I use Linux. I hack Linux. Nobody can ever stop me from doing either of these things, even if I'm the only one in the world to do so. The court of public opinion does not matter for this very reason. Microsoft could have (~0)-1 market share and it would affect my life not in the slightest. So tell me, why should I care what the papers print?
People will use whatever the media tells them to use...and businesses who use better software should have a competitive advantage over those who use crap. I doubt Mr. Mundie has ever used Linux, so who cares what he thinks? If he wants to use an inferior product, we should all snicker at him quietly and move on. Enough of this feeding frenzy.
Take a step back from the brink, folks; if you just want a stable, reliable, high-performance OS, Linux is a great choice. If you want a cause, go join the Peace Corps.
It's NOT piracy. Far, far too many people in this discussion are using the word piracy to refer to people who use software in violation of its license agreement. This is not piracy, it is theft. Piracy is illegally boarding ships at sea, killing or enslaving the crew and passengers, and stealing the cargo. It involves guns and knives, lots of threats, and usually murder. If you hear the word for that used to describe the crappy little offense of license violation, eventually you'll come to think the penalties for both should be the same. Don't get me wrong; stealing software is wrong. But it sure ain't piracy.
While we're on the subject of misleading semantics, please don't use the word "win" to refer to Microsoft's products. If you feel compelled to use shorthand for "windows" use "w" or "lose." Do not associate the idea of victory with Microsoft's product. Do it often enough and you and those who read your posts will subconsciously hear Microsoft and think "it's a win!" It sounds silly, but it's true. Words have meaning; connotation is important. Say what you mean and nobody will be confused.
The standard for how buggy a piece of software may be and still be releasable is the market. If people will buy your product in sufficient numbers for the project to be profitable, there were sufficiently few bugs at release time. This is also known as the Microsoft Lemma, as a reminder of the folks who lowered the bar for everyone.
(This text is here in an effort to prevent this post from being considered filled with junk and rejected. Please ignore it and bitch to CowboyNeal that his "lameness filter" fails to catch first ports, hot grits, all your base, and natalie portman garbage but somehow rejects this perfectly valid and even fairly on-topic post. Thanks for nothing, CowboyNeal.)
is really no different from
foo...
baz:
if (some_condition)
COME FROM foo;
At least Intercal folks realize their language is a joke, I don't think Sun have caught on yet.
Tell me: if "circumvention devices" are prohibited by law, then why does the copy prevention scheme need to be secure? After all, the RIAA has convinced Congress to wield the force of the gun on its behalf against the citizenry. And, if copy prevention schemes were secure, why would a law against "circumvention devices" be needed? Surely, a proper implementation could not be "circumvented" anyway.
I realize, of course, that this is somewhat orthogonal to the other issue here, which is simply freedom of the press. As a reasonably intelligent non-lawyer, it seems obvious to me that the supreme court would find that this law and the first amendment are in direct opposition. What I can't understand is why nobody has brought one of these cases before it. And this one would be a great choice; it doesn't involve any element of evil on the part of the defendants.
green means different things to different people. To me it means first that the cost of every product should reflect not only how much money it took the producer to produce it, but also the cost of cleaning up the mess that third parties are left with as a result of both its consumption and its production.
Great! I would like you, then, to estimate the cost of everything you buy using that methodology and pay the difference between that price and the price it's been marked at to one or more organizations that are doing said cleanup work. Accordingly, when you buy a gallon of gasoline for $2, I expect you to send the Sierra Club or some similar organization $5. When you pay your $50 electric bill, I expect you to send $80 to repair damaged river systems. And so on. If you are doing this already, I applaud your honesty and integrity (though I question your intelligence). If you are not, then begone with you, for you are nothing but a hypocrite. Do not expect others to pay when you are not yourself willing.
I'm living in California...the reason for the so-called electricity crisis is none other than hypocrisy. Those who oppose the construction of generation facilities should have their power turned off first. When that law is passed, I expect very little opposition to such construction. In a democracy, it's easy to protest this and that without it having much effect on you personally, because you know that if your viewpoint makes it into law, the vast majority of the cost will be borne by others (who may or may not agree with you) simply because there are more people who are not you (millions) than who are (1). When the minority of complainers suddenly has to foot the entire bill for its ideals the game changes - suddenly a "social conscience" isn't so popular a thing to have.
This is a fundamental problem with the type of government most advanced nations have. I don't have a real solution (well, I do, but it involves replacing this form of government with a much different one). In the meantime, it might be of interest to consider that the externalities usually thought to be the reason environmental damage occurs in the first place are just as much an issue in the fight against it. After all, how much does it cost you to protest the construction of an electricity generation facility? How much does it cost others when your protest succeeds? That scenario is the definition of an externality.
Your product is on Oracle. That means you've got 0 resistance from Fortune 1000 companies that generally have standardized on Oracle and have the DBAs
and servers set up already.
They would not have to purchase, set up, or support the database regardless of what it was. The database is integrated into the solution. If we were selling a product that worked with databases, your agrument would make perfect sense - in fact it would make the most sense to use odbc or jdbc or at least provide adapters for several databases.
I agree with you until the last sentence. Oracle will never be Free software, nor even free software. But it surely is a giant heap of rotting dung. The reason they can charge so much for it is that they have convinced people who have money to burn that they need it. This, not coincidentally, is the exact same reason Microsoft sells products to people who subsequently swear at them for a year and then budget even more for licenses the next. The ability to convince stupid people that they need something is the real license to print money.
At the small silicon valley company where I work, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, we (well, the bigwigs, of course, I'm not this brain-damaged) have decided to base our offerings at least initially on oracle rather than one of the myriad Free and non-Free alternatives simply because the thinking is that customers would think it odd if we used anything else. Never mind that other databases cost less and perform better, and the the database is in our case invisible to the customer. It's just that silly. I shit you not.
This gets to the fundamental thing people don't understand about measuring the abilities of computers. There are two ways to measure the capability of a systems: speed, and power. They are related but not closely. See, a 5-year-old SparcCenter 2000E with 20 quite slow CPUs and a few gigs of memory is more powerful than the latest and greatest dual 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 peecee and will almost certainly remain more powerful than even the most expensive and fancy peecee for many years to come.
More powerful. Not necessarily faster. Power measures how much work it is possible for the machine to do in a given amount of time. Power is a general measure that assumes you are running a wide variety of different kinds of jobs, or perhaps a large number of similar ones. When measuring power, you must assume that the load of a system should be at least 0.9 per CPU all the time, and that large amounts of data may need to be moved around. Moving data and sustaining high loads for long periods of time without degradation of responsiveness is an indication of power. That SC2000E can serve many millions of pages a day without breaking a sweat. That's power.
Speed, on the other hand, is a concrete measure of the time it takes to run a certain single linear task, such as a kernel compilation or serving a single page to a single client. This measure rarely places any premium on scalability or the ability to move data. Instead, this measure is typically dependent on the speed of the single fastest CPU in the system. Peecees have great speed - the CPUs are clocked very high and execute very complex instructions. Sun systems do not generally fare very well in this area, especially compared to cost.
The design goals of a Sun are evident from the specifications of the systems - buses are wide, not fast. Latencies can be quite high. CPUs are clocked fairly low and execute simple instructions. The system is designed to allow tremendous throughput - power. Load up on memory, disk controllers and storage, and CPUs, and the huge buses will deliver data well as the load rises. For a web server, for example, serving a single page to a single client is fairly slow compared to a machine with greater speed - remember, a single linear task. But serving one more page beyond the 5000 already being served is where the Sun will really shine. The peecee's memory bus will be saturated quickly; it is clocked fast - much faster than the memory itself in most cases - but is fairly narrow, and the system buses contain bottlenecks. The system was designed for speed, not power. The Sun, meanwhile, can serve the 5001st page nearly as quickly as the 1st. That is the difference between speed and power. The inability or unwillingness to understand the difference between the two is the *only* reason there are peecees in server rooms.
Every system has certain design goals. Peecees and peecee-like systems are designed for single linear tasks - the kind you find desktop computers generally do. Because people - especially traditional nontechnical peecee users - generally do not multitask very well, there is no sense designing their architecture for power. Instead, designing for speed makes more sense. In the server room, however, the exact opposite is true. Unless you're expecting very light use of services, the speed of a system is meaningless; power should be the main design criterion. Using an architecture designed for a completely different problem space just because it happens to look cheap (I won't even start on TCO issues with peecee servers...) is entirely inappropriate. I would fire a sysadmin who recommended peecees for a server environment.
and solaris is a bloated pig.
Yep. For systems with four or fewer CPUs I generally recommend linux. Linux on Suns is as stable as solaris if not more so, and the scalability issues don't generally come into play until 6-8 CPUs or so (with recent kernels). For larger configurations, the very design characteristics that make solaris such a dog on smaller boxes make it outperform linux. It all depends on the goals of the system. In most cases, a larger number of smaller systems is more reliable, less expensive, and more responsive than a small number of large systems. Thus, for example, a web server farm might be better designed as a load balancer and 16 Sun 420s running Linux than as a single E6500 running solaris. But that's another issue altogether...
Nope. And there is no comparison between a Pentium Anything and a quad-CPU Sun, even if it's the lowly Ultra 80. As a web server, the only quad-CPU Sun box in the same class an any peecee is a sparcstation 20...and I'd rather have the 20. What a crock.
Now, if they want to blame solaris for poor performance, I might be willing to listen. There's nothing wrong with the hardware.
As far as I'm concerned they can provide support, or no support, for isa, pci, vme, usb, 1394, sbus, qbus, xbus, nubus, scsi, or the fucking school bus. What Microsoft and the peecee makers do has no impact on my life. The isolation is lovely, I'd encourage all of you to try it some time. Life is short - use a workstation.
BTW, have you taken a look at Linux stock lately... Teehee
Well, I assume you know well enough to mean "stock of companies specializing in Linux products and services." But even so, this really hurts you more than it helps you. Stock price is a meaningless indication of value - it reflects neither present earnings nor expected future earnings, and certainly not the inherent value of the technology. Yes, most companies working with Linux have lost a large portion of their market cap lately - but so has Microsoft, and so have many technology companies, even large ones like Cisco, that have little or nothing to do with Linux. So while you are free to take pleasure in the financial losses of others - especially those foolish enough to buy stocks at prices thousands of times the expected earnings five years in the future - it doesn't really strengthen your argument. It mostly makes you look ignorant and manipulative.
If you think BSD is better than Linux, fine. I remember when the BSD people, if they even talked about Linux, would preach to the choir about the technical advantages of BSD, and say almost nothing publicly. It made the wild-eyed Linux advocates, many of whom were non-technical, look like fools when they were actually confronted with technical arguments. I really miss those days; now it seems that many BSD advocates don't even remember why their OS is better. Now they talk about stock prices...what a shame.
Just out of curiosity, how many people are at your site?
About 60-70 people and maybe 100 hosts. Not large, but bigger than a home network too.
I assume you're using it as a stateful firewall? Does it work well?
Yes I am and yes it does. The established/related rules haven't shown any problems over about a month, and both active and passive ftp work (a minor miracle after some past experiences). We aren't using any other protocols that really take advantage of statefulness, although something like traceroute could if a module existed for it.
Well, I am using netfilter as a production firewall. It replaced a $25,000 piece of software from Firewall1. I haven't heard any complaints, nor have I had any crashes or break-ins. It's got my vote for you-can-stake-your-job-on-it status. Definitely not crap - a significant improvement over ipchains. I've been impressed with the flexibility and power of the architecture. Sure, it would be nice to have a few more modules for some oddball protocols, but what's there already is plenty for normal use.
every linux user knows how unstable the GUI (x) can be.....
This varies greatly from one piece of display hardware to the next...on Sun systems, XFree is rock solid for months at a time. Probably the only problems happen on peecee systems, especially on hardware you bought without checking the vendor's policies on making documentation available. It's hardly a shock when a driver written without documentation crashes...it's really a shock that it works at all. Use a Sun and you won't have these problems.
If you are, as I am, a fan of the stainless steel rat series, you'll recall that DiGriz very often encountered ridiculous numbers of bugs, with incredible capabilities. Yet he always got around them. And in one particular instance, he based his reasoning on the sound idea that "the entire city could not be bugged, and indeed, there was no reason to do so." On that same planet (a very paranoid planet indeed), he later noted that the hotel he was staying in was *too* well bugged - there was no possible way for anyone to use all the data being collected. In fact the monitoring facilities were entirely inadequate and he escaped easily.
There's something to be learned here - overbugging does little good. From a purely physical standpoint, there are limits both to how much one camera can capture and to how densely they can be packed. If you have enough cameras, all anybody does is stand around watching each other...QCIC indeed.
Cameras as used in Britain play to people's longing for a sense of security. The security that was once provided by strong family and community ties, honest work, and common decency is now sought from government. Big shocker there...you want freedom, accept the diminished security. It's not a simple tradeoff, of course, get it right and you maximize both simultaneously. Take the approach people in most countries take today, and you end up with none of either. Scared little mice scurrying around in search of a few crumbs left behind by the cat and praying to a God they forgot long ago that said cat doesn't come around and kill them all.
Regardless of whether 50 or 50 million people use fooBSD, they're all damn fine operating systems. The code quality is much better than anything else out there, and that includes Linux.
That said, I seriously doubt your figures. They seem highly pessimistic at best - how would Theo know how many people use his OS; there are dozens of mirrors and download statistics are misleading anyway; some people download but never install and others may mirror locally and install numeroud copies. Any figures about usage of a freely available OS are misleading at best.
Don't like BSD? Don't use it. No skin off my teeth. In fact, there's a lot to be said for an OS which is hacked on by 100% of its user base.
That's emulation - though not in the original sense of the word. It's very much in the same way as Linux on Sparc supports SunOS binaries. Given that it's BSD, I'm guessing it was done better, but it's still "kernel emulation."
is why one would want to run Netscape Communicator on anything. It's unusably unstable on all platforms...I can't imagine how bad it is under emulation...
How is Oracle any cheaper or more open sourced that SQL Server?
You're assuming I'm the usual slashdot fuckwit who screams Open Source the World at the top of his lungs. My selection criteria are much more rational. Oracle is faster, more robust, and runs on more platforms (most of which are vastly more scalable and reliable) than Microsoft's database. All other things being equal - and they pretty much are if it's between Oracle and the Microsoft database - I'll definitely take the better product.
Unfortunately the poster didn't say anything about what their database needs are - what the access patterns will be, how much load is expected, how much data needs to be stored, how much expansion capability they need, and so on. So saying that he is a genius/idiot for wanting to use one database over another is foolish. For the moment we must assume that his requirements are such that MySQL is appropriate and/or that the Microsoft "SQL" server is not, and either answer his question or ignore it. If the requirements are such that MySQL is *not* appropriate, then probably either PostgreSQL or Oracle is. In any case, the debate is not over whether MySQL is appropriate, because we just can't know based on what's been posted.
As we've come to expect from Intel, they are doing a tremendous amount of R&D in their fab labs. Intel has some of the best fabrication technology in the business (perhaps only IBM's is better). But when's the last time you heard of Intel actually doing anything revolutionary with that fab technology? That would be 1975. Since then they've only made the same processor over and over again. Seems like such a shame to let all this technology go to waste producing the same processors they made when they launched the company... Will the new IA64 technology be any better? Maybe. Early returns from people working on the architecture seem to indicate that it's just as much of a bitch to work with as x86, but perhaps it's too early to tell. Of course, that technology is 2 years late already anyway.
While this is a cool idea, I think I'd rather have an OpenBoot implementation. That would take a nice chunk out of the suckiness of peecees. Unfortunately it also requires duplicating a good portion of the work that has already been done in linux - ie writing drivers for the various bootable devices, since unlike in a real OBP system they will not have their own fcode drivers and must be emulated. Still, the knowledge they are building for this could later be used for something like that. Basically instead of booting linux, they would bring up an ok prompt. Alternately, I suppose, one could simply write a userland OBP emulator and run that as init. Then much of the work could be eliminated. Why OBP? It's a nice environment, and a familiar one for many people.
Slashdot Mirror
People will use whatever the media tells them to use...and businesses who use better software should have a competitive advantage over those who use crap. I doubt Mr. Mundie has ever used Linux, so who cares what he thinks? If he wants to use an inferior product, we should all snicker at him quietly and move on. Enough of this feeding frenzy.
Take a step back from the brink, folks; if you just want a stable, reliable, high-performance OS, Linux is a great choice. If you want a cause, go join the Peace Corps.
Mozilla 0.8.1 with psm has worked fine for me, 128 bit mode and all.
While we're on the subject of misleading semantics, please don't use the word "win" to refer to Microsoft's products. If you feel compelled to use shorthand for "windows" use "w" or "lose." Do not associate the idea of victory with Microsoft's product. Do it often enough and you and those who read your posts will subconsciously hear Microsoft and think "it's a win!" It sounds silly, but it's true. Words have meaning; connotation is important. Say what you mean and nobody will be confused.
The standard for how buggy a piece of software may be and still be releasable is the market. If people will buy your product in sufficient numbers for the project to be profitable, there were sufficiently few bugs at release time. This is also known as the Microsoft Lemma, as a reminder of the folks who lowered the bar for everyone.
...You need to have COME FROM, gotos are for wussies who need their hands held...
Oh, you mean exceptions. After all,
try {
foo...
} catch (SomeExceptionType baz) {
try_to_recover_from_baz...
}
(This text is here in an effort to prevent this post from being considered filled with junk and rejected. Please ignore it and bitch to CowboyNeal that his "lameness filter" fails to catch first ports, hot grits, all your base, and natalie portman garbage but somehow rejects this perfectly valid and even fairly on-topic post. Thanks for nothing, CowboyNeal.)
is really no different from
foo...
baz:
if (some_condition)
COME FROM foo;
At least Intercal folks realize their language is a joke, I don't think Sun have caught on yet.
I realize, of course, that this is somewhat orthogonal to the other issue here, which is simply freedom of the press. As a reasonably intelligent non-lawyer, it seems obvious to me that the supreme court would find that this law and the first amendment are in direct opposition. What I can't understand is why nobody has brought one of these cases before it. And this one would be a great choice; it doesn't involve any element of evil on the part of the defendants.
Great! I would like you, then, to estimate the cost of everything you buy using that methodology and pay the difference between that price and the price it's been marked at to one or more organizations that are doing said cleanup work. Accordingly, when you buy a gallon of gasoline for $2, I expect you to send the Sierra Club or some similar organization $5. When you pay your $50 electric bill, I expect you to send $80 to repair damaged river systems. And so on. If you are doing this already, I applaud your honesty and integrity (though I question your intelligence). If you are not, then begone with you, for you are nothing but a hypocrite. Do not expect others to pay when you are not yourself willing.
I'm living in California...the reason for the so-called electricity crisis is none other than hypocrisy. Those who oppose the construction of generation facilities should have their power turned off first. When that law is passed, I expect very little opposition to such construction. In a democracy, it's easy to protest this and that without it having much effect on you personally, because you know that if your viewpoint makes it into law, the vast majority of the cost will be borne by others (who may or may not agree with you) simply because there are more people who are not you (millions) than who are (1). When the minority of complainers suddenly has to foot the entire bill for its ideals the game changes - suddenly a "social conscience" isn't so popular a thing to have.
This is a fundamental problem with the type of government most advanced nations have. I don't have a real solution (well, I do, but it involves replacing this form of government with a much different one). In the meantime, it might be of interest to consider that the externalities usually thought to be the reason environmental damage occurs in the first place are just as much an issue in the fight against it. After all, how much does it cost you to protest the construction of an electricity generation facility? How much does it cost others when your protest succeeds? That scenario is the definition of an externality.
They would not have to purchase, set up, or support the database regardless of what it was. The database is integrated into the solution. If we were selling a product that worked with databases, your agrument would make perfect sense - in fact it would make the most sense to use odbc or jdbc or at least provide adapters for several databases.
At the small silicon valley company where I work, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, we (well, the bigwigs, of course, I'm not this brain-damaged) have decided to base our offerings at least initially on oracle rather than one of the myriad Free and non-Free alternatives simply because the thinking is that customers would think it odd if we used anything else. Never mind that other databases cost less and perform better, and the the database is in our case invisible to the customer. It's just that silly. I shit you not.
This gets to the fundamental thing people don't understand about measuring the abilities of computers. There are two ways to measure the capability of a systems: speed, and power. They are related but not closely. See, a 5-year-old SparcCenter 2000E with 20 quite slow CPUs and a few gigs of memory is more powerful than the latest and greatest dual 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 peecee and will almost certainly remain more powerful than even the most expensive and fancy peecee for many years to come.
More powerful. Not necessarily faster. Power measures how much work it is possible for the machine to do in a given amount of time. Power is a general measure that assumes you are running a wide variety of different kinds of jobs, or perhaps a large number of similar ones. When measuring power, you must assume that the load of a system should be at least 0.9 per CPU all the time, and that large amounts of data may need to be moved around. Moving data and sustaining high loads for long periods of time without degradation of responsiveness is an indication of power. That SC2000E can serve many millions of pages a day without breaking a sweat. That's power.
Speed, on the other hand, is a concrete measure of the time it takes to run a certain single linear task, such as a kernel compilation or serving a single page to a single client. This measure rarely places any premium on scalability or the ability to move data. Instead, this measure is typically dependent on the speed of the single fastest CPU in the system. Peecees have great speed - the CPUs are clocked very high and execute very complex instructions. Sun systems do not generally fare very well in this area, especially compared to cost.
The design goals of a Sun are evident from the specifications of the systems - buses are wide, not fast. Latencies can be quite high. CPUs are clocked fairly low and execute simple instructions. The system is designed to allow tremendous throughput - power. Load up on memory, disk controllers and storage, and CPUs, and the huge buses will deliver data well as the load rises. For a web server, for example, serving a single page to a single client is fairly slow compared to a machine with greater speed - remember, a single linear task. But serving one more page beyond the 5000 already being served is where the Sun will really shine. The peecee's memory bus will be saturated quickly; it is clocked fast - much faster than the memory itself in most cases - but is fairly narrow, and the system buses contain bottlenecks. The system was designed for speed, not power. The Sun, meanwhile, can serve the 5001st page nearly as quickly as the 1st. That is the difference between speed and power. The inability or unwillingness to understand the difference between the two is the *only* reason there are peecees in server rooms.
Every system has certain design goals. Peecees and peecee-like systems are designed for single linear tasks - the kind you find desktop computers generally do. Because people - especially traditional nontechnical peecee users - generally do not multitask very well, there is no sense designing their architecture for power. Instead, designing for speed makes more sense. In the server room, however, the exact opposite is true. Unless you're expecting very light use of services, the speed of a system is meaningless; power should be the main design criterion. Using an architecture designed for a completely different problem space just because it happens to look cheap (I won't even start on TCO issues with peecee servers...) is entirely inappropriate. I would fire a sysadmin who recommended peecees for a server environment.
and solaris is a bloated pig.
Yep. For systems with four or fewer CPUs I generally recommend linux. Linux on Suns is as stable as solaris if not more so, and the scalability issues don't generally come into play until 6-8 CPUs or so (with recent kernels). For larger configurations, the very design characteristics that make solaris such a dog on smaller boxes make it outperform linux. It all depends on the goals of the system. In most cases, a larger number of smaller systems is more reliable, less expensive, and more responsive than a small number of large systems. Thus, for example, a web server farm might be better designed as a load balancer and 16 Sun 420s running Linux than as a single E6500 running solaris. But that's another issue altogether...
Nope. And there is no comparison between a Pentium Anything and a quad-CPU Sun, even if it's the lowly Ultra 80. As a web server, the only quad-CPU Sun box in the same class an any peecee is a sparcstation 20...and I'd rather have the 20. What a crock.
Now, if they want to blame solaris for poor performance, I might be willing to listen. There's nothing wrong with the hardware.
As far as I'm concerned they can provide support, or no support, for isa, pci, vme, usb, 1394, sbus, qbus, xbus, nubus, scsi, or the fucking school bus. What Microsoft and the peecee makers do has no impact on my life. The isolation is lovely, I'd encourage all of you to try it some time. Life is short - use a workstation.
The "lzip" is actually a jpeg of a stuffed monkey and some bananas...takes all kinds I guess. :-)
Well, I assume you know well enough to mean "stock of companies specializing in Linux products and services." But even so, this really hurts you more than it helps you. Stock price is a meaningless indication of value - it reflects neither present earnings nor expected future earnings, and certainly not the inherent value of the technology. Yes, most companies working with Linux have lost a large portion of their market cap lately - but so has Microsoft, and so have many technology companies, even large ones like Cisco, that have little or nothing to do with Linux. So while you are free to take pleasure in the financial losses of others - especially those foolish enough to buy stocks at prices thousands of times the expected earnings five years in the future - it doesn't really strengthen your argument. It mostly makes you look ignorant and manipulative.
If you think BSD is better than Linux, fine. I remember when the BSD people, if they even talked about Linux, would preach to the choir about the technical advantages of BSD, and say almost nothing publicly. It made the wild-eyed Linux advocates, many of whom were non-technical, look like fools when they were actually confronted with technical arguments. I really miss those days; now it seems that many BSD advocates don't even remember why their OS is better. Now they talk about stock prices...what a shame.
About 60-70 people and maybe 100 hosts. Not large, but bigger than a home network too.
I assume you're using it as a stateful firewall? Does it work well?
Yes I am and yes it does. The established/related rules haven't shown any problems over about a month, and both active and passive ftp work (a minor miracle after some past experiences). We aren't using any other protocols that really take advantage of statefulness, although something like traceroute could if a module existed for it.
Well, I am using netfilter as a production firewall. It replaced a $25,000 piece of software from Firewall1. I haven't heard any complaints, nor have I had any crashes or break-ins. It's got my vote for you-can-stake-your-job-on-it status. Definitely not crap - a significant improvement over ipchains. I've been impressed with the flexibility and power of the architecture. Sure, it would be nice to have a few more modules for some oddball protocols, but what's there already is plenty for normal use.
This varies greatly from one piece of display hardware to the next...on Sun systems, XFree is rock solid for months at a time. Probably the only problems happen on peecee systems, especially on hardware you bought without checking the vendor's policies on making documentation available. It's hardly a shock when a driver written without documentation crashes...it's really a shock that it works at all. Use a Sun and you won't have these problems.
There's something to be learned here - overbugging does little good. From a purely physical standpoint, there are limits both to how much one camera can capture and to how densely they can be packed. If you have enough cameras, all anybody does is stand around watching each other...QCIC indeed.
Cameras as used in Britain play to people's longing for a sense of security. The security that was once provided by strong family and community ties, honest work, and common decency is now sought from government. Big shocker there...you want freedom, accept the diminished security. It's not a simple tradeoff, of course, get it right and you maximize both simultaneously. Take the approach people in most countries take today, and you end up with none of either. Scared little mice scurrying around in search of a few crumbs left behind by the cat and praying to a God they forgot long ago that said cat doesn't come around and kill them all.
Regardless of whether 50 or 50 million people use fooBSD, they're all damn fine operating systems. The code quality is much better than anything else out there, and that includes Linux.
That said, I seriously doubt your figures. They seem highly pessimistic at best - how would Theo know how many people use his OS; there are dozens of mirrors and download statistics are misleading anyway; some people download but never install and others may mirror locally and install numeroud copies. Any figures about usage of a freely available OS are misleading at best.
Don't like BSD? Don't use it. No skin off my teeth. In fact, there's a lot to be said for an OS which is hacked on by 100% of its user base.
That's emulation - though not in the original sense of the word. It's very much in the same way as Linux on Sparc supports SunOS binaries. Given that it's BSD, I'm guessing it was done better, but it's still "kernel emulation."
is why one would want to run Netscape Communicator on anything. It's unusably unstable on all platforms...I can't imagine how bad it is under emulation...
You're assuming I'm the usual slashdot fuckwit who screams Open Source the World at the top of his lungs. My selection criteria are much more rational. Oracle is faster, more robust, and runs on more platforms (most of which are vastly more scalable and reliable) than Microsoft's database. All other things being equal - and they pretty much are if it's between Oracle and the Microsoft database - I'll definitely take the better product.
Unfortunately the poster didn't say anything about what their database needs are - what the access patterns will be, how much load is expected, how much data needs to be stored, how much expansion capability they need, and so on. So saying that he is a genius/idiot for wanting to use one database over another is foolish. For the moment we must assume that his requirements are such that MySQL is appropriate and/or that the Microsoft "SQL" server is not, and either answer his question or ignore it. If the requirements are such that MySQL is *not* appropriate, then probably either PostgreSQL or Oracle is. In any case, the debate is not over whether MySQL is appropriate, because we just can't know based on what's been posted.
As we've come to expect from Intel, they are doing a tremendous amount of R&D in their fab labs. Intel has some of the best fabrication technology in the business (perhaps only IBM's is better). But when's the last time you heard of Intel actually doing anything revolutionary with that fab technology? That would be 1975. Since then they've only made the same processor over and over again. Seems like such a shame to let all this technology go to waste producing the same processors they made when they launched the company... Will the new IA64 technology be any better? Maybe. Early returns from people working on the architecture seem to indicate that it's just as much of a bitch to work with as x86, but perhaps it's too early to tell. Of course, that technology is 2 years late already anyway.
While this is a cool idea, I think I'd rather have an OpenBoot implementation. That would take a nice chunk out of the suckiness of peecees. Unfortunately it also requires duplicating a good portion of the work that has already been done in linux - ie writing drivers for the various bootable devices, since unlike in a real OBP system they will not have their own fcode drivers and must be emulated. Still, the knowledge they are building for this could later be used for something like that. Basically instead of booting linux, they would bring up an ok prompt. Alternately, I suppose, one could simply write a userland OBP emulator and run that as init. Then much of the work could be eliminated. Why OBP? It's a nice environment, and a familiar one for many people.