DLL hell, the memories. I now code in Java, but I do recall throwing out MS's advice on DLLs back in the day. Seemed incredibly stupid then to "add onto" system DLLs, or to co-locate DLLs with system DLLs. Shared DLLs always were local, especially after the VC 4 days, when it seemed a new version of MFC would come out about every other day.
Everything I coded always came as a group, and could be "installed" without an installer. I still don't know wtf is better about a "registry enabled" app vs a text/XML file with 5 entries in it - can't your app handle 5 entries? Most apps, contrary to popular belief, do not need to share their information with the OS or any other app. The best thing about that approach was you could move, copy, reconfigure, or delete the entire app by operating on a single directory. (Wait, I see it now, copy and delete was too easy!!!)
XP's GUI is probably starting to suffer from having too much crap loaded on top of an unstable base. It's been posted that Longhorn is totally redesigned from the ground up, and it would have to be, to support the new GUI functionality. W2K is fine, but games have issues running on those, as the vid/DirectX drivers don't seem as stable as those for XP. Since that no longer matters to me, I'm not all that concerned. It's one of the reasons I'm again exploring alternative OSes for my main desktop. My goal is to be MS free on my main desktop, and keep a "game" machine around for MS. Hardware really has gotten cheap lately, hasn't it? I even have 2 dual Sun Ultra 2s sitting upstairs... unused... Silly really. 5 years ago, I'd have given my right arm for just 1 box. Oh well.
Firefly, I wouldn't mind watching the entire series. Too bad it got yanked, but what numbnut scheduled it for Friday evenings? Unfortunately, Fox stopped honoring their 50% off coupon at foxstore.com before I got a hold of the box set.
I actually started disliking Star Wars with episode 6, those damn ewoks screwed it up. Jar-Jar alone could have killed a good movie, much less the incredibly bad Episode I. I didn't even bother seeing AotC on DVD. I sort of "watched" it when TBS (or TNT?) showed it a couple of months ago, and only because I was doing stuff around the house while the TV happened to be on that station. Needless to say, it was the perfect thing to have on TV, as it commanded no attention at all.
Now the Matrix 2&3 had scenes I think could have been completely removed. Matter of fact, some dutiful editing might actually make 2&3 one really decent movie, and after having watched LotR a couple of times now, a 4 hour movie may be perfectly acceptable if it's got a decent story and cinematography.
Personally, I thought it was a fine trilogy, even if 2 and 3 could probably have been combined into 1 fine 3-4 hour single movie. Much better than the Star Wars wreck of episodes I-III. (And III's not even come out yet, but when it does, it'll suck worse than the first two from all accounts).
If you were expecting as great a revelation in 2/3 as in 1, that just wasn't a real expectation. The really cool thing in my mind was that the entire thing was staged as part of a "war" between 2 powerful AI entities.
Actually, there was an initial attempt at VHS protection that flopped badly precisely because of what you witnessed. Macrovision came out later with some signal added that did not distort the picture on the TV, but would with another federally mandated Macrovision enabled VHS recorder. Older recorders lack this circuitry, and can copy Macrovision protected tapes with impunity (well, whatever impunity you consider going from around 200 scan lines to 150!).
The picture of a copied tape was so incredibly bad, I didn't bother. However, if you had about $2k to spend in 88/89, you could buy a professional dubbing deck, which made near copies, but there was still a degradation, and the copy time was slow, by today's standards.
I thought they created those because Executive Software's DiskkeeperLite extra Lite is included with XP now since MS can finally admit that yes, aunti em, NTFS really does frag files to hell and back (since OS/2, HPFS, and most people that knew about the argument no longer are a threat).
...it might make sense to have the antivirus scanner as a part of the OS. Better low-level access...
Perhaps just creating the appropriate hooks for low-level access would be more appropriate? Then again, they couldn't milk the multi-million dollar AV market.... After all, MS is all about the next thing that will add another 1B+ to their bottom line, or their bank account anyways.
Actually, EISA machines, as servers, are still in the datacenters.... No one in their right mind would run one as a workstation, unless it came adequately prepped from the factory with everything you'd need forever. We had a need at the time to run them as workstations. They ran for us for 6 years, if I recall correctly. Not bad. The last time I touched an EISA machine was in 2001, having switched careers post that time.
WFW, if you got it stable and never upgraded, yes, it was rock solid. Otherwise, get your 18 disks out (still less than OS/2's 65+ floppies for the whole friggin thing, CDROMs were extremely necessary, but you only installed it twice, once to unlearn windows behavior, and then once for the rest of the hardware's lifespan.) I had 98 and ME running on P4s, and I wasn't really that impressed. Of course, they weren't naked OSes.
I concur with wishing XP had been a naked OS, with a separate plus pack. Matter of fact, #1 wish is that IE gets totally removed from the system and we get back the old explorer (stupid search utility is asinine these days, no wonder there's 30+ file search utilities for sale on tucows!) I'd almost say don't even bother with a browser, I'll get one myself, thank you very much. But then I thought, if I have only the new PC, how would I get said browser these days? Whoops! Maybe they'd ship it with Firefox? LOL!
I can say this about XP, runs fine on my home built PC, matter of fact, better than this Dell. So like all MS products, if the above statement is true, they succeeded with their usual competence.;)
It depends on what type of drive architecture you're going for.
4+ drives in a SCSI RAID environment, RAID 5. 3 drives, RAID 5 won't be your best performance, but, you'll get the space of 2 drives. 2 drives? Mirrored. Multiple channels adds to the choices.
4 drives on a dual channel IDE ATA RAID controller? Buy a quality 4 channel RAID controller (costs more than an equivalent SCSI RAID controller capable of handling 15 cheap drives... wonder why? Maybe RAID is hard? SATA? Turns out it's highly dependent on, guess what? The controllers.
Lastly, and most importantly, is the actual purpose of the RAID system. Is it going to be large file reads? For SCSI, RAID5 works well for this with 3+ drives. You won't quite get the full benies of striping 3+ drives, but it will be close. For any flavor ATA, mirroring is about the only thing you'll really benefit from, and it only provides redundancy, no performance gains. Unless, of course, you buy a quality RAID controller, in which case you still might want to revisit SCSI. The only benefit to me for SATA/IDE RAID is super large mass store like devices. I'm NOT a fan of IDE under any circumstances, and especially not for any server environment. For anything else, such as large numbers of concurrent anything, or if writes are important as well, and high performance (as in speed) are important, SCSI is your only option. You can see my comment in the other thread:
Due to work issues, we had to run something able to address more than 16MB of RAM. WFW and DOS just didn't cut it. (We were working with 100+MB data files, try opening one of those in Notepad or Word...;) OS/2 was just a heck of a lot more stable on EISA machines, as NT 3.5 had this nasty habit of being able to rewrite CMOS during driver installs. (I forget the exact combination of drivers needed, but it was tracked down to a default NT setting) If you've never rebuilt an EISA machine from 100% scratch, here's my advice, don't. I had to do it 5 times in 3 days (multiple machines, although this wasn't consistent, always a fun thing, as 4 boxes out of 7 did not fail, go figure).
So, having jumped shipped in about 96/97 when work forced Word DOC format as the standard. Office 97 broke all backwards compatibility, and this was during a huge upgrade across all of work, therefore 40-50% of the workforce got all these spiffy new machine with Word97 on them and started sending these nifty new non-comopatible files through their new Outlook email system, we had no choice. (See previously mentioned O97 breaking OS/2 compatibility via a nasty little hack, by asking for memory at the 2GB barrier. OS/2's VMs supported 512MB and therefore O97 would no longer run on OS/2. Otherwise, OS/2 might have taken away NT's sales.)
But all this reminiscing makes me think maybe I should load a copy of OS/2 on that spare 2.4GHz Celeron. Be interesting to see how a 10 yo OS compares to today's XP side by side. I wonder if Quake III will play on it, as it is OpenGL. Of course, there's the video driver issue. Maybe not. Guess the ole PPro is the only thing I have left that it will run reliably on, unless I grab a compatible graphics card from somewhere.
BTW, don't knock NT 3.1, it's the closest thing to a real OS MS ever sold.;) That's before they fubar'd the entire graphics/IO architecture in NT 3.5, so that they could port apps to it more easily.
First a quick discussion of OSes. I ran NT/OS/2 since somewhere around 91. Don't recall the exact dates, so the entire issue of Windows hardware vs OS/2 hardware was irrelevant to me, other than OS/2 blew NT's socks off on the same hardware. I bet WFW did require less hardware than OS/2, then again, try running an SMTP gateway, FTP daemon, NNTP daemon, Telnet daemon, WordPerfect (DOS), and Cadkey on a WFW box concurrently.;) Ran fine on a loaded 486.
Describe? You got that one? Cool. Been a while since I've even heard of that one. ClearLook kicked its butt in practice though (of course, imho only;). I too have some oddities in the old closet for OS/2, including 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and Warp3 server (should be version 2.3 Server, but not sure):
BackMaster
Avarice
Object Desktop (think WindowsBlinds 10 years earlier, and richer - Stardock rules!)
Patrol
Borland's C compiler
Some collection of OS/2 games, includes things like a DigDug clone
Don't think I have ClearLook anymore, that probably got lost over the years, as well as my registered copy of Graham's utilities.
To me, what killed WP was that it completely sucked on windows, compared to Word, for 90% of the populace. They wanted simple WYSIWYG, Word gave it to them, WP was clunkier than crap, and unstable to boot (not that Word was all that stable either). Oh, and there was an extremely badly hacked port of WP5.2 to OS/2. It was so unstable, it actually occassionally forced a reboot of OS/2, something the emulated windows versions never managed to do.
I ran WP6.1 for a while, and it was much better for writing more desktop published type papers, but finally the inertia of the rest of the world forced us into Word. Shame really.
Dedicated multi-channel RAID cards are how you get performance. Tacking on a 0-channel raid solution (basically this just adds RAID functionality to on-board SCSI channels) is good for things like cheap redundancy, but doesn't do a whole lot for performance and may actually hurt it. Since you can buy older RAID cards for dirt cheap @e-you know where, there's no reason not to go ahead and get a multi-channel card.
As for 320, unless you're going to pile a heap of 15K drives onto a U320 controller, U160 or even LVD/SCSI3 will do (same thing, just make sure the controller supports at least 80MBps/channel. This will ensure the longer cable lengths among other things that are a pain in previous revisions of the spec.)
I'm running LVD drives on all my systems, bought an entire case of new 18GBs (10) for under $100! I also bought a set of 5 new 36GB drives for about $120 as examples. It should be noted they're all SCA drives, and require a backplane or adapters, but again those can be had cheaply @e-bay. Backplanes also make your life easier because you don't have to get 8 or 10 or 15 device SCSI3 (or better) cabling, which is still pricey.
LOL is right! So you were the one I read about that was "debugging" frames on Doom? What a job!;)
As for WP, I used 5.1 and 5.2 (winblows) as my last two copies. I hated 5.2, but, the on screen WYSIWYG was cool eye candy, if they could have only made it work right. The killer? MS Word 5, then 6's file formats (actually, WP suffered the same fate as any large company that thinks it has a monopoly generally suffers when they enter their "sloth" stage, they pretty much collapse). WP refused to support the new formats, and missed the boat on WYSIWYG.
BTW, on page layouts and Word, I had huge problems with having pages numbered i-..., then skip a page number (for a title page) and then start counting on page 1 again. I don't know if it's been fixed since O97, since I haven't had to write that kind of report since 99....
And as for unlimited WP5.1 files, it's limited to 2GB I believe, the maximum partition size of DOS. Unless you run it under Windows of some flavor with bigger drives, and then I'm not sure you can exceed 2GB.
Finally, as an aside, there was this really cool word processor/desktop publishing app on OS/2 called ClearLook. A cell based word processor. The full codebase was 5MB (ie, could load the entire source in RAM faster than Office anything brings up the splash screen;) and did everything a word processor needed to do, and then some. You were able to do cell overlays, include pictures, make layers transparent, watermarks anyone? And it was extremely fast. All in about 94. More memory lane stuff. Wonder if I still have that program?
For me, personally, transfer rates are #1, seek times are #2.
And for the record, this article only cements in my mind that SATA is seriously no better than IDE, just a faster version of IDE, with all its inherent problems.
Firewire is another one that's basically DOA for HDs. SCSI really is your only solution, especially if you're looking for RAID performance. (Of course, that's not your normal consumer purchase, but I have 3 SCSI RAIDed systems, so I'm not your normal consumer;)
Hey, don't knock that watching the frame render! You can learn a lot about how computers, or your code anyways, work and debug in-frame rendering that way!!!;)
Word still sucks, if you need to do anything other than have a program format your document for you how it thinks is best. Then again, they claim Word is not a desktop publishing app. So how many version of a word processing program do I need if it doesn't add anything of merit?
Supposedly out in Oct or Nov, from what I recall hearing. (Too lazy to look it up) The initial performance numbers for memory are pretty incredible, and may make it a "must have" for high end gamers and the like, just to squeeze out that extra framerate or 3 beyond 120 fps... I mean, you know you just cannot play a game unless the frame rate is at least a nice smooth 120 fps.
That aside, I don't think it's going to be quite that long, perhaps 1-2 years. Things seem to be changing ever faster in some areas, while others seem to stay stagnant (MS OSes and Office, for instance;)
Businesses have shifted to 64 bits. All those Sun, IBM, and suppsedly hot Itanium boxes.... But, the point being, what they haven't shifted over to yet, they will start, especially when they realize that they can run in-memory caches of 16GB or more, versus today's 3.5GB. That alone will be a selling point for the bigger corporations, especially at the price point we're talking about here. (very cheap)
The K6-2 could only mimic the Intel PII, and it was an older design to boot with 3DNow added. The Athlon 64 is a new design, with several innovative/new features to x86 that Intel does not have, including the 64 bit extensions. That's why this may be a moot point soon, imho, as a pretty decent dual Opteron system can currently be put together for around $2000 with 6GB of RAM. I don't think, given Intel's past pricing behavior, that they're going to play well in that price arena with their new top end chips. Their current top end chips which were made specifically to compete with the first Athlon 64s out are still priced near $1K each.
Hmmm, given that, maybe there's more to the dual P6 core than I thought. With new fab processes, I bet they can churn out dual core chips rather cheaply, and they should run relatively fast too. My current Dual PIII runs respectably fast. However, Intel hasn't given any indication of these getting 64 bit extensions.
The 64 bit race is already in full swing. The most common apps that will benefit most from 64 bits are DBs, along with a slew of specialty apps that do large data manipulation. If systems like Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres, and yes, even MS SQL all start running on AMD machines, it's pretty much over. My opinion from what I've seen of these chips is that this trend will be in full swing by year end. Once it starts, Intel's barrier to 64 bit CPUs rises significantly. (Forget the Itanium 2, who the hell in their right mind would by a single CPU system for the cost of an 8-way NUMA system that blows its doors off? Ok, that might be a little bit of an exageration, the cost of a dual Itanium 2 system...;) Tests I've seen show that a dual opteron system can outperform a loaded Sun V880 (don't know the exact specs on the Sun box, but it did have 8 processors).
First, that IBM missing/moved boot sector is easy enough to fix/replace with an old version of Partition Magic or OS/2....;)
Early VIA chipsets for AMD were terrible. Even now, they're barely stable, or at least my experience says that. Lots of wierd driver issues with those. However, if you wind up getting a good stable set of drivers installed and don't install the latest MS gimmickery (I know, I know, not a word) you'll find AMD to be another long running CPU (both Athlon and Athlon XPs). You will, however, need quality RAM. I found AMD systems to be much more sensitive to RAM issues than Intel systems.
Currently, unless Intel has a completely muffled offering coming out in the next 3-5 months that no one knows about, they're out of the 64 bit game.
I skipped RH6, went from 5->7. No problems with that either, the firewall ran for about a year before the box got reclaimed when I got an 8W linksys router (doesn't do everything, but does enough, and only 8W!)
As for Intel CPU/chipsets, the CPUs were the best performing, the chipsets were quite stable, although definitely not the best performing. However, my next CPU purchase will be an AMD Opteron. We've tested those at work, and a 2-way NUMA machine is something to behold. Intel isn't even in the ballpark, esp when you go beyond 2-way machines. As for rock solid, they appear to be. (After all, Opterons gained a lot from their acquired former DEC Alpha employees, and it shows!:)
For 32-bit athlons, I'd agree, I'd run those only on home systems where stability isn't as much of an issue, but performance is. They truly do outperform Intel at the price point, esp if you go duals, Intel again can't play in the ballpark.
As for rebooting, that should only be done rarely, and then only if you're truly doing something that should require it (like adding a new hard drive or otherwise mucking about with the physical internals. After all, I'm not paying for hot swap systems for home use!;) Oh, and installing a new OS/kernel allows for a reboot as well. Can't forget that, eventually you'll want to upgrade that box!:-D
Finally, just an aside, I think Intel's already lost. They're falling back to the P6 architecture for their next CPU, having ditched further development on the dead-end P4. They will be dual core, which is kinda neat if it happens, but by the time they get there, AMD's 64 bit chips may have made the entire situation moot, especially if AMD's 2+ way CPUs drop in price, as they surely will by whenever the projected rollout date for Intel's dual core CPUs comes around.
Ours were isolated, as it was the only way to get above 5 sites and run a mix of separate certificates. However, IIRC they run as a shared memory model even when they're separated, meaning they all share some common base functionality, ie, they are not truly separated, just their specific config is - standard MS crap, otherwise how could you take down all sites by merely killing the inetinfo.exe process? Yes, they're child processes, I know, but one hung child process can take down the entire webserver, which happens not infrequently with HTTPS btw on that particular system under that configuration. Basically, they're not independent processes.
Personally, I think "stupid bastards talk crap about stuff they don't know" shouldn't post. I could say I'm sick of stupid asshole holier than thou ACs throwing insults, but what good what that do? dumbass.
The courts generally take to long to do anything effectively, and are usually in the form of suits. This means that lawyers make lots of money. This is better than a simple government agency where you get your license?
As for the inherent corruption, that occurs when the charter for an organization is too broad, or implies that the organization has power. Take license plates, for instance. They're handed out via a government agency. They even do personalized plates. It's extremely efficient, overall, as compared to making your own personalized license plates and then duking it out in court when you've picked the same trite "hello" that 59 other people have. Then again, that may just be my impression, but filling out a form with your options seems much simpler than filling out court documents....
The point is Gates recommended data center servers to be rebooted weekly for stability. We had stable systems up for 3 months, counter to Gates' advice. These were 24/7/365 servers with intended 99.999% uptime (with exceptions allowed for scheduled maintenance windows). Due to that and the load this was a bit of an accomplishment at the time. (largish exchange servers, DBs, file servers, WINS, and domain controllers with regular in-service backups for roughly 60+ core servers in multiple geographic locations and subnets with over 5,000 users with at least one machine each - and that was within 1 domain. The total numbered in the 100s of thousands of users that I personally saw, and yes, this is enough information to figure out whom I'm talking about) In 2 years, we only had 1 problem meeting the SLA - the initial email virus, Melissa I think it was.
We managed this feat by hacking the servers down to only necessary services and placing them in an architecture designed to overcome MS OS's shortcomings, of which there were many.
Slashdot Mirror
DLL hell, the memories. I now code in Java, but I do recall throwing out MS's advice on DLLs back in the day. Seemed incredibly stupid then to "add onto" system DLLs, or to co-locate DLLs with system DLLs. Shared DLLs always were local, especially after the VC 4 days, when it seemed a new version of MFC would come out about every other day.
Everything I coded always came as a group, and could be "installed" without an installer. I still don't know wtf is better about a "registry enabled" app vs a text/XML file with 5 entries in it - can't your app handle 5 entries? Most apps, contrary to popular belief, do not need to share their information with the OS or any other app. The best thing about that approach was you could move, copy, reconfigure, or delete the entire app by operating on a single directory. (Wait, I see it now, copy and delete was too easy!!!)
XP's GUI is probably starting to suffer from having too much crap loaded on top of an unstable base. It's been posted that Longhorn is totally redesigned from the ground up, and it would have to be, to support the new GUI functionality. W2K is fine, but games have issues running on those, as the vid/DirectX drivers don't seem as stable as those for XP. Since that no longer matters to me, I'm not all that concerned. It's one of the reasons I'm again exploring alternative OSes for my main desktop. My goal is to be MS free on my main desktop, and keep a "game" machine around for MS. Hardware really has gotten cheap lately, hasn't it? I even have 2 dual Sun Ultra 2s sitting upstairs... unused... Silly really. 5 years ago, I'd have given my right arm for just 1 box. Oh well.
Firefly, I wouldn't mind watching the entire series. Too bad it got yanked, but what numbnut scheduled it for Friday evenings? Unfortunately, Fox stopped honoring their 50% off coupon at foxstore.com before I got a hold of the box set.
I actually started disliking Star Wars with episode 6, those damn ewoks screwed it up. Jar-Jar alone could have killed a good movie, much less the incredibly bad Episode I. I didn't even bother seeing AotC on DVD. I sort of "watched" it when TBS (or TNT?) showed it a couple of months ago, and only because I was doing stuff around the house while the TV happened to be on that station. Needless to say, it was the perfect thing to have on TV, as it commanded no attention at all.
Now the Matrix 2&3 had scenes I think could have been completely removed. Matter of fact, some dutiful editing might actually make 2&3 one really decent movie, and after having watched LotR a couple of times now, a 4 hour movie may be perfectly acceptable if it's got a decent story and cinematography.
I've already got about 100 of their books, including 3 I bought last weekend. But I could always use more books. :)
Personally, I thought it was a fine trilogy, even if 2 and 3 could probably have been combined into 1 fine 3-4 hour single movie. Much better than the Star Wars wreck of episodes I-III. (And III's not even come out yet, but when it does, it'll suck worse than the first two from all accounts). If you were expecting as great a revelation in 2/3 as in 1, that just wasn't a real expectation. The really cool thing in my mind was that the entire thing was staged as part of a "war" between 2 powerful AI entities.
Actually, there was an initial attempt at VHS protection that flopped badly precisely because of what you witnessed. Macrovision came out later with some signal added that did not distort the picture on the TV, but would with another federally mandated Macrovision enabled VHS recorder. Older recorders lack this circuitry, and can copy Macrovision protected tapes with impunity (well, whatever impunity you consider going from around 200 scan lines to 150!).
The picture of a copied tape was so incredibly bad, I didn't bother. However, if you had about $2k to spend in 88/89, you could buy a professional dubbing deck, which made near copies, but there was still a degradation, and the copy time was slow, by today's standards.
I thought they created those because Executive Software's DiskkeeperLite extra Lite is included with XP now since MS can finally admit that yes, aunti em, NTFS really does frag files to hell and back (since OS/2, HPFS, and most people that knew about the argument no longer are a threat).
Wouldn't that just be ports 135-139? :)
Actually, EISA machines, as servers, are still in the datacenters.... No one in their right mind would run one as a workstation, unless it came adequately prepped from the factory with everything you'd need forever. We had a need at the time to run them as workstations. They ran for us for 6 years, if I recall correctly. Not bad. The last time I touched an EISA machine was in 2001, having switched careers post that time.
WFW, if you got it stable and never upgraded, yes, it was rock solid. Otherwise, get your 18 disks out (still less than OS/2's 65+ floppies for the whole friggin thing, CDROMs were extremely necessary, but you only installed it twice, once to unlearn windows behavior, and then once for the rest of the hardware's lifespan.) I had 98 and ME running on P4s, and I wasn't really that impressed. Of course, they weren't naked OSes.
I concur with wishing XP had been a naked OS, with a separate plus pack. Matter of fact, #1 wish is that IE gets totally removed from the system and we get back the old explorer (stupid search utility is asinine these days, no wonder there's 30+ file search utilities for sale on tucows!) I'd almost say don't even bother with a browser, I'll get one myself, thank you very much. But then I thought, if I have only the new PC, how would I get said browser these days? Whoops! Maybe they'd ship it with Firefox? LOL!
I can say this about XP, runs fine on my home built PC, matter of fact, better than this Dell. So like all MS products, if the above statement is true, they succeeded with their usual competence. ;)
It depends on what type of drive architecture you're going for.
4+ drives in a SCSI RAID environment, RAID 5. 3 drives, RAID 5 won't be your best performance, but, you'll get the space of 2 drives. 2 drives? Mirrored. Multiple channels adds to the choices.
4 drives on a dual channel IDE ATA RAID controller? Buy a quality 4 channel RAID controller (costs more than an equivalent SCSI RAID controller capable of handling 15 cheap drives... wonder why? Maybe RAID is hard ? SATA? Turns out it's highly dependent on, guess what? The controllers.
Lastly, and most importantly, is the actual purpose of the RAID system. Is it going to be large file reads? For SCSI, RAID5 works well for this with 3+ drives. You won't quite get the full benies of striping 3+ drives, but it will be close. For any flavor ATA, mirroring is about the only thing you'll really benefit from, and it only provides redundancy, no performance gains. Unless, of course, you buy a quality RAID controller, in which case you still might want to revisit SCSI. The only benefit to me for SATA/IDE RAID is super large mass store like devices. I'm NOT a fan of IDE under any circumstances, and especially not for any server environment. For anything else, such as large numbers of concurrent anything, or if writes are important as well, and high performance (as in speed) are important, SCSI is your only option. You can see my comment in the other thread:
Due to work issues, we had to run something able to address more than 16MB of RAM. WFW and DOS just didn't cut it. (We were working with 100+MB data files, try opening one of those in Notepad or Word...;) OS/2 was just a heck of a lot more stable on EISA machines, as NT 3.5 had this nasty habit of being able to rewrite CMOS during driver installs. (I forget the exact combination of drivers needed, but it was tracked down to a default NT setting) If you've never rebuilt an EISA machine from 100% scratch, here's my advice, don't. I had to do it 5 times in 3 days (multiple machines, although this wasn't consistent, always a fun thing, as 4 boxes out of 7 did not fail, go figure).
;) That's before they fubar'd the entire graphics/IO architecture in NT 3.5, so that they could port apps to it more easily.
So, having jumped shipped in about 96/97 when work forced Word DOC format as the standard. Office 97 broke all backwards compatibility, and this was during a huge upgrade across all of work, therefore 40-50% of the workforce got all these spiffy new machine with Word97 on them and started sending these nifty new non-comopatible files through their new Outlook email system, we had no choice. (See previously mentioned O97 breaking OS/2 compatibility via a nasty little hack, by asking for memory at the 2GB barrier. OS/2's VMs supported 512MB and therefore O97 would no longer run on OS/2. Otherwise, OS/2 might have taken away NT's sales.)
But all this reminiscing makes me think maybe I should load a copy of OS/2 on that spare 2.4GHz Celeron. Be interesting to see how a 10 yo OS compares to today's XP side by side. I wonder if Quake III will play on it, as it is OpenGL. Of course, there's the video driver issue. Maybe not. Guess the ole PPro is the only thing I have left that it will run reliably on, unless I grab a compatible graphics card from somewhere.
BTW, don't knock NT 3.1, it's the closest thing to a real OS MS ever sold.
Oh boy. Where to start? :)
First a quick discussion of OSes. I ran NT/OS/2 since somewhere around 91. Don't recall the exact dates, so the entire issue of Windows hardware vs OS/2 hardware was irrelevant to me, other than OS/2 blew NT's socks off on the same hardware. I bet WFW did require less hardware than OS/2, then again, try running an SMTP gateway, FTP daemon, NNTP daemon, Telnet daemon, WordPerfect (DOS), and Cadkey on a WFW box concurrently. ;) Ran fine on a loaded 486.
Describe? You got that one? Cool. Been a while since I've even heard of that one. ClearLook kicked its butt in practice though (of course, imho only;). I too have some oddities in the old closet for OS/2, including 2.1, 2.3, 2.4, and Warp3 server (should be version 2.3 Server, but not sure):
- BackMaster
- Avarice
- Object Desktop (think WindowsBlinds 10 years earlier, and richer - Stardock rules!)
- Patrol
- Borland's C compiler
- Some collection of OS/2 games, includes things like a DigDug clone
Don't think I have ClearLook anymore, that probably got lost over the years, as well as my registered copy of Graham's utilities.To me, what killed WP was that it completely sucked on windows, compared to Word, for 90% of the populace. They wanted simple WYSIWYG, Word gave it to them, WP was clunkier than crap, and unstable to boot (not that Word was all that stable either). Oh, and there was an extremely badly hacked port of WP5.2 to OS/2. It was so unstable, it actually occassionally forced a reboot of OS/2, something the emulated windows versions never managed to do.
I ran WP6.1 for a while, and it was much better for writing more desktop published type papers, but finally the inertia of the rest of the world forced us into Word. Shame really.
Dedicated multi-channel RAID cards are how you get performance. Tacking on a 0-channel raid solution (basically this just adds RAID functionality to on-board SCSI channels) is good for things like cheap redundancy, but doesn't do a whole lot for performance and may actually hurt it. Since you can buy older RAID cards for dirt cheap @e-you know where, there's no reason not to go ahead and get a multi-channel card.
As for 320, unless you're going to pile a heap of 15K drives onto a U320 controller, U160 or even LVD/SCSI3 will do (same thing, just make sure the controller supports at least 80MBps/channel. This will ensure the longer cable lengths among other things that are a pain in previous revisions of the spec.)
I'm running LVD drives on all my systems, bought an entire case of new 18GBs (10) for under $100! I also bought a set of 5 new 36GB drives for about $120 as examples. It should be noted they're all SCA drives, and require a backplane or adapters, but again those can be had cheaply @e-bay. Backplanes also make your life easier because you don't have to get 8 or 10 or 15 device SCSI3 (or better) cabling, which is still pricey.
LOL is right! So you were the one I read about that was "debugging" frames on Doom? What a job! ;)
;) and did everything a word processor needed to do, and then some. You were able to do cell overlays, include pictures, make layers transparent, watermarks anyone? And it was extremely fast. All in about 94. More memory lane stuff. Wonder if I still have that program?
As for WP, I used 5.1 and 5.2 (winblows) as my last two copies. I hated 5.2, but, the on screen WYSIWYG was cool eye candy, if they could have only made it work right. The killer? MS Word 5, then 6's file formats (actually, WP suffered the same fate as any large company that thinks it has a monopoly generally suffers when they enter their "sloth" stage, they pretty much collapse). WP refused to support the new formats, and missed the boat on WYSIWYG.
BTW, on page layouts and Word, I had huge problems with having pages numbered i-..., then skip a page number (for a title page) and then start counting on page 1 again. I don't know if it's been fixed since O97, since I haven't had to write that kind of report since 99....
And as for unlimited WP5.1 files, it's limited to 2GB I believe, the maximum partition size of DOS. Unless you run it under Windows of some flavor with bigger drives, and then I'm not sure you can exceed 2GB.
Finally, as an aside, there was this really cool word processor/desktop publishing app on OS/2 called ClearLook. A cell based word processor. The full codebase was 5MB (ie, could load the entire source in RAM faster than Office anything brings up the splash screen
Not to mention that the included on-board stuff is usually absolute crap, especially if you cannot explicitly disable it.
For me, personally, transfer rates are #1, seek times are #2.
And for the record, this article only cements in my mind that SATA is seriously no better than IDE, just a faster version of IDE, with all its inherent problems.
Firewire is another one that's basically DOA for HDs. SCSI really is your only solution, especially if you're looking for RAID performance. (Of course, that's not your normal consumer purchase, but I have 3 SCSI RAIDed systems, so I'm not your normal consumer;)
Hey, don't knock that watching the frame render! You can learn a lot about how computers, or your code anyways, work and debug in-frame rendering that way!!! ;)
Word still sucks, if you need to do anything other than have a program format your document for you how it thinks is best. Then again, they claim Word is not a desktop publishing app. So how many version of a word processing program do I need if it doesn't add anything of merit?
For big text files, use gvim. It just works.
Supposedly out in Oct or Nov, from what I recall hearing. (Too lazy to look it up) The initial performance numbers for memory are pretty incredible, and may make it a "must have" for high end gamers and the like, just to squeeze out that extra framerate or 3 beyond 120 fps... I mean, you know you just cannot play a game unless the frame rate is at least a nice smooth 120 fps. That aside, I don't think it's going to be quite that long, perhaps 1-2 years. Things seem to be changing ever faster in some areas, while others seem to stay stagnant (MS OSes and Office, for instance;)
Businesses have shifted to 64 bits. All those Sun, IBM, and suppsedly hot Itanium boxes.... But, the point being, what they haven't shifted over to yet, they will start, especially when they realize that they can run in-memory caches of 16GB or more, versus today's 3.5GB. That alone will be a selling point for the bigger corporations, especially at the price point we're talking about here. (very cheap)
The K6-2 could only mimic the Intel PII, and it was an older design to boot with 3DNow added. The Athlon 64 is a new design, with several innovative /new features to x86 that Intel does not have, including the 64 bit extensions. That's why this may be a moot point soon, imho, as a pretty decent dual Opteron system can currently be put together for around $2000 with 6GB of RAM. I don't think, given Intel's past pricing behavior, that they're going to play well in that price arena with their new top end chips. Their current top end chips which were made specifically to compete with the first Athlon 64s out are still priced near $1K each.
Hmmm, given that, maybe there's more to the dual P6 core than I thought. With new fab processes, I bet they can churn out dual core chips rather cheaply, and they should run relatively fast too. My current Dual PIII runs respectably fast. However, Intel hasn't given any indication of these getting 64 bit extensions.
The 64 bit race is already in full swing. The most common apps that will benefit most from 64 bits are DBs, along with a slew of specialty apps that do large data manipulation. If systems like Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, Postgres, and yes, even MS SQL all start running on AMD machines, it's pretty much over. My opinion from what I've seen of these chips is that this trend will be in full swing by year end. Once it starts, Intel's barrier to 64 bit CPUs rises significantly. (Forget the Itanium 2, who the hell in their right mind would by a single CPU system for the cost of an 8-way NUMA system that blows its doors off? Ok, that might be a little bit of an exageration, the cost of a dual Itanium 2 system...;) Tests I've seen show that a dual opteron system can outperform a loaded Sun V880 (don't know the exact specs on the Sun box, but it did have 8 processors).
First, that IBM missing/moved boot sector is easy enough to fix/replace with an old version of Partition Magic or OS/2.... ;)
Early VIA chipsets for AMD were terrible. Even now, they're barely stable, or at least my experience says that. Lots of wierd driver issues with those. However, if you wind up getting a good stable set of drivers installed and don't install the latest MS gimmickery (I know, I know, not a word) you'll find AMD to be another long running CPU (both Athlon and Athlon XPs). You will, however, need quality RAM. I found AMD systems to be much more sensitive to RAM issues than Intel systems.
Currently, unless Intel has a completely muffled offering coming out in the next 3-5 months that no one knows about, they're out of the 64 bit game.
I skipped RH6, went from 5->7. No problems with that either, the firewall ran for about a year before the box got reclaimed when I got an 8W linksys router (doesn't do everything, but does enough, and only 8W!)
As for Intel CPU/chipsets, the CPUs were the best performing, the chipsets were quite stable, although definitely not the best performing. However, my next CPU purchase will be an AMD Opteron. We've tested those at work, and a 2-way NUMA machine is something to behold. Intel isn't even in the ballpark, esp when you go beyond 2-way machines. As for rock solid, they appear to be. (After all, Opterons gained a lot from their acquired former DEC Alpha employees, and it shows!:)
For 32-bit athlons, I'd agree, I'd run those only on home systems where stability isn't as much of an issue, but performance is. They truly do outperform Intel at the price point, esp if you go duals, Intel again can't play in the ballpark.
As for rebooting, that should only be done rarely, and then only if you're truly doing something that should require it (like adding a new hard drive or otherwise mucking about with the physical internals. After all, I'm not paying for hot swap systems for home use! ;) Oh, and installing a new OS/kernel allows for a reboot as well. Can't forget that, eventually you'll want to upgrade that box! :-D
Finally, just an aside, I think Intel's already lost. They're falling back to the P6 architecture for their next CPU, having ditched further development on the dead-end P4. They will be dual core, which is kinda neat if it happens, but by the time they get there, AMD's 64 bit chips may have made the entire situation moot, especially if AMD's 2+ way CPUs drop in price, as they surely will by whenever the projected rollout date for Intel's dual core CPUs comes around.
Ours were isolated, as it was the only way to get above 5 sites and run a mix of separate certificates. However, IIRC they run as a shared memory model even when they're separated, meaning they all share some common base functionality, ie, they are not truly separated, just their specific config is - standard MS crap, otherwise how could you take down all sites by merely killing the inetinfo.exe process? Yes, they're child processes, I know, but one hung child process can take down the entire webserver, which happens not infrequently with HTTPS btw on that particular system under that configuration. Basically, they're not independent processes.
Personally, I think "stupid bastards talk crap about stuff they don't know" shouldn't post. I could say I'm sick of stupid asshole holier than thou ACs throwing insults, but what good what that do? dumbass.
The courts generally take to long to do anything effectively, and are usually in the form of suits. This means that lawyers make lots of money. This is better than a simple government agency where you get your license?
As for the inherent corruption, that occurs when the charter for an organization is too broad, or implies that the organization has power. Take license plates, for instance. They're handed out via a government agency. They even do personalized plates. It's extremely efficient, overall, as compared to making your own personalized license plates and then duking it out in court when you've picked the same trite "hello" that 59 other people have. Then again, that may just be my impression, but filling out a form with your options seems much simpler than filling out court documents....
The point is Gates recommended data center servers to be rebooted weekly for stability. We had stable systems up for 3 months, counter to Gates' advice. These were 24/7/365 servers with intended 99.999% uptime (with exceptions allowed for scheduled maintenance windows). Due to that and the load this was a bit of an accomplishment at the time. (largish exchange servers, DBs, file servers, WINS, and domain controllers with regular in-service backups for roughly 60+ core servers in multiple geographic locations and subnets with over 5,000 users with at least one machine each - and that was within 1 domain. The total numbered in the 100s of thousands of users that I personally saw, and yes, this is enough information to figure out whom I'm talking about) In 2 years, we only had 1 problem meeting the SLA - the initial email virus, Melissa I think it was.
We managed this feat by hacking the servers down to only necessary services and placing them in an architecture designed to overcome MS OS's shortcomings, of which there were many.