If you're doing good generalized libraries then memory management is a problem. Just doing malloc and free is difficult if you don't know the lifetime of an object because another programmer determines that. Overriding malloc() calloc() realloc() and free() in these situations with a GC is a very nice thing.
Perl only uses a reference counting GC, and last time I looked at one of the postscript formatting modules its circular data structures caused the refcount to never reach 0.
It's still a lot easier then not having a GC at all, though.
Certianly $600 is not "make or break". It's just money that can be better spent.
And of course I meant "mylex". As far as drivers like that are concerned, you have the driver writer to call/write to. Since he works at VA now, if you really want to talk to him if you have a problem then buy a VA box. Sun doesn't seem to let you do that sort of thing anymore.
Till then Solaris or NT is probably the safest bet.
Oracle on NT is not a safe solution. More then 10 to 1 DBA's on the oracle list curse the day their bosses put their database on NT. The general advice is that you should be prepared to reboot the system at least once a week or else your database will crash on you. Because of NT, apparently, since the DB2 sales/marketing folks at IBM have similar stories about their NT products.
Considering the experience of both of these companies in making reliable servers I have to blame NT for the crashes, since at least one of oracle or NT should be able to code a stable server for NT.
I have heard exactly 1 (one) testimonial that oracle on NT is stable, but not transaction count to back that up.
A lot of filesystem operations are significantly faster on linux then on solaris.
Linux gives you more money and a better selection of hardware support (vs. Solaris/x86) to implement a full-scale oracle server. It also gives you additional cash to contribute to a caching* RAID controller (DPT, Myles...) and extra disks.
We use Oracle almost exclusively at my company. My thoughts about Oracle on Linux is that 3rd party apps are lacking (hot backup, etc). And that if your application gets big at all, you'll have real trouble making Linux work on 64 processor boxes (if you succeed at all).
Well, Spectra Logic gave me a demo of Alexandria (the backup product that claims the fastest network backup. In spec'ing it in the past it looks like a great product). That demo cd has the following printed on it:
(Disclaimer - I don't work with or for them - I just think their product is worth evaluating).
As for multi-processor - well sun is still behind SGI for that degree of scaleability. If you're intereseted in going to 64 CPU's then go SGI or wait until a big vendor adds patches to linux to make it do 64 processors well. Or gives davem or alan cox a 64+ cpu box to use. Don't hold your breath for the latter;-)
also...
New patches, fixes and product introductions for Oracle server will always happen first on Sun and sometimes that can be a real buzzkill.
But not on solaris/x86. This is one of the lowest platforms to oracle (at least in my experience in trying to get oracle (tm) consultants to put financial software on it). It seems that linux-specific patches do come out quite quickly. And the oracle 8i pre-release server for linux and sparc/solaris should supposedly arrive at around the same time.
Sparc/solaris is definetely the unix development platform for oracle, but linux is hot right now.
OBstability: so far it hasn't crashed on its own volition in my installation, or in that of a friend of mine. I'm doing very small stuff. Sean, what about you?
OBSpeed: People doing informal speed tests on linux/oracle vs nt/oracle on the same hardware seem to show about a 3-5x speedup under linux.
Also solaris/x86's filesystem speed tends to be a lot slower then linux/x86 - same hardware. I expect that linux would be an ideal database server for many GB of data, as long as the SGA doesn't have to get over a GB or so (these are different things - one is disk space, the other memory. Both are dependant on the expeceted use profile of the database). This is an *estimate* from people I've spoken to - I'm not an oracle expert myself... I'm just learning how to program for it, etc.
Blow the extra money you'd have payed for a SPARC on a caching scsi controller and mirror all of your drives, and you'll have an increadibly reliable and fast server.
OK, OK, this post is funny. It does raise some serious points, though.
Apple makes nice boxes. They may now have a nice OS. However they feel the need to lie (OK, spin, twist, whatever you want) through their publicity to make it sound like more then it is. If it's a server that is so damn good then why do they have to lie to make it look good? Why does apple never admit "we're slower for the price, and we crash a lot, but you love us anyway, and we love you[r money]" ???
I suspect a lot of us have been disgusted with this kind of bullshit benchmarking in the past, and don't like seeing even a somewhat nice vendor lying to people like this. It also raises big customer problems. Am I going to have to deal with clients saying "we should use macosX because apple says it's faster." Well, now I have to dash their hopes and explain that apple published bogus publicity, not benchmarks, and then fight their resistance to the fact that that cute apple would ever lie to them. *sigh*.
I hated when apple used to do this, and hoped they'd stop this bullshit now that they've had a makeover. I gues not:(
>Right now, he's working to make Emacs into a full-fledged user-friendly word processor.
I doubt that.
Please don't. It seems to be the direction that 20.x is headed in. At least according to its documentation.
RMS has been more than a little bit vocal about not caring a whit about whether free software is user-friendly. It is, in fact, one of my biggest aggravations with him. In fact, I believe that the split between Emacs and XEmacs was partially over that very thing. The XEmacs team seemed to move a lot more towards making it a really usable, user-friendly, GUI-oriented program. This stuck in RMS's craw, and thus the code forked. If the details are different, I'd love it if someone would enlighten me. That seems to have been the way of it, though...
I think you're partially right. My understanding from reading and trying to understand this stuff is that the Xemacs (or lucid emacs then) project started because emacs couldn't do colors, fonts, or whatever and as you say RMS didn't want to spend time implementing this. I think they (the lucid emacs folks) made a point to RMS that he had to think of emacs' UI, because of how many people used xemacs. So he has. At this point RMS has design problems with incorperating Xemacs' display code into gnu emacs because there are no code attributions, so he can't ask anyone to assign their copyrights to the FSF. So it has to be re-written for emacs, and re-designed for emacs. I believe that having multiple fonts and multiple sizes displayed is in the works.
He's a brilliant programmer, no argument, but he hasn't worked alone on any of that. In fact I've never used a single piece of software that RMS solely wrote, or even wrote the majority of alone. Bet you haven't either. (The same, of course, can be said of Bill Gates...)
It seems to me that your observation validates RMS' philosophy. His code is out there. Others have contributed both because they are employed by the FSF and because they want to for their own reasons. RMS can design and code some of the system, and others can complete it in less time then he could have himself.
OTOH bill gates doesn't code anymore and according to some stories he never could program well, and he isn't letting anyone fix the mistakes.
I agree that Linus has been a good manager for Linux, and that he seems to get along with others much more then RMS does. I'm happy that both of them ar around.
RMS is well respected amongst most real developers? That's not what I hear - apart from the groupies they all think he's a nut and keep well away from him.
Then you hear way differently fromme. Most of the programmers that have been around the block a few times that *I've* run into acknowledge RMS' programming skills. Why don't you look at his code and decide for yourself?
I know I couldn't enjoy my work without some of the code he's written, and the design he's done.
-Peter
Are... You... what planet are you from???
on
OSI vs Taco Bell
·
· Score: 1
Maybe you can read something into his "joke" resume; or maybe _you_ are "retarded" as you put it. In other words I am saying you might be wrong.
Are you kidding? What in the following excerpt could possibly be written in any serious fashion by someone intelligent enough to properly format html (not a great feat, but certianly a benchmark) and obviously computer literate:
Skills
I am very handy with a hammer, but I think my calling is in sales or customer relations. I'm a people person. I spent a week with my step dad in Arizona and he taught me how to weld. I've become very interested lately in pyrotechnics. Maybe a job starting fires would be cool. Hey, I'm flexible. I just need a goddammed job. If I don't get a job soon, I'll be forced to take up that offer that recruiter from the ARMY gave me.
It seems like IDC feels they know how many units of linux shipped in 1998. Any guesses as to whether their data will be made available to update the estimates of the # of linux systems there are out there?
The free software foundation is a not an academic organization. It is a not for profit corperation. RMS draws no pay - he does outside consulting to pay for food. I suspect he gets fed by friends alot too.
PBS and NPR are completely seperate enteties. IMO They don't get enough of my money. Personally I'm more upset about those huge socialist institutions Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Mitre - all of whom exist because of government subsidies, none of whose products I can use or even agree with. I only wish more of my money went to schools.
This early A.M.'s replay of this show on WNYC had some dork talking about "radical marketing" and someone called in about linux, but the guy dis'd it as something that would probably just go from free to being boxed up and forgotten, and said "oh, this sort of thing has happened before" while admitting that he's never really looked into it.
The host, however, perked his ears up and tried to shut up the guest to get more answers about linux. I guess he found the source of all this linux and associated stuff and is going to put him on the air. Whoopee!
what does that mean, exactly, when an "entire OC-3 Internet backbone runs on Linux" ?
FYI OC3 is a leased line that is, I believe, 155 Mbps max. It's the kind of capacity that can make a lot of people happy.
As for the rest, the design of the MacOS has never impressed me with its ability to scale. From the paper that Alan Cox has online on porting linux m68k to the mack68k, I don't think the hardware is entirely well designed either.
MacOS *has* been getting better for about... 8 years now. In the same time, linux has become remarkably better. MacOS is still mostly more of the same.
IMO the less you have running on a mac, the less often you have to save against unrecoverable crashes.
Slashdot Mirror
The pages for the flux oskit indicates that currently it only works on the x86, which is not an ideal target for a system this small.
-Peter
If you're doing good generalized libraries then memory management is a problem. Just doing malloc and free is difficult if you don't know the lifetime of an object because another programmer determines that. Overriding malloc() calloc() realloc() and free() in these situations with a GC is a very nice thing.
-Peter
Rubbish disposal?
Sanitary deportation?
Forceful of unwanted elements?
-Peter
Perl only uses a reference counting GC, and last time I looked at one of the postscript formatting modules its circular data structures caused the refcount to never reach 0.
It's still a lot easier then not having a GC at all, though.
-Peter
Certianly $600 is not "make or break". It's just money that can be better spent.
And of course I meant "mylex". As far as drivers like that are concerned, you have the driver writer to call/write to. Since he works at VA now, if you really want to talk to him if you have a problem then buy a VA box. Sun doesn't seem to let you do that sort of thing anymore.
-Peter
Till then Solaris or NT is probably the safest bet.
Oracle on NT is not a safe solution. More then 10 to 1 DBA's on the oracle list curse the day their bosses put their database on NT. The general advice is that you should be prepared to reboot the system at least once a week or else your database will crash on you. Because of NT, apparently, since the DB2 sales/marketing folks at IBM have similar stories about their NT products.
Considering the experience of both of these companies in making reliable servers I have to blame NT for the crashes, since at least one of oracle or NT should be able to code a stable server for NT.
I have heard exactly 1 (one) testimonial that oracle on NT is stable, but not transaction count to back that up.
It's far from a safe choice.
-Peter
A lot of filesystem operations are significantly faster on linux then on solaris.
Linux gives you more money and a better selection of hardware support (vs. Solaris/x86) to implement a full-scale oracle server. It also gives you additional cash to contribute to a caching* RAID controller (DPT, Myles...) and extra disks.
*Oops. No pun intended there.
-Peter
We use Oracle almost exclusively at my company. My thoughts about Oracle on Linux is that 3rd party apps are lacking (hot backup, etc). And that if your application gets big at all, you'll have real trouble making Linux work on 64 processor boxes (if you succeed at all).
;-)
Well, Spectra Logic gave me a demo of Alexandria (the backup product that claims the fastest network backup. In spec'ing it in the past it looks like a great product). That demo cd has the following printed on it:
Includeing... Hot Oracle Backup!
Look at spectra logic's home page if you want more inf.
(Disclaimer - I don't work with or for them - I just think their product is worth evaluating).
As for multi-processor - well sun is still behind SGI for that degree of scaleability. If you're intereseted in going to 64 CPU's then go SGI or wait until a big vendor adds patches to linux to make it do 64 processors well. Or gives davem or alan cox a 64+ cpu box to use. Don't hold your breath for the latter
also...
New patches, fixes and product introductions for Oracle server will always happen first on Sun and sometimes that can be a real buzzkill.
But not on solaris/x86. This is one of the lowest platforms to oracle (at least in my experience in trying to get oracle (tm) consultants to put financial software on it). It seems that linux-specific patches do come out quite quickly. And the oracle 8i pre-release server for linux and sparc/solaris should supposedly arrive at around the same time.
Sparc/solaris is definetely the unix development platform for oracle, but linux is hot right now.
-Peter
OBstability: so far it hasn't crashed on its own volition in my installation, or in that of a friend of mine. I'm doing very small stuff. Sean, what about you?
OBSpeed: People doing informal speed tests on linux/oracle vs nt/oracle on the same hardware seem to show about a 3-5x speedup under linux.
Also solaris/x86's filesystem speed tends to be a lot slower then linux/x86 - same hardware. I expect that linux would be an ideal database server for many GB of data, as long as the SGA doesn't have to get over a GB or so (these are different things - one is disk space, the other memory. Both are dependant on the expeceted use profile of the database). This is an *estimate* from people I've spoken to - I'm not an oracle expert myself... I'm just learning how to program for it, etc.
Blow the extra money you'd have payed for a SPARC on a caching scsi controller and mirror all of your drives, and you'll have an increadibly reliable and fast server.
-Peter
OK, OK, this post is funny. It does raise some serious points, though.
:(
Apple makes nice boxes. They may now have a nice OS. However they feel the need to lie (OK, spin, twist, whatever you want) through their publicity to make it sound like more then it is. If it's a server that is so damn good then why do they have to lie to make it look good? Why does apple never admit "we're slower for the price, and we crash a lot, but you love us anyway, and we love you[r money]" ???
I suspect a lot of us have been disgusted with this kind of bullshit benchmarking in the past, and don't like seeing even a somewhat nice vendor lying to people like this. It also raises big customer problems. Am I going to have to deal with clients saying "we should use macosX because apple says it's faster." Well, now I have to dash their hopes and explain that apple published bogus publicity, not benchmarks, and then fight their resistance to the fact that that cute apple would ever lie to them. *sigh*.
I hated when apple used to do this, and hoped they'd stop this bullshit now that they've had a makeover. I gues not
-Peter
>Right now, he's working to make Emacs into a full-fledged user-friendly word processor.
I doubt that.
Please don't. It seems to be the direction that 20.x is headed in. At least according to its documentation.
RMS has been more than a little bit vocal about not caring a whit about whether free software is user-friendly. It is, in fact, one of my biggest aggravations with him. In fact, I believe that the split between Emacs and XEmacs was partially over that very thing. The XEmacs team seemed to move a lot more towards making it a really usable, user-friendly, GUI-oriented program. This stuck in RMS's craw, and thus the code forked. If the details are different, I'd love it if someone would enlighten me. That seems to have been the way of it, though...
I think you're partially right. My understanding from reading and trying to understand this stuff is that the Xemacs (or lucid emacs then) project started because emacs couldn't do colors, fonts, or whatever and as you say RMS didn't want to spend time implementing this. I think they (the lucid emacs folks) made a point to RMS that he had to think of emacs' UI, because of how many people used xemacs. So he has. At this point RMS has design problems with incorperating Xemacs' display code into gnu emacs because there are no code attributions, so he can't ask anyone to assign their copyrights to the FSF. So it has to be re-written for emacs, and re-designed for emacs. I believe that having multiple fonts and multiple sizes displayed is in the works.
He's a brilliant programmer, no argument, but he hasn't worked alone on any of that. In fact I've never used a single piece of software that RMS solely wrote, or even wrote the majority of alone. Bet you haven't either. (The same, of course, can be said of Bill Gates...)
It seems to me that your observation validates RMS' philosophy. His code is out there. Others have contributed both because they are employed by the FSF and because they want to for their own reasons. RMS can design and code some of the system, and others can complete it in less time then he could have himself.
OTOH bill gates doesn't code anymore and according to some stories he never could program well, and he isn't letting anyone fix the mistakes.
I agree that Linus has been a good manager for Linux, and that he seems to get along with others much more then RMS does. I'm happy that both of them ar around.
-Peter
RMS is well respected amongst most real developers? That's not what I hear - apart from the groupies they all think he's a nut and keep well away from him.
Then you hear way differently fromme. Most of the programmers that have been around the block a few times that *I've* run into acknowledge RMS' programming skills. Why don't you look at his code and decide for yourself?
I know I couldn't enjoy my work without some of the code he's written, and the design he's done.
-Peter
Maybe you can read something into his "joke" resume; or maybe _you_ are "retarded" as you put it. In other words I am saying you might be wrong.
Are you kidding? What in the following excerpt could possibly be written in any serious fashion by someone intelligent enough to properly format html (not a great feat, but certianly a benchmark) and obviously computer literate:
Skills
I am very handy with a hammer, but I think my calling is in sales or customer relations. I'm a people person. I spent a week with my step dad in Arizona and he taught me how to weld. I've become very interested lately in pyrotechnics. Maybe a job starting fires would be cool. Hey, I'm flexible. I just need a goddammed job. If I don't get a job soon, I'll be forced to take up that offer that recruiter from the ARMY gave me.
It seems like IDC feels they know how many units of linux shipped in 1998. Any guesses as to whether their data will be made available to update the estimates of the # of linux systems there are out there?
-Peter
The free software foundation is a not an academic organization. It is a not for profit corperation. RMS draws no pay - he does outside consulting to pay for food. I suspect he gets fed by friends alot too.
PBS and NPR are completely seperate enteties. IMO They don't get enough of my money. Personally I'm more upset about those huge socialist institutions Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Mitre - all of whom exist because of government subsidies, none of whose products I can use or even agree with. I only wish more of my money went to schools.
-Peter
This early A.M.'s replay of this show on WNYC had some dork talking about "radical marketing" and someone called in about linux, but the guy dis'd it as something that would probably just go from free to being boxed up and forgotten, and said "oh, this sort of thing has happened before" while admitting that he's never really looked into it.
The host, however, perked his ears up and tried to shut up the guest to get more answers about linux. I guess he found the source of all this linux and associated stuff and is going to put him on the air. Whoopee!
-Peter
FYI OC3 is a leased line that is, I believe, 155 Mbps max. It's the kind of capacity that can make a lot of people happy.
As for the rest, the design of the MacOS has never impressed me with its ability to scale. From the paper that Alan Cox has online on porting linux m68k to the mack68k, I don't think the hardware is entirely well designed either.
MacOS *has* been getting better for about... 8 years now. In the same time, linux has become remarkably better. MacOS is still mostly more of the same.
IMO the less you have running on a mac, the less often you have to save against unrecoverable crashes.
Macs are obnoxious computers.
-Peter