Re:Anyone really using XServes?
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Return of the Mac
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we're approaching one dozen at three locations (US-MD office, GB-London office, GB-London data center). we've also got about as many PowerMac G5s for development and test servers (all but one in our US-NJ office). we're quite happy. we do, however recognize that we're in a distinct minority, and we've gotten more than one odd look from someone when we tell them this.
i'm not sure what this means. i mean, i guess it's one sided in that it's only my experience, but that's pretty much inherent in being a single person's experience. for what it's worth, that experience comes from large financial institutions, a very large telecommunications company (Bell Labs), a very small software startup, a service company to mobile operators, and plenty of independent consulting to various people like software and microelectronics companies. my statements about my experiences have been more or less consistent.
...how do you explain that lots of
people are using the GNU tools on "real" Unices?
that's a very good question. part of it, i believe, is that there is some benefit to having uniformity across platforms, even if the uniformity is below a level available on an individual platform. the gnu toolset certainly provides value in this area, and this becomes especially important as Unix systems become less and less differentiated.
Quite a bold claim, considering that they put that whole socket business in
there, which was about the first thing to be ditched in Plan9...
you will note that i also said they got plenty of things wrong, too; sockets are a wonderful example. while their vision was certainly flawed, they at least had a relatively consistent guiding vision.
History proves you wrong.
well, no. the fact that they started more or less concurrently doesn't say anything convincing about who influenced who (or not). i am, however, currently unable to find the explicit references by GNU/FSF folks to that effect.
also, i think the HURD people did, in fact, understand Unix (at least at a high level) somewhat, although i'm inclined to agree with Linus on this one (a rare thing indeed) that their approach to implementing it is generally unconvincing. concerns about their microkernel (Linus' main objection) aside, they missed why files are the important abstraction level and they made huge sacrifices of simplicity in the service of other aims (including compatibility). while i'd agree with you (or what i think you're saying) about HURD taking a more ambitions and intentional approach to compatibility than Plan 9, i'd point out both that this has hurt their architecture somewhat and also that Plan 9's biggest compatibility problems come not from dealing with POSIX/ANSI, but with dealing with non-standard GNUisms.
i will certainly concede that various vendors have, at various times, left their own OSs in a pretty poor state. i've been particularly frustrated with HP-UX and AIX, but specifics aside, your point stands.
this does not, however, mean the GNU stuff is scientifically interesting. the fact that they've managed to copy the better portions of existing Unix tools, rather than the more archaic portions, does not make them innovative. and having admin'd more Unix flavors and derivatives than i care to list or anyone cares to read, the most consistently frustrating parts of getting things to work in a portable fashion is the hackish approach to portability popularized by GNU (witness autoconf/configure), non-standard extensions to existing languages and utilities (gmake, gawk, gcc's C extensions), and errors in gcc, particularly in the optimizations.
...the science of operating systems isn't very interesting anymore...
this is true in the sense that there is very little of interest being done in this realm; this is entirely false in the sense that there are lots of interesting problems to solve and questions to answer. linux is doing nothing to answer them (with a few very specific examples). inferno and plan 9 are the most interesting in this regard that i'm aware of, and they're pushing "the science of operating systems" substantially farther than Linux even thinks about, with very good results.
in my experience, both in Bell Labs and elsewhere, anyone with experience on "real" unixes thinks the GNU tools are second-rate at best. their coding ability isn't the primary issue (although there are certainly questions there); it is, as you said, their lack of understanding of the philosophy. at least the BSD folks, who got many things wrong in their own derivative works, understood the fundamental philosophy (mostly) of Unix.
to be fair, GNU and Linux have made some very significant, very positive contributions. but with one or two exceptions, they are not in code. GNU and LInux are interesting for sociological/political reasons. they are not scientifically interesting.
HURD does, at least, have some interesting ideas in it. of course, most of them got there because Plan 9 had them, wasn't open source, and RMS wanted access to them. now that it is just use the real thing.
...you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday,"... In response, Motorola has delayed release of the iTunes-equipped phones a few more months.
so, what're they trying to get to? is motorola trying to delay the marketing more? if they recognize that Apple doesn't push products until they're pretty much available (with some exceptions), is it that big of a logical leap to realize that making the product available later is going to make the marketing available later, too?
i'm just giving you a hard time. i get the same thing at work with people talking about working on their old PDP-11s. i also work with jr. high and high school kids, and i know you're right - you should see the looks i get when i start talking about the Dukes of Hazard. i'm considering donating my old NES to the group, just for educational purposes.
OpenOffice is "underutilized" on the Mac because the Mac version is awful. i've used it quite a bit, at various versions, and always been frustrated with things that didn't work right. NeoOffice does an excellent job of recasting OpenOffice into being a "real" Mac app, but it's still quite clunky. Keynote is vastly easier to use than [Neo,Open]Office's presentation bit (and, in my opinion, PowerPoint), and Pages is incrementally easier (not as dramatic a difference) than its [Neo,Open]Office counterpart, and both do import from other formats (most significantly, unfortunately, the relevant Microsoft formats) better than their counterparts.
NeoOffice and OpenOffice are great projects: i wish them continued success, and personally use NeoOffice for spreadsheet stuff. but while i think your point may still be valid, these just aren't good examples.
i'm totally unclear what the relevance is. yes, our public education system, on the whole, has problems. but how does that alter the fact that our having one represents a socialist element in US culture? or the fact that the existence of our public education system - historically - has been very important to getting us "this far" (from the grandparent)? also note that the article you referenced suggests "The U.S. higher-education system is envied around the world" - the system also largely subsidized by government money, an extension of the public education system.
Only people who get income form the government ever seem to thinks more services should be government run and funded.
um, what? no. with the exception of refund checks for tax overpayment, i've never received any money from any government, and i think government funding of various things is a great idea.
Remember, it was capitalism and not socialism that got us this far.
define "capitalism", "socialism", and "this far", please. i don't think you understand what you're talking about. public education has been a very important part of getting us to where we are today - and that comes right out of Marx's Communist Manifesto, from his list of things needed by a socialist state (that's #10; we've also got #2, #4 in limited cases, #5 in general although not absolutely, half of #6, and limited cases of #7). the moderation of capitalism by means of injecting significant strains of socialism has been crucial to the US's technological leadership over the past several decades.
1) true. however: government also exists (at least ours, and at least in theory) to protect the liberty of its citizens. while i'm certainly not an adherent to the utopian vision of the internet as solving all our problems, it is a very useful tool for open communication and information access, particularly compared to other widely available media.
2) agreed. this law is taking away a municipality's resident's ability to decide for themselves whether this is a good idea for them; it's telling them they can't even vote on it. i'm all for municipalities not providing WiFi if the residents decide they don't want it, but they must be allowed to make the choice.
it's nice to see some people can still oppose a law even though it'd get them what they want (at least in the short term).
Considering only people with enough money to buy a computer really benifet...
do you realize what the figures are on computer ownership in the US? it's not like we're taking money from everyone and giving it to the top 10%.
...it isn't fair to use everyones taxes.
see various other siblings for the fact that this parallels logic with highways and that it's a social good.
Not to mention that a lot of WiFi's popularity has been helped by commercial hot spots.
i'm really curious where you've gotten this idea from. is there some support, or are you just offering your opinion?
I own pre ipo stock at a major hot spot provider.
good luck with that. my company works on the financial services side of that industry, and let me tell you: all the "major hot spot providers" (where that's the primary/sole business) have some serious business case issues. it's totally unclear how that's going to be a long-term profitable business. the majority of places that offer WiFi access do so either for free (as an amenity to their customers) or charge for it themselves, typically either via credit card splash-screen-style billing or attached to an existing bill (as is common in hotels). additionally, they have to compete with folks like T-Mobile who, while still looking to turn a profit off the deal, are increasingly looking at their own WiFi offerings as a defensive measure: an added feature of having an account with them, rather than a stand-alone service.
if you have some idea for a sensible business case for these guys, or what i'm missing in the business case analysis, seriously, let me know. we do this stuff for real.
my lunch box was way bigger than either this or a Mac mini when i was a kid. how much lunch could you fit in one of these? must be one of those low-carb lunches.
i agree that's what the grandparent is trying to say. and it's still wrong. who in their right mind doesn't consider the BSD projects to be open source? there's no shortage of projects with development processes more closed than linux which still manage to make a good run of open source. many (like, say, me!) would consider having a more controlled development model appropriate or beneficial in many cases. it's certainly helped the OpenBSD folks with their security goals.
look, we're all used to it in the CompSci world by now, so we might not realize how bad an idea it is, but do you understand how bad a mistake it will be to allow them to redefine a kilogram to be 1024 grams? we must stop this!
if you're looking for a really solid system which will last you for quite some time, the answer is "now". Apple hardware remains useful for a good stretch longer than hardware in the PC world. anything you buy new from Apple today will still be totally respectable two years from now, and still comfortable well beyond that. that aside, Apple is always "about" to come out with some great new something-or-other. that's the thing, that's why people love Apple: they actually continually innovate. they're always going to update or upgrade something a few months after you buy. would it be better if they just sat still?
if you're looking for bragging rights, simply wait until a product announcement (usually at one of the semi-annual shows). buy that day.
the only thing that's worth waiting for at this point is Tiger: the OS advances at a bit more of a steady state, and we have a pretty good idea what's going to be in it (and let me tell you, the dev previews of things like Dashboard look pretty sweet). of course, you can buy a mac now and buy Tiger later if the new features are useful to you; you get to start using a mac now (a big win!), and can upgrade or not as you see fit.
Am I going to get burned by a sluggish overpriced laptop...
no. Apple does not make any such thing. their current lowest-end laptop comes stock with a 1.2Ghz and 256 MB of ram (okay, you're going to want a bit more than that, but it's not ludicrous); nothing that qualifies as being in the same neighborhood as "sluggish". it also starts at $999, which is a far was from "overpriced" for anything with similar performance (not to mention usability, reliability, &c.).
First off, WEP is still better than absolutely nothing.
only on paper. you note - correctly - that it will slow people down from getting in. but your comment about it preventing the "uneducated and unexperienced from snooping" exposes the problem: how many uneducated people are going to have tcpdump skills? honestly, i've seen off-the-shelf free products that do WEP cracking *more easialy* than i've seen them do TCP sniffing.
in practice, of course, your next point is the most useful: not everything supports WPA. but then, personally, i don't even rely on WPA. if it's got to be secure, you really want end-to-end encryption. SSL and ssh help a lot here. i wish Inferno/Plan9's network model had been more widely adapted: simply importing another (wired) machine's entire network stack over an end-to-end encrypted channel makes all these concerns simply go away.
One of these fixes......will come as a welcome relief to those trying to keep their WEP-based wireless networks secure.
unless said fix has to do with fixing something broken in WPA, this is silly. WEP is insecure. record break-in times to WiFi networks "secured" using WEP is well under half an hour; stock tools can do it in several hours to a day. WPA is hardly iron-clad, but it's orders of magnitude better than the fatally flawed WEP. one should not rely on WEP for security of any kind.
the most "interesting" operating system i know of, Inferno, doesn't make use of a MMU. it's designed to be able to run on very minimal or embedded-style hardware (or as an application on top of another OS). it's got some really fascinating characteristics, and its handling of networking in particular is still way ahead of anything else out there, even eight years after its initial beta release. your comments about performance are still entirely appropriate, but there's plenty of very interesting - and even general purpose - things to be done with this.
unlike French, which has an official language institute, an arbitrary organization's style guide does not dictate "correct" English in either of its major variants (although such things are useful reference points in both). try google searches for things like "BT are" site:co.uk or "GNER are" site:co.uk for a rather lengthy list of examples from British speakers, including folks like the Manchester council leader. i can point you to a substantial collection of press releases by British companies if you like, too. this is also certainly common practice in speech in England (or at least in London, where i lived for a good while). even a search in one of your own publications for, say, "BT are" site:guardian.co.uk yields a number of relevant hits (although to your publication's credit, most - but not all - i found before i stopped skimming google's second page are quotes from other people).
i will certainly concede that this practice is not universal in British English - Vita Nuova has recently changed their web site to treat the name a singular, for example - but then, such was never my claim. i claimed that British folks speak this way. perhaps i should have explicitly included the "tend to".
yes, as a sibling has noted, i said "tense" when i should have said "number". i think it's pretty clear what i was referring to in the example. and (since we're well past the point of pedantry) even if you got hung up on that detail, the statement isn't "incoherent", just false.
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we're approaching one dozen at three locations (US-MD office, GB-London office, GB-London data center). we've also got about as many PowerMac G5s for development and test servers (all but one in our US-NJ office). we're quite happy. we do, however recognize that we're in a distinct minority, and we've gotten more than one odd look from someone when we tell them this.
also, i think the HURD people did, in fact, understand Unix (at least at a high level) somewhat, although i'm inclined to agree with Linus on this one (a rare thing indeed) that their approach to implementing it is generally unconvincing. concerns about their microkernel (Linus' main objection) aside, they missed why files are the important abstraction level and they made huge sacrifices of simplicity in the service of other aims (including compatibility). while i'd agree with you (or what i think you're saying) about HURD taking a more ambitions and intentional approach to compatibility than Plan 9, i'd point out both that this has hurt their architecture somewhat and also that Plan 9's biggest compatibility problems come not from dealing with POSIX/ANSI, but with dealing with non-standard GNUisms.
i will certainly concede that various vendors have, at various times, left their own OSs in a pretty poor state. i've been particularly frustrated with HP-UX and AIX, but specifics aside, your point stands.
this does not, however, mean the GNU stuff is scientifically interesting. the fact that they've managed to copy the better portions of existing Unix tools, rather than the more archaic portions, does not make them innovative. and having admin'd more Unix flavors and derivatives than i care to list or anyone cares to read, the most consistently frustrating parts of getting things to work in a portable fashion is the hackish approach to portability popularized by GNU (witness autoconf/configure), non-standard extensions to existing languages and utilities (gmake, gawk, gcc's C extensions), and errors in gcc, particularly in the optimizations.
in my experience, both in Bell Labs and elsewhere, anyone with experience on "real" unixes thinks the GNU tools are second-rate at best. their coding ability isn't the primary issue (although there are certainly questions there); it is, as you said, their lack of understanding of the philosophy. at least the BSD folks, who got many things wrong in their own derivative works, understood the fundamental philosophy (mostly) of Unix.
to be fair, GNU and Linux have made some very significant, very positive contributions. but with one or two exceptions, they are not in code. GNU and LInux are interesting for sociological/political reasons. they are not scientifically interesting.
HURD does, at least, have some interesting ideas in it. of course, most of them got there because Plan 9 had them, wasn't open source, and RMS wanted access to them. now that it is just use the real thing.
i'm just giving you a hard time. i get the same thing at work with people talking about working on their old PDP-11s. i also work with jr. high and high school kids, and i know you're right - you should see the looks i get when i start talking about the Dukes of Hazard. i'm considering donating my old NES to the group, just for educational purposes.
psh. kids today. bet your music collection goes "all the way back" to CDs, too.
OpenOffice is "underutilized" on the Mac because the Mac version is awful. i've used it quite a bit, at various versions, and always been frustrated with things that didn't work right. NeoOffice does an excellent job of recasting OpenOffice into being a "real" Mac app, but it's still quite clunky. Keynote is vastly easier to use than [Neo,Open]Office's presentation bit (and, in my opinion, PowerPoint), and Pages is incrementally easier (not as dramatic a difference) than its [Neo,Open]Office counterpart, and both do import from other formats (most significantly, unfortunately, the relevant Microsoft formats) better than their counterparts.
NeoOffice and OpenOffice are great projects: i wish them continued success, and personally use NeoOffice for spreadsheet stuff. but while i think your point may still be valid, these just aren't good examples.
i'm totally unclear what the relevance is. yes, our public education system, on the whole, has problems. but how does that alter the fact that our having one represents a socialist element in US culture? or the fact that the existence of our public education system - historically - has been very important to getting us "this far" (from the grandparent)? also note that the article you referenced suggests "The U.S. higher-education system is envied around the world" - the system also largely subsidized by government money, an extension of the public education system.
so, yeah: i "dare".
1) true. however: government also exists (at least ours, and at least in theory) to protect the liberty of its citizens. while i'm certainly not an adherent to the utopian vision of the internet as solving all our problems, it is a very useful tool for open communication and information access, particularly compared to other widely available media.
2) agreed. this law is taking away a municipality's resident's ability to decide for themselves whether this is a good idea for them; it's telling them they can't even vote on it. i'm all for municipalities not providing WiFi if the residents decide they don't want it, but they must be allowed to make the choice.
it's nice to see some people can still oppose a law even though it'd get them what they want (at least in the short term).
if you have some idea for a sensible business case for these guys, or what i'm missing in the business case analysis, seriously, let me know. we do this stuff for real.
my lunch box was way bigger than either this or a Mac mini when i was a kid. how much lunch could you fit in one of these? must be one of those low-carb lunches.
i agree that's what the grandparent is trying to say. and it's still wrong. who in their right mind doesn't consider the BSD projects to be open source? there's no shortage of projects with development processes more closed than linux which still manage to make a good run of open source. many (like, say, me!) would consider having a more controlled development model appropriate or beneficial in many cases. it's certainly helped the OpenBSD folks with their security goals.
look, we're all used to it in the CompSci world by now, so we might not realize how bad an idea it is, but do you understand how bad a mistake it will be to allow them to redefine a kilogram to be 1024 grams? we must stop this!
if you're looking for bragging rights, simply wait until a product announcement (usually at one of the semi-annual shows). buy that day.
the only thing that's worth waiting for at this point is Tiger: the OS advances at a bit more of a steady state, and we have a pretty good idea what's going to be in it (and let me tell you, the dev previews of things like Dashboard look pretty sweet). of course, you can buy a mac now and buy Tiger later if the new features are useful to you; you get to start using a mac now (a big win!), and can upgrade or not as you see fit.no. Apple does not make any such thing. their current lowest-end laptop comes stock with a 1.2Ghz and 256 MB of ram (okay, you're going to want a bit more than that, but it's not ludicrous); nothing that qualifies as being in the same neighborhood as "sluggish". it also starts at $999, which is a far was from "overpriced" for anything with similar performance (not to mention usability, reliability, &c.).
in practice, of course, your next point is the most useful: not everything supports WPA. but then, personally, i don't even rely on WPA. if it's got to be secure, you really want end-to-end encryption. SSL and ssh help a lot here. i wish Inferno/Plan9's network model had been more widely adapted: simply importing another (wired) machine's entire network stack over an end-to-end encrypted channel makes all these concerns simply go away.
the most "interesting" operating system i know of, Inferno, doesn't make use of a MMU. it's designed to be able to run on very minimal or embedded-style hardware (or as an application on top of another OS). it's got some really fascinating characteristics, and its handling of networking in particular is still way ahead of anything else out there, even eight years after its initial beta release. your comments about performance are still entirely appropriate, but there's plenty of very interesting - and even general purpose - things to be done with this.
unlike French, which has an official language institute, an arbitrary organization's style guide does not dictate "correct" English in either of its major variants (although such things are useful reference points in both). try google searches for things like "BT are" site:co.uk or "GNER are" site:co.uk for a rather lengthy list of examples from British speakers, including folks like the Manchester council leader. i can point you to a substantial collection of press releases by British companies if you like, too. this is also certainly common practice in speech in England (or at least in London, where i lived for a good while). even a search in one of your own publications for, say, "BT are" site:guardian.co.uk yields a number of relevant hits (although to your publication's credit, most - but not all - i found before i stopped skimming google's second page are quotes from other people).
i will certainly concede that this practice is not universal in British English - Vita Nuova has recently changed their web site to treat the name a singular, for example - but then, such was never my claim. i claimed that British folks speak this way. perhaps i should have explicitly included the "tend to".
yes, as a sibling has noted, i said "tense" when i should have said "number". i think it's pretty clear what i was referring to in the example. and (since we're well past the point of pedantry) even if you got hung up on that detail, the statement isn't "incoherent", just false.
time for remedial classes?
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