Yeah but why "fake" it? Hes obviously done the hard bit (sticking all those decorations on the damm tree) Pretty easy to hook it up to the net and attach a sound card+speakers and some links to run a.wav player.
Yes you are right, but not eveyone uses computers as a home word processor - this kind of thing is meant to go in med/large servers with things like database engines or high cap web servers running on them.
Again, not everyone uses Windows and Linux has good SMP support. Its not essential for the software to support MP either - most server processes (under the Unix model anyway) spawn additonal processes as load increases, so it's relatively simple for the OS to just share these out over the available CPU's
We currently use Dell servers with 2-4 Intel Xeons in them, which are expensive, so an alternative from AMD is most welcome.
QuakeIII apparentley supports MP, but I've never tested it.
1.. If the player can read the original, then so can a copier - I don't see how the data can be magically readable by one device and not by another when both devices predate the format.
2.. I hope this doesn't catch on - I don't want to go back to furtling around though boxes of 5 inch plastic disks to find the track I'm after - making you keep the distribution media is like having to keep all the packaging from everything you ever bought.
This is not the way to go - ownership needs to be registered somewhere (or "right to listen/watch etc"). Thats the way software license mostly work - physically posessing the distribution CD does not mean you have the right to use it - this is dealth with elsewhere - the disk is irrelavent. Just as having a brick in your hand does not give you the *right* to chuck it through a shop window and rob the place. This crypto CD plan is like trying to invent a brick that will only allow itself to be used for wall building - "Powered by stoopid" will be the logo no doubt.. (or "idiot outside".)
hmm thats great but 6 is invalid. Just because Marvin's brain was the "size of a planet" doesn't mean it had to be a planet, and even if that were so, it doesn't have to be the Earth - the previous rules 1-5 do not state whether the earth was the only planet/computer.
Mind you - the whole plot was based on deliberatley unlikely premises for comedic purposes, so perhaps you are right, and somewhere it will turn out that the only planet sized brain is the earth....
Then again - why didn't Marvin lose his marbles when his brain was flattened to make way for an intergalactic bypass?
Re:Come on
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
hmm yeah - I played GTA3 a couple of times on a friends PS2 and whilst it was very very beatiful, inclusing reflections of the secnery in the gleaming paintwork (and I could elect to drive my actual real life car which was kinda wierd)at the end of the graphical amazement, it left me cold - basically - it is *nothing* like driving a car. It may have been a different story with a wheel to steer with rather than that funny joystick thing, but I I'm not prepared to spend the £250 to find out:)
We played some other PS2 titles (which I forget the name of, although one was a Sar Wars title) and I came away thinking "hmm so basically, scenery of one type or another scrolls towards you, and you steer" This seemed the basic premise of most of the games. In some you could shoot things as well, whilst others you just avoided obstacles (snowboarding was one excuse). The annoying thing that all these games had in common, is that you are never *really* in control of your ship/board/car/shopping trolley etc as the game will just not let you move outside of the "approved" area of the scenery. For example, I couldn't fly out of the canyon in the SW game. But there was no apparent reason for this, it was just arbitrary.
The only other basic type involved 2 psuedo 3d avatarsviewed in 3rd person who face off in some osrt of kickboxing fight. The game appeared to be won by pressing everything on the controller at the same time rapidly.
Apparentley, GT3 is hailed as one of the best if not the best console game. Hmm well if a very pretty version of "horace goes skiing" is the state of the art, I'll stick to me PC this time around. With games like Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside from Sony coing next year, it's gonna be a blast.
Before I get flamed by all the console lovers, I should state that I fully recognise that the console has a place - it's damm sight cheaper than a PC for start (My video card cost more than a PS/2), and is more easily accesible by non "hardcore" gamers who just want a bit of a laff with their mates round the TV with the aforementioned beer and pizza, and not to have to spend the first few days of playing any new game, writing macros and message binds, and downloading the essential addons and extra maps you need to play in the "big league" - in many ways, the very flexibility offered by the PC as a games platform provides many more potential ways to cheat. And cheating is what ruins many an online multiplayer gaming experience - just ask any Counterstrike player. These games are effectivley being driven onto the private LAN tournament scene where inspections of the players kit whilst in play are possible leaving just the casual games on the 'net. Serious tournaments are almost impossible on the Internet because of the cheating opportunities available by simply hacking the models or game client. These client mods are undetectable by the server. So, with the "closed" nature of console games (ie you can't write your own config scripts or alter the models, sounds and textures ) perhaps there will be a resurgence of serious Internet based multiplayer play. That is, until the consoles start to look so much like a PC that they suffer the same fate...
OK the ramble factor has reached the "shut up now scoot" stage so I'll not bore oyu any more:)
LOL this guys has no idea how insulting he's just been to died in the wool yerkshermen - calling them reds. haw haw - it's them other lot on t'other side of tut'mountain - yerksher would be er white:)
See where the bottleneck is first. Try hitting servers located at your ISP. If your throughput to them is good, you can be sure that your shared connection has nothing to do with your problems.
Indeed - as you point out, unles the server's at your ISP, then the blockage could be anywhere - the whole Internet is "shared"
I reccomend doing a trace on your route:-
traceroute slashdot.org
or if you use Windows it's spelt:-
tracert slashdot.org
for some reason - perhaps those 8.3 conventions linger on LOL:)
Anyway - just examine the results for whwre the round trip time jumps the most. Mostly traceroute will sucessfully reverse lookup the host names of the nodes on the route so it's a simple task then to indentify the 2 ends of that particular "hop". If it doesn't you can use the tools at samspade.org to id IP address owners. Then if you have more time on your hands than a very bored person, you can lobby the people who own those bits to spend some cash on their pipes:)
I agree with you about the console - and we did unplug and remove the KVM when the install and initial testing was done. I wonder why they supplied us with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and not a serial console (or nothing)? Sun (or their reseller) specced the details - one would have thought they'd supply a properly fitting one if they supply one at all! Solaris 8 is also supplied as a workstation distro though - and the lack of something more modern along the lines of Gnome or KDE makes for a very limited interface - it looks little different now than 3 years ago.
As for the Dell servers - only the ones that run NT have consoles.
I dont think there's anything wrong with a GUI - it can help to visualise things. As long as you understand what goes on behind it. I have a to almost re-train people coming to work here whos only backgriund is NT oriented - as even though they have passed all the exams, they often fail to demonstrate an understanding of the underlying architecture of a system as the NT GUI insulates you almost entirely from "how things fit together". With Unix/Linux you have the choice, and for me it depends on the task - if I have to do a thing once, pointing and clicking may work, but if I have to do the same thing to a hundred things, it's quicker to write something in bash using all the tools at your disposal such as sed/awk/C- take you pick!
Re your last paragraph - yes! thats exactly it - for high range servers, Sun makes absolute sense - as the Intel/PCI manufacturers like Dell, have nothing to offer at that level. And I'm sure Sun's price list is competitive against it's rivals in that sector - HP? IBM? But for small to mid-range servers, as you point out - they package the same technology in a smaller box, which makes the machine way too expensive for the task. The claimed advantages in resilience are not relevant any more as the PCI boxes have now acheived a level of resilience where to all practical intents and purposes, it makes no difference. The Sun box, may indeed last longer, but as long as both designs last longer than the lifespan of the technology - it matters not. The box itself may be more scalable, but these days software (and FC shared storage arrays) will let me just add more boxes.
To sum up - I have nothing against Sun - but their small-mid range offering was lacking for the vast amounts of cash.
Well - I can only quote from my own experiences - Solaris 8 did come with lots of "freebies" and extra disks, but none of them contained any GNU tools - but that is not my beef with Sun. In the small to mid range server market - their offering - the E450 is is just well - not up to the mark - escpailly for the price. We wouldn't have bought a second hand one from an E-bay auction, and that was the best price they would give us - and that was after haggling - they wanted about £90K first off.
We run redHat Enterprise on our Dell box - which is a joint development between Oracle and RedHat and has some close tweaks to the memory model. It runs with no problems. Oracle/Sparc should run like a dream - it's the platform Oracle develop on - but for 80K I expect a proper disk subsystem, and proper racking - and more performance than a 12K Intel/PCI box.
You're not reading my posts porperly - I admit there is no need for any GUI on a server, and yes - I do the admin from my Linux deaktop at my desk. I was not "demanding" anything, and spouting insults does not improve my opinion of you.
No - no GNU tools were included (and Sun confirmed this at the time of install). I could have downloaded and compiled gcc et al - but hmm I have no compiler/make etc to do it with - you have to buy them seperatley from Sun.
Yes - you can do SOFTWARE raid and mirroring - in my experience about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
*sigh* actually - no it doesn't - for our purpose (Oracle 8i database) the Dell box outperformed it consistently by about 20% And what you can get from Dell for 80 grand makes you wonder how Sun stay in business.
Yes - you are right - we don't actually need a desktop on this perticular box, and perhaps I should have made it clearer - I was just adding that to the woefully large list of things missing from an 80K system which includes Solaris8 - which is also sold for workstations.
MCSE? Did I mention using Windows instead? No. I don't claim to be an expert on Solaris - I learn a much as I need to to get the job done. Most of my expertise lies in Linux based OS's mostly RedHat right now.
All of my comments are from *experience*. The Solaris box was reliable - thats about all I can say for it. The Dell/Redhat combo is just as reliable though, but with all mod. cons. You can flap about the theory of why one is better than the other but the only thing that matters to me is the *end result* (ie reliable bangs per buck) which is only determined through running both for a considerable time. They do the same job, one takes up 5 times more rack space, and cost 8 times more - do the math yourself.
Here comes the Sun
Doo doo doo doo
Here Comes the Sun
And I say......
It's the most primitive load of junk I've seen in a long time for £80,000.
We bought a Sun E450 (against my wishes - the decision was taken before I got there so it was too late for serious debate). It had 4 SparcII 500Mhz cpus (this is about a year ago), 280Gb disk and 2Gb ram. It cost 80 thousand UKP. It came with:-
Solaris 8
No compiler.
No development tools such as make, M4, autoconf..
No decent desktop (do they really think anyone can be bothered with that joke desktop they supply, with no drag n drop, no file associations etc etc)
The hardware was out of the Arc - no RAID, no mirroring.
At the time I got a quote from Dell for an equivalent power machine - it came in at about £12,000 - with quad channel RAID controller, and 4 PIII Xeon 733Mhz cpus.
Sun charged us over 4000 a peice for the 18Gb Western Dig disks alone - each! When I quizzed them on this - they replied that they get the "best ones". My arse! My room full of Dell servers has WD disks and not one of them has failed - ever (2 years old now). But then even if one did - the servers are all RAID 5 so it won't bring the system down!
Same deal with the RAM - same stuff you can by on the open market - 10 times the price.
When you buy kit from Dell or Compaq (and probably everyone else too) the racks come with nice rack specific monitors, a proper rack keyboard that has a trackball, and fold away neatly. Except if you by a Sun server for 10 times the price - the damm keyboard was too wide to even fit through the rack door - no special monitor, and none of the doors shut properly.
"What a shoddy pile of old rubbish" was my first and lasting impression of "what Sun can give you for £80,000"
We got shot of it last month. Replaced by one Dell 6450 with RedHat Enterprise.
Sorry - this is completely off-topic - but I felt the need:)
LOL:) That spec is going to look a bit weak for $300 by the time anyone cracks the DRM and ports Linux to it.
Besides - I would have thought a more liekly turn of ebents would be "oo look ports of X box games to PCs with Windows and nVidia graphics" I wouldn't mind betting most of the code in the X box is Windows derived.
All stable orbits are looping. Elliptical just means that it isn't always a uniform distance from the origin of the orbit, in this case, Mars.
Indeed - and even if it were a uniform distance from the surface, surface features not withstanding:-) it would still be an ellipse. A circle is still an ellipse - just a special case.
For example, when you trade in a car for a newer or better one, which some people might call an upgrade, you give the dealer the old car as part of the payment for the new one. But when you purchase a Windows 3000 upgrade CD at a store, you hand the cashier $100 and they hand you the CD. At no point do you surrender your copies of previous versions of Windows as payment for the new version.
You have separate in your mind this idea that the delivery media or any physical entity is at all relevant. No - you don't physcially hand over your old "copy" of 98 - but you *do* hand over your right to use it. Its "license to use" that we pay the cash for - not the 50p CD, or worthless manual.
You trade in the cheaper "right to use Win98" for a more expensive item: "right to use XP".
Of course, the car analogy differs in one important respect: depreciation. If MS ever say halved the price of a new OS, then you'd effectively be "trading in" a product of greater value - they'd have to pay you to upgrade:)
There is implied depreciation I guess, as any product is only worth what someone else will pay you for it. How much will you pay me for my Windows 98 license? Not much I bet.
You are right - the license has little to do with copyright - which deals with the rights of an individual or company to be recognised as the inventor/creator of a work. The licenses are purely "licenses to use" the product, not claim you wrote it.
In the UK there is a list managed by "The telephone Preference Service" and I beleive it is mandatory for companies not to call people on this list. As far as I recall it is free to register. When we used to do mass callings using an autodialler, I had the server pull the 3Mb (and growing) file every night from their ftp server and delete records that matched in our database before exporting and uploading the list to the dialler. Not only could we get into serious trouble for calling people on the list, we had to pay a subscription for the list!
I can't recall the URL of their web site now - but it they do have one somewhere:)
If you sell your old 140hp internal combustion engine, you no longer have the right to install the 280hp internal combustion engine you've purchased as an upgrade.
This is nothing like a good analogy - a closer analogy would be "if you sell your 140hp engine, you cannot attach your new turbo to it" - becuase you aint got it any more!
The MS "upgrade" license is more like a trade in - notice that they don't call the new OS "windows yada version 1.1" - it's always a completely new product name. In fact, if you beleive the blurb on XP, they only just now invented video playback, central management, and network access. And hey - XP lets you connect USB cameras. Er - so did 98 dudes.
"if I swap you my 140hp engine plus $600 for that 280hp engine" then do I still have the 140hp engine?
If I swap my 98 license plus $100 or whatever the cost is for that shiny new XP license, do I still have the 98 license?
erm If I swap my working 98 install for that bloated, doesn't-work-with-half-my-peripherals-or-games, take-ages-to-do-anything, shiny-supeficial-makeover OS am I mad? YOU BET. 98 is wot I got on my games machine and no later MS OS has been able to run all the things I need.
:P
Licensing is a funny old game: recently, I bought 137 MS mice, becuase I could get a free Smartsuite license with a peice of hardware. I then used these to get 137 MS Office licenses via the "competitive upgrade" (or trade in) offer from MS....
Since when did you *have* to buy MS anything with your new PC? Certain manufacturers may put the thing on the disk, and may even refuse to knock money off the price if you say you don't want it. You are however - not forced to buy the damm thing - go somewhere else. If you do buy a *new* license with your new PC (or if a *new* license is included) then you *are* free to sell off your 98 license. If its an upgrade license - what's it doing on a brand new PC??
These "problems" are created by the very people who complain about them most of the time by not having the courage of their own convictions and voting with their feet/wallets etc.
Which OEMS were "forced to pay for MS licenses" when they did not ship any MS product? The stupid ones? They'd have to be pretty dumb to pay for something they did not buy. And how did MS force them exactly? Did MS send the mob round to collect the cash?
I'm sure MS like any other sucessful corp have done questionable things - but I do get the feeling that a large contingent complain about it whilst not actually being prepared to do anything about it.
Why troll this guy? It's a fair point. I think on balance it won't "help" terrorists, and is certainly not intended to, but if on the one hand the nsa demand a "back door" in every security and crypto system, it doesn't make sense to open source their own efforts - after all, at this very moment aren't there a couple a 100 guys reading the code looking for back doors, all eager to be the first to publish it on slashdot. I'm sure the nsa thought of this too - so I'd be suprised if they were dumb enough to opensource their mods if they were a bit on the dodgy side.
But still, it doesn't fit with their public stance on "just for us" security.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah but why "fake" it? Hes obviously done the hard bit (sticking all those decorations on the damm tree) Pretty easy to hook it up to the net and attach a sound card+speakers and some links to run a .wav player.
I reckon Chuck's hair may be fake though...
erm you mean they both have a "p" at the end??!?
Yes you are right, but not eveyone uses computers as a home word processor - this kind of thing is meant to go in med/large servers with things like database engines or high cap web servers running on them.
Again, not everyone uses Windows and Linux has good SMP support. Its not essential for the software to support MP either - most server processes (under the Unix model anyway) spawn additonal processes as load increases, so it's relatively simple for the OS to just share these out over the available CPU's
We currently use Dell servers with 2-4 Intel Xeons in them, which are expensive, so an alternative from AMD is most welcome.
QuakeIII apparentley supports MP, but I've never tested it.
1.. If the player can read the original, then so can a copier - I don't see how the data can be magically readable by one device and not by another when both devices predate the format.
2.. I hope this doesn't catch on - I don't want to go back to furtling around though boxes of 5 inch plastic disks to find the track I'm after - making you keep the distribution media is like having to keep all the packaging from everything you ever bought.
This is not the way to go - ownership needs to be registered somewhere (or "right to listen/watch etc"). Thats the way software license mostly work - physically posessing the distribution CD does not mean you have the right to use it - this is dealth with elsewhere - the disk is irrelavent. Just as having a brick in your hand does not give you the *right* to chuck it through a shop window and rob the place. This crypto CD plan is like trying to invent a brick that will only allow itself to be used for wall building - "Powered by stoopid" will be the logo no doubt.. (or "idiot outside".)
This was why Slashdot was created :) - I put it to you that CmdrTaco is in fact, a mouse.
hmm thats great but 6 is invalid. Just because Marvin's brain was the "size of a planet" doesn't mean it had to be a planet, and even if that were so, it doesn't have to be the Earth - the previous rules 1-5 do not state whether the earth was the only planet/computer.
Mind you - the whole plot was based on deliberatley unlikely premises for comedic purposes, so perhaps you are right, and somewhere it will turn out that the only planet sized brain is the earth....
Then again - why didn't Marvin lose his marbles when his brain was flattened to make way for an intergalactic bypass?
hmm yeah - I played GTA3 a couple of times on a friends PS2 and whilst it was very very beatiful, inclusing reflections of the secnery in the gleaming paintwork (and I could elect to drive my actual real life car which was kinda wierd)at the end of the graphical amazement, it left me cold - basically - it is *nothing* like driving a car. It may have been a different story with a wheel to steer with rather than that funny joystick thing, but I I'm not prepared to spend the £250 to find out :)
:)
We played some other PS2 titles (which I forget the name of, although one was a Sar Wars title) and I came away thinking "hmm so basically, scenery of one type or another scrolls towards you, and you steer" This seemed the basic premise of most of the games. In some you could shoot things as well, whilst others you just avoided obstacles (snowboarding was one excuse). The annoying thing that all these games had in common, is that you are never *really* in control of your ship/board/car/shopping trolley etc as the game will just not let you move outside of the "approved" area of the scenery. For example, I couldn't fly out of the canyon in the SW game. But there was no apparent reason for this, it was just arbitrary.
The only other basic type involved 2 psuedo 3d avatarsviewed in 3rd person who face off in some osrt of kickboxing fight. The game appeared to be won by pressing everything on the controller at the same time rapidly.
Apparentley, GT3 is hailed as one of the best if not the best console game. Hmm well if a very pretty version of "horace goes skiing" is the state of the art, I'll stick to me PC this time around. With games like Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside from Sony coing next year, it's gonna be a blast.
Before I get flamed by all the console lovers, I should state that I fully recognise that the console has a place - it's damm sight cheaper than a PC for start (My video card cost more than a PS/2), and is more easily accesible by non "hardcore" gamers who just want a bit of a laff with their mates round the TV with the aforementioned beer and pizza, and not to have to spend the first few days of playing any new game, writing macros and message binds, and downloading the essential addons and extra maps you need to play in the "big league" - in many ways, the very flexibility offered by the PC as a games platform provides many more potential ways to cheat. And cheating is what ruins many an online multiplayer gaming experience - just ask any Counterstrike player. These games are effectivley being driven onto the private LAN tournament scene where inspections of the players kit whilst in play are possible leaving just the casual games on the 'net. Serious tournaments are almost impossible on the Internet because of the cheating opportunities available by simply hacking the models or game client. These client mods are undetectable by the server. So, with the "closed" nature of console games (ie you can't write your own config scripts or alter the models, sounds and textures ) perhaps there will be a resurgence of serious Internet based multiplayer play. That is, until the consoles start to look so much like a PC that they suffer the same fate...
OK the ramble factor has reached the "shut up now scoot" stage so I'll not bore oyu any more
LOL this guys has no idea how insulting he's just been to died in the wool yerkshermen - calling them reds. haw haw - it's them other lot on t'other side of tut'mountain - yerksher would be er white :)
Get an atlas dude - Allison was 'avin you on man.
er.. I tried to attach an example, but some "lameness filter" popped up and said I shouldn't use "junk" characters...
Indeed - as you point out, unles the server's at your ISP, then the blockage could be anywhere - the whole Internet is "shared"
I reccomend doing a trace on your route:-
traceroute slashdot.org
or if you use Windows it's spelt:-
tracert slashdot.org
for some reason - perhaps those 8.3 conventions linger on LOL
Anyway - just examine the results for whwre the round trip time jumps the most. Mostly traceroute will sucessfully reverse lookup the host names of the nodes on the route so it's a simple task then to indentify the 2 ends of that particular "hop". If it doesn't you can use the tools at samspade.org to id IP address owners. Then if you have more time on your hands than a very bored person, you can lobby the people who own those bits to spend some cash on their pipes
LOL then again have you *seen* Falcon's eye Nethack?
:)
http://falconseye.sourceforge.net
You may *need* that N64 TV remote (or whatever it is
It's real laff (and the music is excellent) but for serious competition - ooo it'd slow ya down
LOL - how did so many people grip the wrong end of the stick here? And no - they wouldn't be given shell access to cp the .sav files :)
Yeah and they're thinking of outlawing Christmas too.
"My first OS" :)
I agree with you about the console - and we did unplug and remove the KVM when the install and initial testing was done. I wonder why they supplied us with a monitor, mouse and keyboard and not a serial console (or nothing)? Sun (or their reseller) specced the details - one would have thought they'd supply a properly fitting one if they supply one at all! Solaris 8 is also supplied as a workstation distro though - and the lack of something more modern along the lines of Gnome or KDE makes for a very limited interface - it looks little different now than 3 years ago.
As for the Dell servers - only the ones that run NT have consoles.
I dont think there's anything wrong with a GUI - it can help to visualise things. As long as you understand what goes on behind it. I have a to almost re-train people coming to work here whos only backgriund is NT oriented - as even though they have passed all the exams, they often fail to demonstrate an understanding of the underlying architecture of a system as the NT GUI insulates you almost entirely from "how things fit together". With Unix/Linux you have the choice, and for me it depends on the task - if I have to do a thing once, pointing and clicking may work, but if I have to do the same thing to a hundred things, it's quicker to write something in bash using all the tools at your disposal such as sed/awk/C- take you pick!
Re your last paragraph - yes! thats exactly it - for high range servers, Sun makes absolute sense - as the Intel/PCI manufacturers like Dell, have nothing to offer at that level. And I'm sure Sun's price list is competitive against it's rivals in that sector - HP? IBM? But for small to mid-range servers, as you point out - they package the same technology in a smaller box, which makes the machine way too expensive for the task. The claimed advantages in resilience are not relevant any more as the PCI boxes have now acheived a level of resilience where to all practical intents and purposes, it makes no difference. The Sun box, may indeed last longer, but as long as both designs last longer than the lifespan of the technology - it matters not. The box itself may be more scalable, but these days software (and FC shared storage arrays) will let me just add more boxes.
To sum up - I have nothing against Sun - but their small-mid range offering was lacking for the vast amounts of cash.
Well - I can only quote from my own experiences - Solaris 8 did come with lots of "freebies" and extra disks, but none of them contained any GNU tools - but that is not my beef with Sun. In the small to mid range server market - their offering - the E450 is is just well - not up to the mark - escpailly for the price. We wouldn't have bought a second hand one from an E-bay auction, and that was the best price they would give us - and that was after haggling - they wanted about £90K first off.
We run redHat Enterprise on our Dell box - which is a joint development between Oracle and RedHat and has some close tweaks to the memory model. It runs with no problems. Oracle/Sparc should run like a dream - it's the platform Oracle develop on - but for 80K I expect a proper disk subsystem, and proper racking - and more performance than a 12K Intel/PCI box.
You're not reading my posts porperly - I admit there is no need for any GUI on a server, and yes - I do the admin from my Linux deaktop at my desk. I was not "demanding" anything, and spouting insults does not improve my opinion of you.
No - no GNU tools were included (and Sun confirmed this at the time of install). I could have downloaded and compiled gcc et al - but hmm I have no compiler/make etc to do it with - you have to buy them seperatley from Sun.
Yes - you can do SOFTWARE raid and mirroring - in my experience about as useful as a chocolate fireguard.
*sigh* actually - no it doesn't - for our purpose (Oracle 8i database) the Dell box outperformed it consistently by about 20% And what you can get from Dell for 80 grand makes you wonder how Sun stay in business.
Yes - you are right - we don't actually need a desktop on this perticular box, and perhaps I should have made it clearer - I was just adding that to the woefully large list of things missing from an 80K system which includes Solaris8 - which is also sold for workstations.
MCSE? Did I mention using Windows instead? No. I don't claim to be an expert on Solaris - I learn a much as I need to to get the job done. Most of my expertise lies in Linux based OS's mostly RedHat right now.
All of my comments are from *experience*. The Solaris box was reliable - thats about all I can say for it. The Dell/Redhat combo is just as reliable though, but with all mod. cons. You can flap about the theory of why one is better than the other but the only thing that matters to me is the *end result* (ie reliable bangs per buck) which is only determined through running both for a considerable time. They do the same job, one takes up 5 times more rack space, and cost 8 times more - do the math yourself.
Here comes the Sun
:)
Doo doo doo doo
Here Comes the Sun
And I say......
It's the most primitive load of junk I've seen in a long time for £80,000.
We bought a Sun E450 (against my wishes - the decision was taken before I got there so it was too late for serious debate). It had 4 SparcII 500Mhz cpus (this is about a year ago), 280Gb disk and 2Gb ram. It cost 80 thousand UKP. It came with:-
Solaris 8
No compiler.
No development tools such as make, M4, autoconf..
No decent desktop (do they really think anyone can be bothered with that joke desktop they supply, with no drag n drop, no file associations etc etc)
The hardware was out of the Arc - no RAID, no mirroring.
At the time I got a quote from Dell for an equivalent power machine - it came in at about £12,000 - with quad channel RAID controller, and 4 PIII Xeon 733Mhz cpus.
Sun charged us over 4000 a peice for the 18Gb Western Dig disks alone - each! When I quizzed them on this - they replied that they get the "best ones". My arse! My room full of Dell servers has WD disks and not one of them has failed - ever (2 years old now). But then even if one did - the servers are all RAID 5 so it won't bring the system down!
Same deal with the RAM - same stuff you can by on the open market - 10 times the price.
When you buy kit from Dell or Compaq (and probably everyone else too) the racks come with nice rack specific monitors, a proper rack keyboard that has a trackball, and fold away neatly. Except if you by a Sun server for 10 times the price - the damm keyboard was too wide to even fit through the rack door - no special monitor, and none of the doors shut properly.
"What a shoddy pile of old rubbish" was my first and lasting impression of "what Sun can give you for £80,000"
We got shot of it last month. Replaced by one Dell 6450 with RedHat Enterprise.
Sorry - this is completely off-topic - but I felt the need
LOL :) That spec is going to look a bit weak for $300 by the time anyone cracks the DRM and ports Linux to it.
Besides - I would have thought a more liekly turn of ebents would be "oo look ports of X box games to PCs with Windows and nVidia graphics" I wouldn't mind betting most of the code in the X box is Windows derived.
Indeed - and even if it were a uniform distance from the surface, surface features not withstanding
You have separate in your mind this idea that the delivery media or any physical entity is at all relevant. No - you don't physcially hand over your old "copy" of 98 - but you *do* hand over your right to use it. Its "license to use" that we pay the cash for - not the 50p CD, or worthless manual.
You trade in the cheaper "right to use Win98" for a more expensive item: "right to use XP".
Of course, the car analogy differs in one important respect: depreciation. If MS ever say halved the price of a new OS, then you'd effectively be "trading in" a product of greater value - they'd have to pay you to upgrade
There is implied depreciation I guess, as any product is only worth what someone else will pay you for it. How much will you pay me for my Windows 98 license? Not much I bet.
You are right - the license has little to do with copyright - which deals with the rights of an individual or company to be recognised as the inventor/creator of a work. The licenses are purely "licenses to use" the product, not claim you wrote it.
In the UK there is a list managed by "The telephone Preference Service" and I beleive it is mandatory for companies not to call people on this list. As far as I recall it is free to register. When we used to do mass callings using an autodialler, I had the server pull the 3Mb (and growing) file every night from their ftp server and delete records that matched in our database before exporting and uploading the list to the dialler. Not only could we get into serious trouble for calling people on the list, we had to pay a subscription for the list!
:)
I can't recall the URL of their web site now - but it they do have one somewhere
This is nothing like a good analogy - a closer analogy would be "if you sell your 140hp engine, you cannot attach your new turbo to it" - becuase you aint got it any more!
The MS "upgrade" license is more like a trade in - notice that they don't call the new OS "windows yada version 1.1" - it's always a completely new product name. In fact, if you beleive the blurb on XP, they only just now invented video playback, central management, and network access. And hey - XP lets you connect USB cameras. Er - so did 98 dudes.
"if I swap you my 140hp engine plus $600 for that 280hp engine" then do I still have the 140hp engine?
If I swap my 98 license plus $100 or whatever the cost is for that shiny new XP license, do I still have the 98 license?
erm If I swap my working 98 install for that bloated, doesn't-work-with-half-my-peripherals-or-games, take-ages-to-do-anything, shiny-supeficial-makeover OS am I mad? YOU BET. 98 is wot I got on my games machine and no later MS OS has been able to run all the things I need.
:P
Licensing is a funny old game: recently, I bought 137 MS mice, becuase I could get a free Smartsuite license with a peice of hardware. I then used these to get 137 MS Office licenses via the "competitive upgrade" (or trade in) offer from MS....
Since when did you *have* to buy MS anything with your new PC? Certain manufacturers may put the thing on the disk, and may even refuse to knock money off the price if you say you don't want it. You are however - not forced to buy the damm thing - go somewhere else. If you do buy a *new* license with your new PC (or if a *new* license is included) then you *are* free to sell off your 98 license. If its an upgrade license - what's it doing on a brand new PC??
These "problems" are created by the very people who complain about them most of the time by not having the courage of their own convictions and voting with their feet/wallets etc.
Which OEMS were "forced to pay for MS licenses" when they did not ship any MS product? The stupid ones? They'd have to be pretty dumb to pay for something they did not buy. And how did MS force them exactly? Did MS send the mob round to collect the cash?
I'm sure MS like any other sucessful corp have done questionable things - but I do get the feeling that a large contingent complain about it whilst not actually being prepared to do anything about it.
Why troll this guy? It's a fair point. I think on balance it won't "help" terrorists, and is certainly not intended to, but if on the one hand the nsa demand a "back door" in every security and crypto system, it doesn't make sense to open source their own efforts - after all, at this very moment aren't there a couple a 100 guys reading the code looking for back doors, all eager to be the first to publish it on slashdot. I'm sure the nsa thought of this too - so I'd be suprised if they were dumb enough to opensource their mods if they were a bit on the dodgy side.
But still, it doesn't fit with their public stance on "just for us" security.