Hm... There might be something to be said for talking to former employees.
In my experience, employees usually know exactly what they think of their boss and have pretty specific thoughts even if they'll never see the light of day.
I really like my boss. I don't go around saying it because of the obvious conclusions everyone would jump to, but I'd certainly tell someone about it if they asked.
I think they're still made, but only to satisfy military contracts. They're not current, they just get die shrinks and more cache. They're not bad processors even now, but they cost a fortune and even SPARC is faster now.
I got a copy protected one that didn't work in iTunes, either player or ripping. Or my legitimate CD player for that matter. It plays MP3 CDs so I think it might be smart enough to be fooled by the copy protection.
cdparanoia had no problems though. Worked the first time with default settings.
I will say this: A&B Sound agreed to allow me to get a refund for it if it didn't work in legitimate players. I appreciated that. I didn't take it back because the copies I burned all worked fine, but I wouldn't have bought it without that assurance.
I'm glad what I did is still legal in Canada. The copyright act says that making a copy available to the public by telecommunications isn't allowed, no matter what that court decision said, but it explicitly allows private copying.
My officemate has a dual Xeon 2 ghz (ENVY ENVY ENVY ENVY) from Dell, and it's quiet as a mouse. I'm not saying G5's are loud, but there exist quiet PCs.
As for MacOS... I promise you, 99% of the dual core Athlons will go into gaming machines, and while there are a decent number of games for MacOS, the Windows version is either released at the same time or first, and there's always a Windows version. Sometimes there's no MacOS port. That makes the competition Intel and no one else.
Don't get me wrong, for desktop stuff MacOS is the only OS I can stand. But sometimes it's just not acceptable, either due to the requirement of Windows or the requirement of something else (usually Linux or Solaris).
As for memory bandwidth, most of these will likely be single core systems. While there are dual G5s out there (indeed, the current ones are all duals right now), the Athlons will have the same memory bandwidth because the G5s aren't NUMA. Maybe a bit more due to the on die memory controller*.
* Yes, I know how fast the frontside bus is, and I know every CPU has its own bus. But there's one memory bus and that means 400 mhz * 128 bits is the fastest it can access memory.
That's better for stuff with lots of branches, and Sun is doing it. They have 4 cores, each with 4 threads. Very rudimentry pipelining, and not superscalar at all. Whenever a core waits for something, it flips to another thread which is ready to go. There was an article on Ars about it. Basically, they can get about 60% more instructions per clock cycle out of these things on workloads that have lots of branches, and they've got 4 cores. Shit for gaming, very very good for dynamic web content and databases and stuff.
The other side of the coin is high clock speed. That's why P4's are so good at benchmarks that are basically a little loop that just crunches through numbers. Athlons are somewhere in between.
Right now, the best way to do that number crunching has been one big core rather than a lot of little ones. But there's a limit to how many parallel instructions you can extract from a serial stream of instructions. So it's reaching the point where a different solution is the cheapest way to get faster.
Linux is targeted to be a general purpose OS. Those get SMP support fast because it's important for various things (esp dynamic content, database, development, etc).
The developers concentrate elsewhere, and that's not an empty excuse, look at the results. ProPolice everywhere (Linux doesn't have this even though there's a lot of places where it would be easy), W^X (even though OpenBSD has shown that it can be done without major breakage), transparent firewall failover (Linux can do failover with UCARP, ported from OpenBSD, but any existing sessions are toast), other tweaks like ACK packet prioritization (which NetFilter can do, but it's a PITA and requires either blind copying and pasting or deep knowledge of TCP).
Linux is way better as a general purpose OS, no one denies that. But, I'd rather have two OpenBSD firewalls ready to take over for each other transparently than one Linux firewall. No matter how many CPUs it has.
"A unified work pretty much takes on the restrictions of all of its parts."
That's true. That's why the commerical stuff isn't allowed into OpenBSD.
If a company somewhere out there wants to maintain their own fork of a previously BSDL program, they can. But that has no impact at all on the BSDL version, which remains as free as it ever was.
Microsoft uses BSDL code in the NT network stack (strong evidence from observing the behaviour), but that hasn't had any impact on the BSDs. Their network stacks are unchanged. Microsoft Services for UNIX uses OpenBSD code for a lot of the userspace stuff-- confirmed from OpenBSD copyright notices in the binaries. But OpenBSD hasn't been impacted at all.
They're commercial forks, but the original isn't affected. Microsoft doesn't have to contribute changes back, but that is the primary goal of the BSD license, not some unforseen side effect.
Also... remembe that there was a big lawsuit over this very issue. USL sued Berkley and USL got their asses handed to them. The BSD license came through its day in court long before anyone had heard of SCO.
in/etc/rc.conf.local and you've got a webserver. With something as complicated as Apache, it would be hard to make it as easy as that if it were a port. Also, I think it would be considered rude for a port to go around setting up stuff in/var.
They seem to like to be able to do just about all of the basics out of the box.
The longest I've tracked Gentoo stable without something vital breaking is about 60 days. I've had situations where the stable branch wouldn't compile because some of the packages required a package in the unstable branch. If anyone, anywhere, had tried it in any way on a -stable system before it was released to the stable branch, it would have been caught.
FreeBSD isn't perfect, but it's telling that FreeBSD-current works more consistently than Gentoo-stable. Give Debian-unstable a shot, it's more consistent.
I can get Windows through no cost to me through university. I have my OpenBSD firewall running on a seperate machine. I would use Mozilla.
But it's too damn much trouble to maintain. All of OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS are less annoying to maintain.
While it's easier for a non-savy user to click through a few windows or call tech support, equivilant maintenance tasks on those other OSes are either less time consuming or not needed. They might be harder to perform, but they take less time.
I might consider VMWare if I needed Windows for work that someone would pay me for. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Wow. You were lucky. One of the times I had mine repaired, it came back with a broken SO-DIMM. Kingston was good enough to replace it, but I was still pissed. This was an Apple authorized place, not Apple themselves, but "Apple authorized" still means something.
To be fair, I don't have any complaints about 10.3.4. I used to be able to crash it at will with 10.3.2 and lower, but that's been fixed. I haven't seen any problems with NFS support, which was buggy up until 10.3.4, and Java seems okay now. Safari still sucks, but it's not like there aren't any other browsers out there. I was thrilled when Camino 0.8 beta came out. 0.7 was my favorite till it started getting so out of date.
I have no standing issues at the moment. Broken NFS was the last thing.
Apple's on my shit list for now. I had several other issues attributable to poor QC (2 power adaptors failed after weeks of use), and I don't quickly forget stuff like that. There have been a number of other large scale fuckups like the iPod-mini headphone jack thing. My impression now is that they spend too much time making things look sexy and not enough time making them robust.
"Repair, replace, refund!" is not the motto of a company that gets my business.
If they get their act together, I will take them off the list in a few years.
No. It means that on both sides of the fence, there is some crap and some gold. And that even though they present themselves well and have a loyal customer base, Apple can shovel crap with the best of them.
I've got a Pentium 2 400. I believe it's about 7-8 years old. It started out running NT, but then I moved to Linux and now it's OpenBSD. I have yet to see it crash, though to be fair I lived in Houston when it ran NT and the power there was way to unreliable to give me a good idea of how long it could have gone without a reboot.
My iBook has had the logic board replaced 4 times. In the first year I owned it, I had a month of downtime. After the OS 10.2.8 update, I had to reboot almost every day, even when I wasn't doing anything more than browsing the web. That's more than windows.
Some people have perfect experiences with Apple. But some don't.
"In test environments, we have run up to 4 pfsync+carp hosts (all different architectures: i386, sparc, sparc64, and amd64!), randomly rebooting them. TCP sessions were not interrupted through over two days of such torture testing."
Linux has UCARP, but has no way for the stateful firewall to do transparent failover.
Don't really feel like researching enough detail for a comprehensive summary of the other stuff.
I wrote a program to generate high quality random numbers from the high quality entropy source (/dev/srandom).
Then I stick a number on the end and increment it. I RTA, but having a high quality random password just makes me feel good.
I have an iBook, so I have to get it repaired a lot due to the logic board thing. I generally make a new password when I have it repaired. And they always compliment me on my password.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Hm... There might be something to be said for talking to former employees.
In my experience, employees usually know exactly what they think of their boss and have pretty specific thoughts even if they'll never see the light of day.
I really like my boss. I don't go around saying it because of the obvious conclusions everyone would jump to, but I'd certainly tell someone about it if they asked.
Just when that EFI firmware thing would make a serial console possible.
I think they're still made, but only to satisfy military contracts. They're not current, they just get die shrinks and more cache. They're not bad processors even now, but they cost a fortune and even SPARC is faster now.
I got a copy protected one that didn't work in iTunes, either player or ripping. Or my legitimate CD player for that matter. It plays MP3 CDs so I think it might be smart enough to be fooled by the copy protection.
cdparanoia had no problems though. Worked the first time with default settings.
I will say this: A&B Sound agreed to allow me to get a refund for it if it didn't work in legitimate players. I appreciated that. I didn't take it back because the copies I burned all worked fine, but I wouldn't have bought it without that assurance.
I'm glad what I did is still legal in Canada. The copyright act says that making a copy available to the public by telecommunications isn't allowed, no matter what that court decision said, but it explicitly allows private copying.
Are you kidding?
Norton firewall: "Well, there aren't enough resources left for any exploits to work. So you're 'safe'.".
OpenBSD: *scrapes off bottom of shoe*
My officemate has a dual Xeon 2 ghz (ENVY ENVY ENVY ENVY) from Dell, and it's quiet as a mouse. I'm not saying G5's are loud, but there exist quiet PCs.
As for MacOS... I promise you, 99% of the dual core Athlons will go into gaming machines, and while there are a decent number of games for MacOS, the Windows version is either released at the same time or first, and there's always a Windows version. Sometimes there's no MacOS port. That makes the competition Intel and no one else.
Don't get me wrong, for desktop stuff MacOS is the only OS I can stand. But sometimes it's just not acceptable, either due to the requirement of Windows or the requirement of something else (usually Linux or Solaris).
As for memory bandwidth, most of these will likely be single core systems. While there are dual G5s out there (indeed, the current ones are all duals right now), the Athlons will have the same memory bandwidth because the G5s aren't NUMA. Maybe a bit more due to the on die memory controller*.
* Yes, I know how fast the frontside bus is, and I know every CPU has its own bus. But there's one memory bus and that means 400 mhz * 128 bits is the fastest it can access memory.
That's better for stuff with lots of branches, and Sun is doing it. They have 4 cores, each with 4 threads. Very rudimentry pipelining, and not superscalar at all. Whenever a core waits for something, it flips to another thread which is ready to go. There was an article on Ars about it. Basically, they can get about 60% more instructions per clock cycle out of these things on workloads that have lots of branches, and they've got 4 cores. Shit for gaming, very very good for dynamic web content and databases and stuff.
The other side of the coin is high clock speed. That's why P4's are so good at benchmarks that are basically a little loop that just crunches through numbers. Athlons are somewhere in between.
Right now, the best way to do that number crunching has been one big core rather than a lot of little ones. But there's a limit to how many parallel instructions you can extract from a serial stream of instructions. So it's reaching the point where a different solution is the cheapest way to get faster.
Netcraft runs FreeBSD...
Linux is targeted to be a general purpose OS. Those get SMP support fast because it's important for various things (esp dynamic content, database, development, etc).
The developers concentrate elsewhere, and that's not an empty excuse, look at the results. ProPolice everywhere (Linux doesn't have this even though there's a lot of places where it would be easy), W^X (even though OpenBSD has shown that it can be done without major breakage), transparent firewall failover (Linux can do failover with UCARP, ported from OpenBSD, but any existing sessions are toast), other tweaks like ACK packet prioritization (which NetFilter can do, but it's a PITA and requires either blind copying and pasting or deep knowledge of TCP).
Linux is way better as a general purpose OS, no one denies that. But, I'd rather have two OpenBSD firewalls ready to take over for each other transparently than one Linux firewall. No matter how many CPUs it has.
That's true. That's why the commerical stuff isn't allowed into OpenBSD.
If a company somewhere out there wants to maintain their own fork of a previously BSDL program, they can. But that has no impact at all on the BSDL version, which remains as free as it ever was.
Microsoft uses BSDL code in the NT network stack (strong evidence from observing the behaviour), but that hasn't had any impact on the BSDs. Their network stacks are unchanged. Microsoft Services for UNIX uses OpenBSD code for a lot of the userspace stuff-- confirmed from OpenBSD copyright notices in the binaries. But OpenBSD hasn't been impacted at all.
They're commercial forks, but the original isn't affected. Microsoft doesn't have to contribute changes back, but that is the primary goal of the BSD license, not some unforseen side effect.
Also... remembe that there was a big lawsuit over this very issue. USL sued Berkley and USL got their asses handed to them. The BSD license came through its day in court long before anyone had heard of SCO.
httpd=""
in /etc/rc.conf.local and you've got a webserver. With something as complicated as Apache, it would be hard to make it as easy as that if it were a port. Also, I think it would be considered rude for a port to go around setting up stuff in /var.
They seem to like to be able to do just about all of the basics out of the box.
thttpd was discussed, but they said pretty emphatically that they're happy with Apache 1.3.29 + patches.
SOMEONE ELSE WILL
Just because the linux kernel can do it doesn't mean portage can. You clearly weren't updating things.
The longest I've tracked Gentoo stable without something vital breaking is about 60 days. I've had situations where the stable branch wouldn't compile because some of the packages required a package in the unstable branch. If anyone, anywhere, had tried it in any way on a -stable system before it was released to the stable branch, it would have been caught.
FreeBSD isn't perfect, but it's telling that FreeBSD-current works more consistently than Gentoo-stable. Give Debian-unstable a shot, it's more consistent.
I can get Windows through no cost to me through university. I have my OpenBSD firewall running on a seperate machine. I would use Mozilla.
But it's too damn much trouble to maintain. All of OpenBSD, Linux, FreeBSD, and MacOS are less annoying to maintain.
While it's easier for a non-savy user to click through a few windows or call tech support, equivilant maintenance tasks on those other OSes are either less time consuming or not needed. They might be harder to perform, but they take less time.
I might consider VMWare if I needed Windows for work that someone would pay me for. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
for i in $( seq 100 ); do dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/${whatever}; done
Wow. You were lucky. One of the times I had mine repaired, it came back with a broken SO-DIMM. Kingston was good enough to replace it, but I was still pissed. This was an Apple authorized place, not Apple themselves, but "Apple authorized" still means something.
To be fair, I don't have any complaints about 10.3.4. I used to be able to crash it at will with 10.3.2 and lower, but that's been fixed. I haven't seen any problems with NFS support, which was buggy up until 10.3.4, and Java seems okay now. Safari still sucks, but it's not like there aren't any other browsers out there. I was thrilled when Camino 0.8 beta came out. 0.7 was my favorite till it started getting so out of date.
I have no standing issues at the moment. Broken NFS was the last thing.
Apple's on my shit list for now. I had several other issues attributable to poor QC (2 power adaptors failed after weeks of use), and I don't quickly forget stuff like that. There have been a number of other large scale fuckups like the iPod-mini headphone jack thing. My impression now is that they spend too much time making things look sexy and not enough time making them robust.
"Repair, replace, refund!" is not the motto of a company that gets my business.
If they get their act together, I will take them off the list in a few years.
No. It means that on both sides of the fence, there is some crap and some gold. And that even though they present themselves well and have a loyal customer base, Apple can shovel crap with the best of them.
I've got a Pentium 2 400. I believe it's about 7-8 years old. It started out running NT, but then I moved to Linux and now it's OpenBSD. I have yet to see it crash, though to be fair I lived in Houston when it ran NT and the power there was way to unreliable to give me a good idea of how long it could have gone without a reboot.
God I hate posts like this.
My iBook has had the logic board replaced 4 times. In the first year I owned it, I had a month of downtime. After the OS 10.2.8 update, I had to reboot almost every day, even when I wasn't doing anything more than browsing the web. That's more than windows.
Some people have perfect experiences with Apple. But some don't.
I've got the money saved up. In a high interest place where I can't get to right away...
$#%^#@Q^#$%...
I have enough for groceries, but not much more.
And we already know it sucks.
Firewall Failover
"In test environments, we have run up to 4 pfsync+carp hosts (all different architectures: i386, sparc, sparc64, and amd64!), randomly rebooting them. TCP sessions were not interrupted through over two days of such torture testing."
Linux has UCARP, but has no way for the stateful firewall to do transparent failover.
Don't really feel like researching enough detail for a comprehensive summary of the other stuff.
What I've been doing so far seems to be okay
:)
I wrote a program to generate high quality random numbers from the high quality entropy source (/dev/srandom).
Then I stick a number on the end and increment it. I RTA, but having a high quality random password just makes me feel good.
I have an iBook, so I have to get it repaired a lot due to the logic board thing. I generally make a new password when I have it repaired. And they always compliment me on my password.
That allows DOS attacks.