Plus, existing taxes and regulatory fees for brick and mortar casinos are also quite high. Nevada charges these high fees because it provides the best service. The regulations actually help everyone; the state's reputation for clean games and fair play keeps visitors coming and the casinos profitable. It's good for business, it's good for visitors, and it's good for the state.
I don't doubt for one moment that the mafia runs the games, or that the regulators know that. My take on it is that the legal, fair games are nevertheless so profitable that the mafia wants in. It's really quite clever; they've created a way for dishonest greedy people to make money legally and honestly. I really miss living in Nevada...they have a great attitude there.
My job isn't only to compile it, but to install it on the production systems. It's an ASP sort of thing... Presumably (ha-ha) they've already checked that it compiles and tested it before I get it. In practice, they give me a big chunk of untested code that might or might not compile, and will be genuinely pissed if the systems aren't running it by the end of the day. Naturally I can't tell you what company this is, but if I were you I would not do business with all ASPs just to be on the safe side.
Heh, that is one thing I really do hate about the programmers. They seem to have all these 1-week deadlines; they figure if they can hand off a mostly-compiling chunk of code to the production group (me) at 6 pm on a Friday then, well, they made their deadline and damn the sysadmins if the new release isn't online until Monday. I have a rule about Fridays too: anything given to me after 4 pm waits until next week. We all have to draw the line somewhere...
As I said, Solaris is optimized for very large machines running many processes simultaneously. If you can afford to drop a million bucks or two for 64 CPUs and 64 gigs of memory and lots of striped disks on FC controllers, Solaris performs fairly well. Not as well as IRIX, but fairly well nonetheless. OTOH Solaris is all but useless for the 1 and 2 CPU systems commonly used for workstations and smallish servers. The hardware is great, however, and I highly recommend running Linux instead of Solaris. You don't seem to lose anything in stability but the performance increase is very nice indeed.
not the problem. The problems are dishonesty and greed. The historical record is pretty clear that these flaws are not peculiar to any one economic system.
One could argue, if one were a supporter of capitalism, that at least that system offers you the choice not to see Sony's films as a punishment. Under socialism the government owns virtually everything, making a boycott impossible no matter how outrageous the behaviour. As I said, one could argue...
I guess you've never tried Linux on sparc64. I consider this the best-supported of all architectures. I've used m68k, ppc, mips, mips64, sparc, sparc64, and i386 and have used linux for over 7 years in total, including a fair bit of mips and sparc hacking, so I consider myself in a good position to judge. When I install Linux on a sparc64 system it Just Works; the last time (last year) I installed on x86 I had no end of problems - different problems on each of the 40 or so systems I was maintaining at the time. I'll never go back to x86; draw your own conclusions.
Actually there are at least 4 variables: The target architecture, the host architecture, the host OS, and the host libraries. As you point out, the first can be const'd by using cross-compilers. The host architecture is the variable of interest. The host OS can be const'd by using either linux on both or solaris on both. Doing that would also const the system libraries (unfortunately since glibc doesn't work on solaris any longer it's impossible to test only this variable).
Unfortunately unless you only use gcc, it isn't a very good benchmark for CPUs. Unless every CPU ran in the same otherwise identical system, other differences would greatly affect the outcome. The gcc test is in fact a fairly good exercise for the system as a whole - it covers disk i/o, memory bandwidth, cpu power, and the abilities of the OS. Unfortunately the CPU is not usually the bottleneck in this scenario. If you have little memory, it's the disk subsystem. If you have lots of memory, it's either the ability of the OS to use it, or the memory bandwidth itself. I'm actually a believer in the gcc benchmark - but not for CPUs.
Hmm. I'm afraid my experience hasn't matched yours. I ran Solaris 8 on a dual-CPU Ultra 2 for a month or two, and then switched back to Linux. It was my main NFS server, and also the compile box...it was just too slow, even under essentially no load. It's nice and zippy now... I have a number of systems running solaris 8 at work also - I have yet to be impressed; even our 2x450 systems run pretty slow. It's pretty stable on Sun hardware (but then, so is every other OS that runs on it), but it seems universally slow.
XFS on solaris would indeed be nice; UFS is slooooooow. I'd even settle for ext2 - no journaling but it's a helluva lot faster than UFS. Actually it'd be nice if XFS/linux worked on bigendian systems too.
You're overlooking the obvious: solaris is a very slow operating system. Especially its filesystem and disk-access layers are very slow, and the entire OS has been optimized for the MANY-processor cases. Running solaris on a box with less than 8 CPUs and less then 4GB of memory is just silly. And if you can afford a box that big, you can afford hardware RAID and VxFS and so on to cover up Solaris's atrocious performance.
Microsoft hates Java because Sun put one over on them with it. Everyone else hates Java because it's a piece of shit. *shrug* It's all the same...
Re:I'm more worried about the precompiled binarys
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Themes.org Cracked
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· Score: 1
So what? People who use binaries get what they deserve. I don't really understand why binaries of Free Software are even offered. When they are, they are generally offered as an unsupported convenience option only for those who might be lacking a compiler or the intelligence to read the README and build the thing.
What makes you think so? Go to freshmeat and pick 20 random pieces of software out of the appindex. How many will be commercially funded? How many will be written by people whose day job is software development? How many would die if the project lead lost his current day job? My guess is not many. Nor will this project die. The special circumstance here is that the code originated as closed code inside sgi. That won't matter, of course, now that it's been released. These guys got fired, not killed.
There are no "Linux system libraries." Linux is a kernel. It exports functionality via system calls, not via any libraries. You are probably thinking of glibc, which has nothing whatever to do with Linux, and happens to be under the LGPL license which specifically permits this sort of activity. There's a reason RMS calls it "GNU/Linux" - beyond the fact that he's a nutjob.
Re:Will the same thing happen to RHAT?
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Mandrake Shakeup
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· Score: 2
All risks filings look like that. It's standard fare for that sort of thing. I wouldn't sweat it too much. As for being due to the GPL, I fail to see how another license would solve the problem. The risks they are referring to are due to reliance on third-party "vendors" for portions of their product. Most companies suffer the same problem - I would imagine, for one example, that BEA's SEC filings refer to reliance on Java as a risk. Finally,
They haven't burned through all of that capital yet. Ultimately, I am afraid they will...
While it's hard to predict the future, Red Hat is currently breaking even. Which implies that they aren't burning through anything...
There is not a clear dividing line between industry and government, no matter how much the libertarian ideal says so.
Only because of bureaucratic capture. The problem is easily solved by forcing individuals to be responsible for their own actions regardless of whether they were committed on behalf of a corporation. I don't see a conflict between this approach and libertarianism - people may still assemble freely, form corporate bodies for financial consolidation and efficiency, and buy and sell with no additional transaction costs. The only difference is that incorporation no longer protects the individuals comprising it from legal action, including criminal action. In other words, if Microsoft is found guilty of anticompetitive business practices, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and the rest of the people who were responsible for the decisions go to prison. I think such a system would be very fair, no?
that I wouldn't care in the slightest. Although, as others have pointed out, there is actually no multiboot issue here, it doesn't really matter even if there were. Why? Simple - if you don't like Microsoft's tactics, don't use their products. Nothing forces you to buy or use XP. If it has issues that prevent you from using your system(s) the way you want, just don't use it! All the whining and crying about anticompetitive practices is just so much bull -- you can much more effectively let Microsoft know how you feel by not buying their product.
Dealing with for-profit corporations is very easy. When you buy their product, you are giving a vote of confidence and approval in them - their products, their people, and their practices. When you don't buy their products, you are doing just the opposite. Since they want to make money, successful for-profit corporations will alter their products, people, and practices in ways that maximize the number of people who buy their products. If you buy a product from a company of which you do not approve, you are voting for Buchanan when you claim you wanted Gore. And, like those who did that, you are being incredibly stupid.
While this is a fine plan, similar indeed to the measurements for hardware, for human violence, and many other areas, it isn't really practical for software. Not because the idea - longer time between more severe events, and that initial conditions influence the times - is invalid, but because there are too many variations.
It would not be difficult to measure the period of cracks in default installations of $OS with no added software, exposed directly to the internet at a low-profile location. Such numbers would be useless. Almost nobody actually has true default installs of anything, and virtually every system has configuration changes, software added or removed, various local administration practices enforced, etc. It also tells yout nothing about the effect of firewalls and intrusion detection, or the impact of merely *being* a higher-profile target or a site which provides certain services to the world.
In short, there are conservatively a million different inputs to this function, among the least important of which is what the system looked like after the initial OS installation. Until such magical time as OS vendors find a way to make every possible user happy with the set of software and configurations installed out of the box, customizations will remain the rule, and at least in the Unix world, so many customizations are possible, exercising so much different code from so many different sources, that no reasonable analysis of this type is possible.
In short, neat idea, but not possible to implement in any meaningful way.
Fox has tonnes of shitty shows they can pull instead.
Agreed. Even though I can't stand Family Guy, it's still better than the 76th rerun of Police Videos Episode 41. But neither of them holds a candle to Lone Gunmen. There are only three things I even watch on Fox any more: Futurama, Lone Gunmen, and Malcolm. Nothing else looks even vaguely worthwhile. I'll miss Lone Gunmen; Friday night between Police Videos and the news is about the worst slot I can imagine, so it sounds like they never really gave it a chance. Now the question is what to do during the hour after Futurama and before Malcolm. The Simpsons has decayed badly, and there's no way Family Guy will keep me watching...
There is absolutely no way the Earth is less than 450 million years old or more than 45 billion years old
Just like there's absolutely no way that light can travel through a vacuum or that planets besides the six known ones exist or that the galaxy Earth is part of is not the only one? Scientific "facts" are subject to change; the larger the scope of the "fact," the larger and more frequent changes will be. Basing a statement of absolute fact such as yours on a large number of current assumptions is foolish. While it appears that the lower bounds on Earth's age can be safely fixed above 450M years using several apparently reliable methods, the upper bound is much more difficult.
the universe isn't even nearly that old!
The age of the universe has not even been estimated with any accuracy. Current estimates range from 7-9B years to double that, and goings-on near to the time when the universe came into existence (by whatever method) are almost completely unknown; many apparently viable hypotheses exist but none explains fully the observations we make today. The only statement which can be made reliably is that the universe is not less old than Earth, although it's even conceivable that this statement is false as well depending on your definition of Universe.
Is it just me, or did they tack on a vague unexplained wanring about "climate change" just to get government grant money? The rest of the article describes an unexplained jump in C-14 levels (whether the level of all carbon or the ratio of C-14 rose is not stated explicitly) between 10k and 45k years ago, along with the implications for radiological dating. But nowhere is it described what, if anything, this tells us about the climate at that time (hint: it was DAMN cold) or what affect climate has on C-14 levels. One possible explanation could be that the oceans absorbed less carbon in total because they were much colder than today. But that would not really explain why C-12 would have been absorbed preferentially, or why there was an excess of C-14 to begin with. While there might be a lot of interesting things to consider about this mystery, the vague warning about "climate change" is junk science at its worst. The basic translation of the article is: "There was a lot of C-14 around a long time ago and we don't know why. Stop driving your car." When are scientists going to start doing science again?
The NetBSD port is brand new, missing support for many devices, has no SMP (I think - it's not explicitly mentioned), and is largely untested. Yeah, it'll probably boot, but the other two OSs mentioned are suitable for serious production use. Pardon my error, but I really don't think the level of support is in the same class.
An Ultra 5 is pretty much just a PC with an UltraSparc CPU. Linux was designed with this kind of hardware in mind, Solaris is meant for bigger servers running SCSI disks and such. Put Linux on an E450 and compare it with Solaris on an E450 and you would get a much better comparison.
Actually I find that Linux pretty much sucks on PCs and also on Ultra 5s. The hardware is garbage; the OS can't make up for that. Linux on reliable solid hardware like Ultra 2 is the finest platform I've worked on in all my experience.
You can laugh if you like, but I consider peecees a poorly-supported cousin in the linux world. To me, sparc64 is the primary platform for linux. The hardware is fast, stable, and well-made. The OS is fast, stable, and well-made. It just doesn't get any better. If you use FreeBSD on a peecee because you tried linux and thought it was a piece of crap, you fixed the part that wasn't broken. The OS was fine, it's your hardware that needed replacing.
I can't stand to use linux on peecees either...so I can sympathize. I was just starting to think Linux basically sucked the big one until I put it on a sparcstation 20. I've since bought 4 more Sun systems, run Linux on every one, and never looked back. I now lead a peecee-free lifestyle and enjoy using OpenBSD on my older systems and Linux on my newer ones. Sparc support in Linux is far from dead...all of Red Hat's expertise can't hide the fact that peecees are widely disparate in capabilities and quality, that there are so many different devices and different drivers of varying quality, or that the peecee is a 20-year-old system design. The Sun platform is simple, fast, and reliable. And, believe it or not, it's fairly easy to write a very good OS for a platform like that. David S Miller and the many other fine hackers who wrote the ultrasparc support have done exactly that.
IMO linux has no niche on the sparc - solaris beats it on the high end, and its too big and slow compared to {open,net}bsd on the lowend.
The only two operating systems supported on 64-bit sparcs are Linux and Solaris. Linux is noticeably and decisively faster on 1x200, 2x200, and 2x400 Ultra 2s. I have no data for much larger systems. There's no way I'd run solaris on these systems; linux is fast and rock solid.
There are many of us, like me, who want to see Linux continue to improve until it becomes a real contender in every OS market, including the mainstream desktop
It already is. In every technical way measurable, the Free Unix systems are already superior. The remaining barriers to acceptance are political. Political battles are never worth fighting.
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I don't doubt for one moment that the mafia runs the games, or that the regulators know that. My take on it is that the legal, fair games are nevertheless so profitable that the mafia wants in. It's really quite clever; they've created a way for dishonest greedy people to make money legally and honestly. I really miss living in Nevada...they have a great attitude there.
My job isn't only to compile it, but to install it on the production systems. It's an ASP sort of thing... Presumably (ha-ha) they've already checked that it compiles and tested it before I get it. In practice, they give me a big chunk of untested code that might or might not compile, and will be genuinely pissed if the systems aren't running it by the end of the day. Naturally I can't tell you what company this is, but if I were you I would not do business with all ASPs just to be on the safe side.
Heh, that is one thing I really do hate about the programmers. They seem to have all these 1-week deadlines; they figure if they can hand off a mostly-compiling chunk of code to the production group (me) at 6 pm on a Friday then, well, they made their deadline and damn the sysadmins if the new release isn't online until Monday. I have a rule about Fridays too: anything given to me after 4 pm waits until next week. We all have to draw the line somewhere...
As I said, Solaris is optimized for very large machines running many processes simultaneously. If you can afford to drop a million bucks or two for 64 CPUs and 64 gigs of memory and lots of striped disks on FC controllers, Solaris performs fairly well. Not as well as IRIX, but fairly well nonetheless. OTOH Solaris is all but useless for the 1 and 2 CPU systems commonly used for workstations and smallish servers. The hardware is great, however, and I highly recommend running Linux instead of Solaris. You don't seem to lose anything in stability but the performance increase is very nice indeed.
One could argue, if one were a supporter of capitalism, that at least that system offers you the choice not to see Sony's films as a punishment. Under socialism the government owns virtually everything, making a boycott impossible no matter how outrageous the behaviour. As I said, one could argue...
I guess you've never tried Linux on sparc64. I consider this the best-supported of all architectures. I've used m68k, ppc, mips, mips64, sparc, sparc64, and i386 and have used linux for over 7 years in total, including a fair bit of mips and sparc hacking, so I consider myself in a good position to judge. When I install Linux on a sparc64 system it Just Works; the last time (last year) I installed on x86 I had no end of problems - different problems on each of the 40 or so systems I was maintaining at the time. I'll never go back to x86; draw your own conclusions.
Unfortunately unless you only use gcc, it isn't a very good benchmark for CPUs. Unless every CPU ran in the same otherwise identical system, other differences would greatly affect the outcome. The gcc test is in fact a fairly good exercise for the system as a whole - it covers disk i/o, memory bandwidth, cpu power, and the abilities of the OS. Unfortunately the CPU is not usually the bottleneck in this scenario. If you have little memory, it's the disk subsystem. If you have lots of memory, it's either the ability of the OS to use it, or the memory bandwidth itself. I'm actually a believer in the gcc benchmark - but not for CPUs.
XFS on solaris would indeed be nice; UFS is slooooooow. I'd even settle for ext2 - no journaling but it's a helluva lot faster than UFS. Actually it'd be nice if XFS/linux worked on bigendian systems too.
You're overlooking the obvious: solaris is a very slow operating system. Especially its filesystem and disk-access layers are very slow, and the entire OS has been optimized for the MANY-processor cases. Running solaris on a box with less than 8 CPUs and less then 4GB of memory is just silly. And if you can afford a box that big, you can afford hardware RAID and VxFS and so on to cover up Solaris's atrocious performance.
Microsoft hates Java because Sun put one over on them with it. Everyone else hates Java because it's a piece of shit. *shrug* It's all the same...
So what? People who use binaries get what they deserve. I don't really understand why binaries of Free Software are even offered. When they are, they are generally offered as an unsupported convenience option only for those who might be lacking a compiler or the intelligence to read the README and build the thing.
What makes you think so? Go to freshmeat and pick 20 random pieces of software out of the appindex. How many will be commercially funded? How many will be written by people whose day job is software development? How many would die if the project lead lost his current day job? My guess is not many. Nor will this project die. The special circumstance here is that the code originated as closed code inside sgi. That won't matter, of course, now that it's been released. These guys got fired, not killed.
There are no "Linux system libraries." Linux is a kernel. It exports functionality via system calls, not via any libraries. You are probably thinking of glibc, which has nothing whatever to do with Linux, and happens to be under the LGPL license which specifically permits this sort of activity. There's a reason RMS calls it "GNU/Linux" - beyond the fact that he's a nutjob.
They haven't burned through all of that capital yet. Ultimately, I am afraid they will...
While it's hard to predict the future, Red Hat is currently breaking even. Which implies that they aren't burning through anything...
Only because of bureaucratic capture. The problem is easily solved by forcing individuals to be responsible for their own actions regardless of whether they were committed on behalf of a corporation. I don't see a conflict between this approach and libertarianism - people may still assemble freely, form corporate bodies for financial consolidation and efficiency, and buy and sell with no additional transaction costs. The only difference is that incorporation no longer protects the individuals comprising it from legal action, including criminal action. In other words, if Microsoft is found guilty of anticompetitive business practices, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and the rest of the people who were responsible for the decisions go to prison. I think such a system would be very fair, no?
Dealing with for-profit corporations is very easy. When you buy their product, you are giving a vote of confidence and approval in them - their products, their people, and their practices. When you don't buy their products, you are doing just the opposite. Since they want to make money, successful for-profit corporations will alter their products, people, and practices in ways that maximize the number of people who buy their products. If you buy a product from a company of which you do not approve, you are voting for Buchanan when you claim you wanted Gore. And, like those who did that, you are being incredibly stupid.
Proudly 100% Microsoft-free for over 5 years.
It would not be difficult to measure the period of cracks in default installations of $OS with no added software, exposed directly to the internet at a low-profile location. Such numbers would be useless. Almost nobody actually has true default installs of anything, and virtually every system has configuration changes, software added or removed, various local administration practices enforced, etc. It also tells yout nothing about the effect of firewalls and intrusion detection, or the impact of merely *being* a higher-profile target or a site which provides certain services to the world.
In short, there are conservatively a million different inputs to this function, among the least important of which is what the system looked like after the initial OS installation. Until such magical time as OS vendors find a way to make every possible user happy with the set of software and configurations installed out of the box, customizations will remain the rule, and at least in the Unix world, so many customizations are possible, exercising so much different code from so many different sources, that no reasonable analysis of this type is possible.
In short, neat idea, but not possible to implement in any meaningful way.
Agreed. Even though I can't stand Family Guy, it's still better than the 76th rerun of Police Videos Episode 41. But neither of them holds a candle to Lone Gunmen. There are only three things I even watch on Fox any more: Futurama, Lone Gunmen, and Malcolm. Nothing else looks even vaguely worthwhile. I'll miss Lone Gunmen; Friday night between Police Videos and the news is about the worst slot I can imagine, so it sounds like they never really gave it a chance. Now the question is what to do during the hour after Futurama and before Malcolm. The Simpsons has decayed badly, and there's no way Family Guy will keep me watching...
Just like there's absolutely no way that light can travel through a vacuum or that planets besides the six known ones exist or that the galaxy Earth is part of is not the only one? Scientific "facts" are subject to change; the larger the scope of the "fact," the larger and more frequent changes will be. Basing a statement of absolute fact such as yours on a large number of current assumptions is foolish. While it appears that the lower bounds on Earth's age can be safely fixed above 450M years using several apparently reliable methods, the upper bound is much more difficult.
the universe isn't even nearly that old!
The age of the universe has not even been estimated with any accuracy. Current estimates range from 7-9B years to double that, and goings-on near to the time when the universe came into existence (by whatever method) are almost completely unknown; many apparently viable hypotheses exist but none explains fully the observations we make today. The only statement which can be made reliably is that the universe is not less old than Earth, although it's even conceivable that this statement is false as well depending on your definition of Universe.
Is it just me, or did they tack on a vague unexplained wanring about "climate change" just to get government grant money? The rest of the article describes an unexplained jump in C-14 levels (whether the level of all carbon or the ratio of C-14 rose is not stated explicitly) between 10k and 45k years ago, along with the implications for radiological dating. But nowhere is it described what, if anything, this tells us about the climate at that time (hint: it was DAMN cold) or what affect climate has on C-14 levels. One possible explanation could be that the oceans absorbed less carbon in total because they were much colder than today. But that would not really explain why C-12 would have been absorbed preferentially, or why there was an excess of C-14 to begin with. While there might be a lot of interesting things to consider about this mystery, the vague warning about "climate change" is junk science at its worst. The basic translation of the article is: "There was a lot of C-14 around a long time ago and we don't know why. Stop driving your car." When are scientists going to start doing science again?
The NetBSD port is brand new, missing support for many devices, has no SMP (I think - it's not explicitly mentioned), and is largely untested. Yeah, it'll probably boot, but the other two OSs mentioned are suitable for serious production use. Pardon my error, but I really don't think the level of support is in the same class.
Actually I find that Linux pretty much sucks on PCs and also on Ultra 5s. The hardware is garbage; the OS can't make up for that. Linux on reliable solid hardware like Ultra 2 is the finest platform I've worked on in all my experience.
You can laugh if you like, but I consider peecees a poorly-supported cousin in the linux world. To me, sparc64 is the primary platform for linux. The hardware is fast, stable, and well-made. The OS is fast, stable, and well-made. It just doesn't get any better. If you use FreeBSD on a peecee because you tried linux and thought it was a piece of crap, you fixed the part that wasn't broken. The OS was fine, it's your hardware that needed replacing.
I can't stand to use linux on peecees either...so I can sympathize. I was just starting to think Linux basically sucked the big one until I put it on a sparcstation 20. I've since bought 4 more Sun systems, run Linux on every one, and never looked back. I now lead a peecee-free lifestyle and enjoy using OpenBSD on my older systems and Linux on my newer ones. Sparc support in Linux is far from dead...all of Red Hat's expertise can't hide the fact that peecees are widely disparate in capabilities and quality, that there are so many different devices and different drivers of varying quality, or that the peecee is a 20-year-old system design. The Sun platform is simple, fast, and reliable. And, believe it or not, it's fairly easy to write a very good OS for a platform like that. David S Miller and the many other fine hackers who wrote the ultrasparc support have done exactly that.
The only two operating systems supported on 64-bit sparcs are Linux and Solaris. Linux is noticeably and decisively faster on 1x200, 2x200, and 2x400 Ultra 2s. I have no data for much larger systems. There's no way I'd run solaris on these systems; linux is fast and rock solid.
It already is. In every technical way measurable, the Free Unix systems are already superior. The remaining barriers to acceptance are political. Political battles are never worth fighting.
We work in an unsigned system here. Get over it.