me look really REALLY dorky, to only give written press interviews), but so it goes.
Sure, there are geeks out there who don't care about anything except whether they can get a dual PIII system with their next paycheck, but don't paint all geeks with the same brush.
I graduated high school in 1982. I was the self-professed "weird kid" of the class, yet I don't remember any of the torture that others here talk about. Sure there was occasional picking by some of the more insecure types, I got in a couple of fights with kids who picked on me (which sounds ludicrous, considering that I must have weighed a whole 98 pounds at the time, but it was more for effect than anything else -- I was careful to do it within sight of a teacher, and those were the days when teachers actually broke up fights and when administrators assigned appropriate punishments rather than calling the cops), but other than that people pretty much left me alone. In fact, if I'd allowed it, there's quite a few people who would have become close friends rather than aquaintances, and I'm talking about from all sorts of people, from the chess club intelligensia to some of the athletes. My mother tells me now, over 15 years later, that she had one of my classmates, one of the popular ones, in the hospital (she is a nurse) and he told her that he respected the way I followed my own drummer rather than allowing other people to tell me how to think. I remember the kid. Great kid. Thought so at the time too. A real person, a caring person, and a jock who took time to say hello and include me in conversations from time to time. And his variety was the majority.
My thought is that society as a whole has become more intolerant since then. Ronny Raygun came into power teaching that selfishness was good, the Moral Majority and Christian Coalition came around preaching their message of intolerance and hate (the Christ that I follow would have reacted in anger at the way these people take his name in vain), and "loners" have been painted by the media as dangerous and unbalanced. And the teaching corps has declined in quality dramatically -- I got the last of the 60's generation teachers when I was in high school (i.e., they entered teaching in the 1950's and 1960's, when opportunities for smart women were pretty limited). My teachers would have never tolerated the wanton brutality that I have seen on this board, and the administrators back then backed up the teacher.
One last thing: I am a nerdy white guy, and I spent a couple of years as a nerdy white guy teacher before leaving the profession because the stress was giving me ulcers. I would NEVER have tolerated any of the abuse that has been tossed around on this board. I was a lousy disciplinarian, but the students knew my beliefs, and knew that beyond that boundary boojums lay, and knew that I would not be intimidated when it came to those core beliefs. It saddens me that there are teachers with no backbone out there who allow such evil to happen in today's day and age.
What we should do is build a moral society, a society where violence is not condoned with a blink and a nod by the "authorities". I am maddened every time I see one of these "child rearing experts" say that the parent should not intervene when his/her child is physically assaulted by other children because "children must learn to get along with one another". Assault is a crime, not a lesson. It does not matter whether you are three years old or thirty years old, it is not to be condoned or accepted. (Although obviously the punishment must be different!).
Toleration, non-violence, charity, and duty towards others needs to be taught from the beginning, rather than having kids allowed to run wild because they "must learn how to get along with one another". One thing I learned from teaching "behavior disordered" students was that kids aren't born as civilized beings -- those behaviors are learned behaviors, they can and should be taught, and we should be demanding that they be taught. I think we can do without "esteem enhancement" courses and "drug education" courses if our kids are taught how to be tolerant, thoughtful, helpful people from the beginning. Some kids are taught that by their parents. But it is obvious that too many are not, and that too many teachers and administrators have relinquished their duty to civilize their charges in favor of dubious theories of child rearing (said dubious theories incidentally making their life easier, since they now have an excuse to ignore the fact that some students are making life hell for the "weird kid" minority).
-- Eric
More links to articles similar to Jon's...
0 4/22/misfits/index.html
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http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/feature/1999/
http://www.salonmagazine.com/news/feature/1999/
Too bad the "mainstream" media seems clueless. Has anybody noticed that the bigger the readership, the more clueless the magazine? Compare Salon Magazine with Slate, for example...
-E
Read "Sewer, Gas, and Electric" by Matt Ruff. Ayn Rand is a character in that novel (sort of).
You may never look at Objectivism the same way again.
I agree with your assessment of where Red Hat is, at this particular time. Bob Young is brilliant, but he is not a manager. Luckily it appears that he is getting the kind of management help he needs to turn Red Hat into the kind of company that he wants. (I'm not forgetting Marc Ewing in all of this, BTW, but Marc has always been more comfortable with the technical side of things and left the business side to Bob).
The "suits" can destroy a startup if they're not careful. But I'm betting on Bob and Marc and Donny and Erik and etc. keeping these managers on track so that they can create a corporate structure without destroying what makes Red Hat special.
Red Hat *IS* expanding into new lines of business -- the Linux support business. They have made a start, but creating the kind of support organization that the Fortune 500 wants and expects for its enterprise-class operating systems takes money. A *LOT* of money. When a company needs to add capacity to their payroll system they want a support engineer from the OS vendor on site to help them plan and execute the move. Calling Red Hat Support down in North Carolina just won't cut it for enterprise-class systems.
There are other things I would say here, but I really can't at the moment. Just try to think how IBM retains the loyalty of their mainframe customers, and what a Linux-oriented company would have to do in order to get that same level of loyalty out of their customers.
-- Eric
Obviously you are not an accounting geek. It's been years since I studied accounting (late 80's), but I do remember that there are tons of acronyms used for all sorts of seemingly trivial things. (One which computer geeks might recognize is LIFO vs. FIFO valuation of inventory, which is very important for detirmining gross margin but which also has cash flow complications which can bite you if you don't watch out, and that line of thought leads to a number of other acronyms by folks who actually listened in their Finance 101 course!).
My comment was as an outsider looking at Red Hat snapping up all of these executives who are experienced at taking companies through the IPO stage.
Frankly, there was probably a half dozen other people thinking the same thing the moment they saw who Red Hat's latest aquisition was.
I have no inside knowledge of Red Hat and whether or not they are planning an IPO anytime soon. I don't think they have their ducks in a row yet for an IPO at the moment, but they may within six months. From what little I know of Red Hat Corporate, they are having difficulties dealing with their growth, and these new aquisitions may simply be Bob bringing on board people who know how to manage a company that's as big as Red Hat (Bob is a VERY bright guy, but somewhat 'scatterbrained' as we put it down here in North Carolina, i.e., not the kind of detail-minded person needed to do the actual day to day business of managing a company that's gotten as big as Red Hat).
On the other hand, no matter how much the people at Red Hat deny it, the IPO *will* come. Very few startups can make the investments needed to create a major corporation without massive amounts of venture capital money (which comes with IPO strings attached). If Red Hat wants to create a professional support organization with outside reps and etc., like is needed if Linux is going to attack the enterprise, they're going to need money. A *LOT* of money.
I think many people in the Linux community don't realize just what kind of support the Fortune 500 demands and expects for their enterprise systems. Red Hat's telephone support is a start, but many of the very largest companies expect someone to come ON SITE to fix things -- immediately, if not sooner. We in the Linux community have come a long way. But this war is not over, and there are still many battles to be fought -- and most of those battles take money. Lots of money. IPO-type money, eventually, because if you get enough money out of venture capitalists to make it happen, they will demand IPO sooner or later.
-- Eric
Note that Bob Young may be annoyed, but not necessarily truthful. He may have answered the question like that because he was thinking "Duh, stupid, if I told you the REAL answer then I'd be in trouble with the FTC!".
The Feds have very strict rules about IPO's, and if you don't follow them exactly, you get hit with a big stick.
-E
Please note that this report was (deliberately?) released a week before Comdex, when most Linux vendors were running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to get everything straight for their Comdex displays. And most of the top people for Linux vendors have been at Comdex all of this week, while the home offices are understaffed and slowly going crazy because there's not enough people to do everything that's needed to keep the business running...
Given all of that, it's a little early for sponsored benchmarking by members of the Linux community. This stuff takes time, and if it's a choice between doing Comdex right and repeating a discredited benchmark, doing Comdex right comes up at the top of the list every time.
Isn't that what I said in the "Mindcraft Reality Check"?
There are valid limits to Linux scalability, problems that need fixing, and honest benchmarking can help us find those limits. Unfortunately, Mindcraft's benchmarking was so flawed by misconduct and poor judgment that it is not useful for that purpose.
BTW, I do agree with the Microsoft spokesman who said that he was certain that NT would have come out on top even with an honest test. I suspect the SAMBA results would have been quite competitive, within 3% (more or less) of the NT numbers, but the Apache server has never been known for its static file serving speed (though mod_mmap_static may change that!). On the other hand, there is a big difference between the 5%-10% advantage that I bet Mindcraft would have found, and the ridiculous numbers that they actually reported. They actually shot themselves in the foot here, because if they'd reported the real numbers, the Slashdot Crowd would have howled, but Jeremy Allison and other technical heavyweights would have stayed on the sidelines working on fixing the problems found, and the media would have ignored the Slashdot Crowd.
Just count it as another example of Microsoft Arrogance (tm) outweighing their good sense. It's amazing how such bright people can do such stupid things.
-- Eric