I must say, Linuxworld proves to be much more interesting than/. as for posted newslinks. (but the discussion on/. is more interesting).
But on topic: I had the pleasure to work with VM/ESA on top of which was running another IBM Mainframe OS, VSE/ESA. Several coipes of VSE were runnning at any time. And we of course started additional ones, for testing of programs. And the uptime was incredible!!! We had an entire disk unit *destroyed* (filings of the hard disk material flying around), but the system was still happily humming on. Very impressive.
Also, did you guys know that OS/2 was developed partly by running it on top of VM? I think these mainframes + VM are the coolest technology to come out of IBM, if we don't count the bionic chip coming out in 2015:o)
yep, I did, and, funny thing, I used a mirror that was posted on this thread!!! So, dude, just read slashdot if you want to find out the best mirrors:o)))
note: this is not stricly related to this post, it (unfortunately) may apply to many other appeared on/.
Are Mozilla developers missing the point of open source (implying open security bugs) or are they under pressure from Netscape? Tell Mozilla developers what you think.
OK, so why do we al have to think the same? The country where I came from had a bitter fight for DEMOCRACY, which means, we don't have to all think, speak and act alike. Freedom of thought, freedom of expression etc. So, please, don't imply we will all tell Netscape that they don't get it, because, shock horror, we are not an army that is under the command of the/. generals.
sorry if this is offtopic, I think it had to be said, sooner or later.
Really? Netscape crushed? Last time I checked they were still viable, although its now rolled into AOL(yeah, like they're really any better than MS) If Microsoft chooses to give software away they are crushing other companies, but if others give software away thats OK.
OK, I know you pro-MS guys would say anything to amke MS look better, but this BULLSHIT is a bit too much: to state MS did not crush Netscape. Well, MS only choke the mostimportant source of revenue for Netscape, effectively causing it to fall under an almos-as-slimy corporation as AOL.
And how did MS choke Netscape's main source of revenue? (yes I have to write this, too, because I guesspro-MS guys will ask it)? By (not only) developing and giving a good quality browser away for free (because MS has a LOT of cash that they can throw away for such purposes); and even PUTTING such browser in every Windows shipped with every PC in the world.
Please, spare us the BS that not even you believe.
I will not list all the things MS is guilty of. I will rather let my fantasy flow in the direction on how would I punish that evil corporation.
So, IMO, opening up the source of windows-es is not enough, because we know MS will try to give us the code that is not totally valid ("oh, you meant the source of THAT version of Windows? We thought you meant Windows 3.0 - OK, OK,..." repeat previous 10.000 times). Or they will edit the sources so that the comments are missing. Or they will flatly forge it.
Breaking Microsoft up won't work, either. They have been preparing themselves for this since about 2 years. They have formed the communication paths between an OS and an application company to be. A vertical breakup (two or more smaller microsofts, which would compete among each other) won't work for the same reason, and then once the breakup is complete, these mini-microsofts will focus on either the OS, or one application.
Federal monitoring of their activities? That will never work, or it will work as well as the UN monitoring of the Iraq nuclear and bio-weapons labs.
So what, then? Well, here is my proposal (apply ALL themeasures in the list):
- Fine them to pay US$ 100 bln, to be distributed to MS products licensees. For home users, that would amount to approximately a grand/person.
-All the upper management jailed to serve sentences of 20 to 40 years, depending on their position. Alchin would get 30, Gates and Ballamr get 40 (each). VPs would get 25, etc.
-The word "Microsoft" would be fobidden from use on posters, T-shirts and other advertisements, and placed in the same cathegory as the symbols of the Nazy era.
-Federal agents would break into the Microsoft premises, and remove the material with the source code. It would be published in it's entirety, on the Internet, with possibly many mirrors, with noone holding the license rights. Or maybe something like the BSD would be ok. (MS will be forced, of course, to renounce to any copyrights).
-the MS campus in Redmond would be transformed into "The Museum of Monopoly" (I like this one) and the upkeep will be payd by the Bill Gates foundation (I like this even more) forever.
The current MS employees (the ones that didn't make it to the jail) will have the option to work in the Museum of Monopoly. It means, the janitors will be pretty much in place, the only problem are those people who made all those buggy products. (Add Access 2000 to the list of "most buggy")
OK, I have my flame-protector suit on, go ahead:o)
Why Dallas in particular? I have been to Dallas (Irving, actually, but moved around so saw a bit of it all) and I could get a job in Dallas at a big and succesfull company that many admire. I already do work for them but in another location. I would never accept to work in Dallas and, I believe, in Texas in general BUT THIS IS JUST MY OPINION and I really would appreciate to see what is attractive about Dallas. Thanks.
AFAIK, they sell OpenLinux 2.3, eServer 2.3 (and that one seems to be very cool, kernel tuned for server performance, hardware RAID compiled into kernel, the whole binary stuff compiled for Pentium Pro or better CPU, Webmin and much more), OpenLinux 2.3 Powerbundle and NetWare for Linux. Also, there is stuff like OpenLinux T-shirt etc. And there is a comprehensive Linux courseware which is non-distro specific, which is Good(tm). They are also selling some OpenLnux books.
Actually, your statement does stand, but Caldera inc. is not the company going IPO! CALD is the ticker symbol of Calderasystems, which also belongs undr Caldera inc.
So, DrDOS is not owned by the company we are talking about here (which is Calderasystems).
Another thing: DrDOS is at version 7.03, and there has been developement in the last 2 years, relative to multitasking.
It has now been decided (as far as I know, have read it somewhere but forgot where) that there will be no more developement on it. But that's a decision Lineo took recently.
Actually, Calderasystems, which is the one going IPO, has nothing to do with DrDOS. DrDOS belongs to Lineo, the thin-client company. However, that's not their future, either, since Lineo is planning to get rid of DrDOS and concentrate on Linux for embedded devices. So, they seem to be planning to give it away completely. You can actually download DrDOS for free already, and use it for non-commercial purposes.
So what if Forbes published that article, does it mean it's truth?
Caldera has a lot of nice stuff done for Linux, a lot of networking, and they published COAS and Lizard opensource. That's not nothing. Without the networking it has today, Linux wouldn't have been succesful at all. Also, read this: "Troll Tech would like to thank CEO Ransom Love and all the other good people at Caldera Systems who have helped in many ways during the creation of the QPL. Their backing and feedback have been invaluable during the process of making Qt Open Source."
This is just a bunch of biased personal opinions, expecially the Forbes article.
They (and you) claim that Caldera has not contributed anything to the community. This is not true: they contributed and continue to do so, a lot of neat networking stuff in IP and IPX protocols. Also, they made NetWare for Linux (which is not like mars, but has a fully functional NDS v 4.x), an NDS client for Linux, ported Netscape FastTrack server to Linux, made Lizard and COAS available opensource...
I think these are important things. Caldera has contributed to the Linux community quite a lot, actually.
As someone already noted, NetWare 5 has been around quite some time now. Actually, it came out in september 1998, a few weeks before the actual schedule. You could immediately toy around with a free double CD package, containing NetWare 5, the clients, the Internet services etc, and a 3-user license. So, you could hook up 3 client machines to your NetWare 5 server, and all this was given away for free. Current CNEs also received a Student Kit and an exam voucher (for the NetWare 4.x to 5 Update) for free! The Student Kit alone is worth at least 500US$. So, I believe these are pretty favorable conditions for passing an exam.
I must admit I like much more the vendor-neutral courses offered by Caldera, and the certificate offered by LPI, than RedHats proprietary (as in RedHat Linux-specific) course and certification. Finally there is a powerful, customizable, flexible, non-proprietary open-source OS, and I don't want to be a RedHat-specific engineer. If nothing else, I never liked RedHat Linux, dunno why, I still prefere Slackware.
OK, I am not saying Intel doesn't actually have a 1 GHz PIII. They probably have, but vary, very few pieces. The yield to get such silicone is low at House Intel, which means they will have one or none ! GHz chips per wafer. Probably less, judging from the "ease" you can buy a 800 MHz PIII.
And maybe Intel can even afford to sell such rare silicon for about US$ 1000, efecctively losing on the deal. They can afford it because, well, they still have money to throw away. Being the first to cross the 1 GHz barrier is probably worth it.
BUT do they really think people are going to drink the story this time? Ask Gateway, that got seriously burnt with Intel. I think NOT! It's to damn obvious Intel doesn't have enough 1 giga, or even enough 800 MHz silicone. Itäs so obvious that the marketeering with the "first to giga" won't work. It just won't, no matter what Intel does, they can't cause a collective brain damage to their potential customers. Oh, wait, Microsoft has been doing this for years, and people are still buying the crappier than crapy releases of Win9x...
ICS (as I said in another post) used to be integral part of BorderManager. Novell decided to strip off the admirable manageability of BorderManager, but improved the performance, and that's ICS. Of course, BorderManager had much more features, and it's still sold separately, but ICS is sold to VARs like IBM and Compaq.
Look at the performance the Comaq box is sporting! It's purely amazing!! Obviously, Compaq's many years of cooperation with Novell, and the many NetWare drivers they have developed, helped them for the ICS appliance, too. Let me remind you that ICS actually runs on NetWare (but without NDS).
Novell's ICS did pretty damn well! I still remember when ICS was part of BorderManager. It showed very good potential, and incredibly flexible. You can't find such a configurable caching solution anywhere! Now, I believe ICS has stripped down conffigurability, but upped the performane.
The only reason I said what Isaid is because it's what I have experienced, and that's for me the truth. To have an NT-only network is stupid. I work for over 5 years now with networks. I am a MCNE (Master CNE) and a MCSE, too. Yep, got the pesky MCSE certificate to prove to our customers (when I worked for a systems integrator) that I know that stuff. Funny thing was, there were several MCSEs and some MCPs in my company, and only 2 CNEs, including me. The MCSE people were those who had to drive from time to time, to the NT-only customers. Those networks needed constant maintainance, and usually 2 MCSEs had to go to the site. Usually the NT servers had to be rebooted weekly, if not dayly. The worst thing was when an NT server with NTFS (Microsoft's version of a journaled FS) would crash. Chances are you have lost your data nad the server was FUBR. I was also managing the network (NetWare+NT+Linux.. yep, we had linux already in 1996 in production) in the company. It was interesting to see an engineer doing something around an NT server everytime I would pass by the server room. The NT servers were like babies needing some direct care, while I could remotely manage the NetWare and the Linux (and a Unixware) servers from my office. NDS sure helped me a lot to manage the NetWare servers, and the firewall (BorderManager, managed throgh NDS). At the time I was quitting, NDS for NT was being rolled out. Wonder if it's there now, helpingthe new guy that is replacing me.
Let me reiterate my point: a pure NT network is a stupid thing. I, however, believe that NT has it's place (flame-shields on) in a corporate network. But guess what? This also might be past tense soon, because Linux is a GREAT application server, and it HAS a lot of applications, databases, Java, webservers, mail anything you want AND NDS! One day NT will be an unwise option.
I am aware of many customers that would not let Linux in the server room if it wasn't possilbe to manage it centrally with NDS. Why? Do you ever think why are so many MCSEs needed? Because to administer an NT network you need a lot of silly NT admins that will run around silly NT boxes that need to be rebooted or administered. NetWare does not need that, hence the little number of CNEs around. A typical CNE will lean back on the chair and happily administer a horrendously huge network composed of NetWare, NT and (since recently) Sun boxes. Thanks to NDS. The companies that are used to keep the administrative expenses low (NOT those having a pure NT network, obviously) didn't want to have to deal with Linux because it's a separate box, unattached to the rest of the NDS tree. Now, Linux has a way into those companies, too. And believe me, those NDS-enabled companies are much more willing to work with Linux than the NT-only companies, for the simple reason that the NT-ony companies have IM departements run by morons.
As another aspect of the same phenomenon, let me tell you why my comapny uses HP-UX systems, instead of SGI or Sun (even though SGI and Sun are pretty big, aren't they). So, I work for this really huge company that has customers wolrdwide. We cannot afford to use Sun or SGI because, even though they are big UNIX vendors, they don't have quite worldwide support. And that is of critical importance for this market. HP has covered the globe pretty well, so you can expect the same level of support in South Africa and in China, UK and Egypt, Russia and USA. And that matters. This is the market Linux can't penetrate now, but it might in the future, thanks to the support of IBM, Novell and HP.
I, too, have been wondering how bad those programmers actually are. They are not motivated to make god code, actually. People will buy their crap anyway, because they muscled out most of the competition, and not on the basis of the quelity of their software. Everyone will agree that they have the best possible marketing, and I would add that they have the best possible strategy in leveraging their monopolistic dominance.
So, as a result, their programmers are not motivated.
I, for one, would not hire someone who worked for Microsoft. Partly because I still feel it's very un-ethical, and partly because I will always be under the impression I have hired someone who coded Winblows98 or Word00.
..or BeIA, as the Internet Appliance version of BeOS is now called. Col stuff, and BeOS runs on it no problem! Tested by the Transmeta guys themselves!
I have a question: you say that your Athlon 550 MHz system is faster than a friends dual Celeron 466 MHz (guess he uses the Abit BP 6). What OS are you and your friend using? I am asking this because NT and Linux have mediocre SMP support. It's pretty hard to take advantage of SMP in these OS-es, so I guess the typical gain of adding a second CPU, in NT, is about 30% (if used as a typical workstation, not server), and Linux w/kernel 2.2 would do about the same (again, working typically as workstation). Now, if I do the math, 466*1.3=606. Taking into consideration Athlon's advanced risc-like core, it becomes clear why your system outperformed your friend's. However, if you were using something like BeOS, which has gains of 70 to 99% with the second CPU, the dual celery would smoke your system bigtime.
So what kind of OS do you guys use? And how did you perform the performance measurements?
Why I am asking: I am planning to buy an Abit BP-6 w/2 Celeron 466 MHz myself, but I need to know whether it makes sense, or should I rather buy an Athlon 550, with the AMD chipset (I don't give a shit about AGP 4X, and the mobo with the AMD chipset is 35 US$ cheaper here in Helsinki!), which is the system you have.
Slashdot Mirror
I must say, Linuxworld proves to be much more interesting than /. as for posted newslinks. (but the discussion on /. is more interesting).
:o)
But on topic: I had the pleasure to work with VM/ESA on top of which was running another IBM Mainframe OS, VSE/ESA. Several coipes of VSE were runnning at any time. And we of course started additional ones, for testing of programs. And the uptime was incredible!!! We had an entire disk unit *destroyed* (filings of the hard disk material flying around), but the system was still happily humming on. Very impressive.
Also, did you guys know that OS/2 was developed partly by running it on top of VM? I think these mainframes + VM are the coolest technology to come out of IBM, if we don't count the bionic chip coming out in 2015
yep, I did, and, funny thing, I used a mirror that was posted on this thread!!! So, dude, just read slashdot if you want to find out the best mirrors :o)))
BeOS rocks!!!!
note: this is not stricly related to this post, it (unfortunately) may apply to many other appeared on /.
/. generals.
Are Mozilla developers missing the point of open source (implying open security bugs) or are they under pressure from Netscape? Tell Mozilla developers what you think.
OK, so why do we al have to think the same? The country where I came from had a bitter fight for DEMOCRACY, which means, we don't have to all think, speak and act alike. Freedom of thought, freedom of expression etc. So, please, don't imply we will all tell Netscape that they don't get it, because, shock horror, we are not an army that is under the command of the
sorry if this is offtopic, I think it had to be said, sooner or later.
Really? Netscape crushed? Last time I checked they were still viable, although its now rolled into AOL(yeah, like they're really any better than MS) If Microsoft chooses to give software away they are crushing other companies, but if others give software away thats OK.
OK, I know you pro-MS guys would say anything to amke MS look better, but this BULLSHIT is a bit too much: to state MS did not crush Netscape. Well, MS only choke the mostimportant source of revenue for Netscape, effectively causing it to fall under an almos-as-slimy corporation as AOL.
And how did MS choke Netscape's main source of revenue? (yes I have to write this, too, because I guesspro-MS guys will ask it)? By (not only) developing and giving a good quality browser away for free (because MS has a LOT of cash that they can throw away for such purposes); and even PUTTING such browser in every Windows shipped with every PC in the world.
Please, spare us the BS that not even you believe.
I will not list all the things MS is guilty of. I will rather let my fantasy flow in the direction on how would I punish that evil corporation.
..." repeat previous 10.000 times). Or they will edit the sources so that the comments are missing. Or they will flatly forge it.
:o)
So, IMO, opening up the source of windows-es is not enough, because we know MS will try to give us the code that is not totally valid ("oh, you meant the source of THAT version of Windows? We thought you meant Windows 3.0 - OK, OK,
Breaking Microsoft up won't work, either. They have been preparing themselves for this since about 2 years. They have formed the communication paths between an OS and an application company to be. A vertical breakup (two or more smaller microsofts, which would compete among each other) won't work for the same reason, and then once the breakup is complete, these mini-microsofts will focus on either the OS, or one application.
Federal monitoring of their activities? That will never work, or it will work as well as the UN monitoring of the Iraq nuclear and bio-weapons labs.
So what, then? Well, here is my proposal (apply ALL themeasures in the list):
- Fine them to pay US$ 100 bln, to be distributed to MS products licensees. For home users, that would amount to approximately a grand/person.
-All the upper management jailed to serve sentences of 20 to 40 years, depending on their position. Alchin would get 30, Gates and Ballamr get 40 (each). VPs would get 25, etc.
-The word "Microsoft" would be fobidden from use on posters, T-shirts and other advertisements, and placed in the same cathegory as the symbols of the Nazy era.
-Federal agents would break into the Microsoft premises, and remove the material with the source code. It would be published in it's entirety, on the Internet, with possibly many mirrors, with noone holding the license rights. Or maybe something like the BSD would be ok. (MS will be forced, of course, to renounce to any copyrights).
-the MS campus in Redmond would be transformed into "The Museum of Monopoly" (I like this one) and the upkeep will be payd by the Bill Gates foundation (I like this even more) forever.
The current MS employees (the ones that didn't make it to the jail) will have the option to work in the Museum of Monopoly. It means, the janitors will be pretty much in place, the only problem are those people who made all those buggy products. (Add Access 2000 to the list of "most buggy")
OK, I have my flame-protector suit on, go ahead
Why Dallas in particular? I have been to Dallas (Irving, actually, but moved around so saw a bit of it all) and I could get a job in Dallas at a big and succesfull company that many admire. I already do work for them but in another location. I would never accept to work in Dallas and, I believe, in Texas in general BUT THIS IS JUST MY OPINION and I really would appreciate to see what is attractive about Dallas.
Thanks.
7) Product portfolio: OpenLinux distro (and...?)
AFAIK, they sell OpenLinux 2.3, eServer 2.3 (and that one seems to be very cool, kernel tuned for server performance, hardware RAID compiled into kernel, the whole binary stuff compiled for Pentium Pro or better CPU, Webmin and much more), OpenLinux 2.3 Powerbundle and NetWare for Linux. Also, there is stuff like OpenLinux T-shirt etc. And there is a comprehensive Linux courseware which is non-distro specific, which is Good(tm).
They are also selling some OpenLnux books.
Wonder how come this didn't make it to Slashdot (no, I didn't submit it, but strange that noone did?)
Actually, your statement does stand, but Caldera inc. is not the company going IPO! CALD is the ticker symbol of Calderasystems, which also belongs undr Caldera inc.
So, DrDOS is not owned by the company we are talking about here (which is Calderasystems).
Another thing: DrDOS is at version 7.03, and there has been developement in the last 2 years, relative to multitasking.
It has now been decided (as far as I know, have read it somewhere but forgot where) that there will be no more developement on it. But that's a decision Lineo took recently.
Actually, Calderasystems, which is the one going IPO, has nothing to do with DrDOS. DrDOS belongs to Lineo, the thin-client company. However, that's not their future, either, since Lineo is planning to get rid of DrDOS and concentrate on Linux for embedded devices. So, they seem to be planning to give it away completely. You can actually download DrDOS for free already, and use it for non-commercial purposes.
So what if Forbes published that article, does it mean it's truth?
Caldera has a lot of nice stuff done for Linux, a lot of networking, and they published COAS and Lizard opensource. That's not nothing. Without the networking it has today, Linux wouldn't have been succesful at all.
Also, read this:
"Troll Tech would like to thank CEO Ransom Love and all the other good people at Caldera
Systems who have helped in many ways during the creation of the QPL. Their backing and
feedback have been invaluable during the process of making Qt Open Source."
This is just a bunch of biased personal opinions, expecially the Forbes article.
They (and you) claim that Caldera has not contributed anything to the community. This is not true: they contributed and continue to do so, a lot of neat networking stuff in IP and IPX protocols. Also, they made NetWare for Linux (which is not like mars, but has a fully functional NDS v 4.x), an NDS client for Linux, ported Netscape FastTrack server to Linux, made Lizard and COAS available opensource...
I think these are important things. Caldera has contributed to the Linux community quite a lot, actually.
As someone already noted, NetWare 5 has been around quite some time now. Actually, it came out in september 1998, a few weeks before the actual schedule. You could immediately toy around with a free double CD package, containing NetWare 5, the clients, the Internet services etc, and a 3-user license. So, you could hook up 3 client machines to your NetWare 5 server, and all this was given away for free. Current CNEs also received a Student Kit and an exam voucher (for the NetWare 4.x to 5 Update) for free! The Student Kit alone is worth at least 500US$. So, I believe these are pretty favorable conditions for passing an exam.
I must admit I like much more the vendor-neutral courses offered by Caldera, and the certificate offered by LPI, than RedHats proprietary (as in RedHat Linux-specific) course and certification. Finally there is a powerful, customizable, flexible, non-proprietary open-source OS, and I don't want to be a RedHat-specific engineer. If nothing else, I never liked RedHat Linux, dunno why, I still prefere Slackware.
Aren't CIOs of big companies required to know some grammar?
OK, I am not saying Intel doesn't actually have a 1 GHz PIII. They probably have, but vary, very few pieces. The yield to get such silicone is low at House Intel, which means they will have one or none ! GHz chips per wafer. Probably less, judging from the "ease" you can buy a 800 MHz PIII.
And maybe Intel can even afford to sell such rare silicon for about US$ 1000, efecctively losing on the deal. They can afford it because, well, they still have money to throw away. Being the first to cross the 1 GHz barrier is probably worth it.
BUT do they really think people are going to drink the story this time? Ask Gateway, that got seriously burnt with Intel. I think NOT! It's to damn obvious Intel doesn't have enough 1 giga, or even enough 800 MHz silicone. Itäs so obvious that the marketeering with the "first to giga" won't work. It just won't, no matter what Intel does, they can't cause a collective brain damage to their potential customers. Oh, wait, Microsoft has been doing this for years, and people are still buying the crappier than crapy releases of Win9x...
ICS (as I said in another post) used to be integral part of BorderManager. Novell decided to strip off the admirable manageability of BorderManager, but improved the performance, and that's ICS. Of course, BorderManager had much more features, and it's still sold separately, but ICS is sold to VARs like IBM and Compaq.
Look at the performance the Comaq box is sporting! It's purely amazing!! Obviously, Compaq's many years of cooperation with Novell, and the many NetWare drivers they have developed, helped them for the ICS appliance, too. Let me remind you that ICS actually runs on NetWare (but without NDS).
Novell's ICS did pretty damn well! I still remember when ICS was part of BorderManager. It showed very good potential, and incredibly flexible. You can't find such a configurable caching solution anywhere!
Now, I believe ICS has stripped down conffigurability, but upped the performane.
Good job, Novell!
The only reason I said what Isaid is because it's what I have experienced, and that's for me the truth.
To have an NT-only network is stupid. I work for over 5 years now with networks. I am a MCNE (Master CNE) and a MCSE, too. Yep, got the pesky MCSE certificate to prove to our customers (when I worked for a systems integrator) that I know that stuff. Funny thing was, there were several MCSEs and some MCPs in my company, and only 2 CNEs, including me. The MCSE people were those who had to drive from time to time, to the NT-only customers. Those networks needed constant maintainance, and usually 2 MCSEs had to go to the site. Usually the NT servers had to be rebooted weekly, if not dayly. The worst thing was when an NT server with NTFS (Microsoft's version of a journaled FS) would crash. Chances are you have lost your data nad the server was FUBR. I was also managing the network (NetWare+NT+Linux.. yep, we had linux already in 1996 in production) in the company. It was interesting to see an engineer doing something around an NT server everytime I would pass by the server room. The NT servers were like babies needing some direct care, while I could remotely manage the NetWare and the Linux (and a Unixware) servers from my office. NDS sure helped me a lot to manage the NetWare servers, and the firewall (BorderManager, managed throgh NDS). At the time I was quitting, NDS for NT was being rolled out. Wonder if it's there now, helpingthe new guy that is replacing me.
Let me reiterate my point: a pure NT network is a stupid thing. I, however, believe that NT has it's place (flame-shields on) in a corporate network. But guess what? This also might be past tense soon, because Linux is a GREAT application server, and it HAS a lot of applications, databases, Java, webservers, mail anything you want AND NDS! One day NT will be an unwise option.
I am aware of many customers that would not let Linux in the server room if it wasn't possilbe to manage it centrally with NDS. Why? Do you ever think why are so many MCSEs needed? Because to administer an NT network you need a lot of silly NT admins that will run around silly NT boxes that need to be rebooted or administered.
NetWare does not need that, hence the little number of CNEs around. A typical CNE will lean back on the chair and happily administer a horrendously huge network composed of NetWare, NT and (since recently) Sun boxes. Thanks to NDS. The companies that are used to keep the administrative expenses low (NOT those having a pure NT network, obviously) didn't want to have to deal with Linux because it's a separate box, unattached to the rest of the NDS tree. Now, Linux has a way into those companies, too.
And believe me, those NDS-enabled companies are much more willing to work with Linux than the NT-only companies, for the simple reason that the NT-ony companies have IM departements run by morons.
Very true.
As another aspect of the same phenomenon, let me tell you why my comapny uses HP-UX systems, instead of SGI or Sun (even though SGI and Sun are pretty big, aren't they). So, I work for this really huge company that has customers wolrdwide. We cannot afford to use Sun or SGI because, even though they are big UNIX vendors, they don't have quite worldwide support. And that is of critical importance for this market. HP has covered the globe pretty well, so you can expect the same level of support in South Africa and in China, UK and Egypt, Russia and USA. And that matters.
This is the market Linux can't penetrate now, but it might in the future, thanks to the support of IBM, Novell and HP.
Yes, since BeOS is the best of them all!
Very true! Moderate this post up, please!
I, too, have been wondering how bad those programmers actually are. They are not motivated to make god code, actually. People will buy their crap anyway, because they muscled out most of the competition, and not on the basis of the quelity of their software. Everyone will agree that they have the best possible marketing, and I would add that they have the best possible strategy in leveraging their monopolistic dominance.
So, as a result, their programmers are not motivated.
I, for one, would not hire someone who worked for Microsoft. Partly because I still feel it's very un-ethical, and partly because I will always be under the impression I have hired someone who coded Winblows98 or Word00.
..or BeIA, as the Internet Appliance version of BeOS is now called. Col stuff, and BeOS runs on it no problem! Tested by the Transmeta guys themselves!
I have a question: you say that your Athlon 550 MHz system is faster than a friends dual Celeron 466 MHz (guess he uses the Abit BP 6). What OS are you and your friend using? I am asking this because NT and Linux have mediocre SMP support. It's pretty hard to take advantage of SMP in these OS-es, so I guess the typical gain of adding a second CPU, in NT, is about 30% (if used as a typical workstation, not server), and Linux w/kernel 2.2 would do about the same (again, working typically as workstation).
Now, if I do the math, 466*1.3=606. Taking into consideration Athlon's advanced risc-like core, it becomes clear why your system outperformed your friend's.
However, if you were using something like BeOS, which has gains of 70 to 99% with the second CPU, the dual celery would smoke your system bigtime.
So what kind of OS do you guys use? And how did you perform the performance measurements?
Why I am asking: I am planning to buy an Abit BP-6 w/2 Celeron 466 MHz myself, but I need to know whether it makes sense, or should I rather buy an Athlon 550, with the AMD chipset (I don't give a shit about AGP 4X, and the mobo with the AMD chipset is 35 US$ cheaper here in Helsinki!), which is the system you have.
I plan on using BeOS and Linux.