Security products are only expensive if you're infringing on someone's patents and live in North America, the only place anyone respects patents on algorithms.
mod_ssl + rsaref + apache didn't cost me a damn cent and took about 3 hours to set up. I don't make $6667 per hour so I can't figure out where the $20K figure I saw being bandied about comes from.
Have fun writing those OS/2 device drivers, dickhead.
Two completely, utterly, totally different markets. Anyone you know run Oracle Parallel Server on a Beowulf? Anybody see physics labs writing up grant applications to buy new O2Ks?
No and no. ccNUMA boxes perform an entirely different class of applications (well) from DSM clusters (which when built from Common Off-The-Shelf, or COTS, hardware qualify as a Beowulf). SMP boxes like Sun's (the UE10K for example) are the one extreme of parallel processing, all CPUs capable of acting from a single memory image. Distributed shared memory (DSM) clusters like Beowulves are the other extreme -- totally discrete information is acted on by each processor. ccNUMA boxes are somewhere in between, though from a programmer's perspective they are more like a big SMP box.
More succinctly:
A business that is doing online sales wants a resilient, fault-tolerant architecture for taking orders. So they build a Beowulf or an even-more-loosely-coupled cluster of webservers. That's where DSM clustering shines -- spill a 2L of Pepsi into one of them and nobody notices.
Then one day they decide they need to profile trends in the orders -- say, they want to figure out whether ads on Slashdot generate a response, and whether those people buy stuff. The company has a big-ass database now, way too big to fit in the main memory of a 32-bit machine like one of their Beowulf (or neo-wulf, heh) nodes. So they take some money from the petty cash drawer, buy a Starfire box and an Oracle license, import the data they have collected, and grind over it until they get some answers. That's where SMP shines.
CC is kind of bogus. What would be nice is Purify, as someone mentioned. Especially for, say, MySQL;-) heheh...
Anyways, if there are UML goombahs out there that haven't heard of Dia, LOOK AT IT. It's VERY raw right now but one of my favorite special-purpose tools. I started working on getting it to make diagrams from SQL scripts (just simple create table foo (YourMom varchar(255), Foo int); type stuff) and got distracted, but it doesn't look like it will be harder than necessary. The output format is XML and there's an active user community. Here is the homepage:
Cringely is incisive and appears to be right on target in this piece. It's a damn fine read, although I suspect that a high-level market-based overview like this glosses over the alliances and deals that really make big business work. He hits on several of those (AMD + Microsoft being the big one); it would be nice if a followup piece were to look at the interests of Lucent and IBM relative to Intel and what might take place in a more open marketplace (i.e. one where cross-platform Linux support ala Oracle makes competition something other than a high-end phenomenon... a future which is most assuredly NOT a certainty...).
Well, SQL*Plus sucks compared to the MySQL interactive tool, dealing with CLOBs is a nightmare, and basically anything like an update needs to work on a single field (when using DBI) to be processed (never mind their ANSI "compliance"). The JDBC drivers work okay, although the fast (OCI) one apparently is fuct.
But it works well enough for my employers to use it as the underlying engine for a document tracking application, and it comes with support when you buy a license. I call in TARs all the time out of pure laziness -- Oracle tech support is actually pretty good. Either that or they're very masochistic, because I make a point of only calling in really nasty problems.;-)
All in all it isn't bad -- you can't beat Oracle for scalability, although I miss the creature comforts of MySQL (readline, for starters).
Postgres is supposed to have readline in the most recent CVS version (thanks Ari!) so I'm probably going to try that out at home.
The One True Debugger (or meta-debugger, if you prefer; or debugger GUI) is still DDD.
If wdb runs underneath DDD (like gdb, pdb, pydb, jdb, and dbx do) then it rules. If not, it sucks. End of story.;-)
Seriously though, DDD is the greatest programming tool ever created. Well, it's tied with XEmacs. Anyone who bags on *nix/*BSD for having crappy IDEs hasn't used these two tools properly.
I'm going to check and see if Ripco and Lunatic Labs are still around (Ripco was, as of a couple years ago, and was an ISP to boot)...
It's amazing how trivial stuff like this can trigger a flood of memories. Every time I see stuff like this (and recognize names, to boot) it seems like the world gets a little smaller.
Having worked at IBM (on contract) a few months ago, I'm surprised it wasn't on the list. The IBMers I worked with that used Linux ran either
1) LinuxPPC 2) Debian, or 3) RedHat.
Of the two x86 distros, the feeling was that RedHat was for ordinary joes who wouldn't ask much from the system, and Debian was/is for people who want to make the system do backflips. Of course LinuxPPC had its own crowd.
No skin off my back though -- it would be amazing if someone working on Debian didn't already run it on a Netfinity 7000 or similar. They're great machines, the kind you'd expect a Debian maintainer to be working with;-). Heheh...
(still waiting for my copy of Solaris 7 to show up so as to run Coda on Debian, Solaris, NT, and FreeBSD boxes)
That makes me wonder -- how is IBM going to respond to Coda, seeing as to how when Coda matures it will be a Better DFS?!? That may be the really interesting question... several of the Coda clients have BSD-style licenses.
I just remembered that you can, in fact, use the OCI interface with JDBC. Instead of loading the "Thin" driver, you load the OCI driver. My boss was against this ("no no no, we want to use the Thin driver") but I'm not -- a web server driven mostly by a database may as well reside on the same server (unless you're smoking crack and use applets or CGI scripts for everything, as opposed to mod_jserv + DBConnectionBroker and/or mod_perl + ApacheDBI). So sue me or whatever.
1) MySQL can simulate the important part of transactions, namely, the atomicity of an update. Requesting a table lock for the duration of a multi-statement update, and releasing it at the end, is what you have to do. Who the hell uses rollback, anyways?
2) PostGreSQL is a pleasant database to use, but it's slow, and I can't for the life of me wrap my mind around the code. There are lots of spatial and object-oriented constructs in there which you don't need and which, in conjuction with totally- portable transactions, make it relatively slow.
3) Oracle is a bear to install, tune, and make behave. However, with enough memory on the server and enough competence in the DBA, it will scale from here to eternity. I have to administer an Oracle database as the backend of my company's corporate-infrastructure web application and it's not a pleasant job. Maybe if I could get mod_jserv to work on my server, I'd be singing a different tune -- the JDBC driver for Oracle is pretty nice. Unfortunately, it uses the TCP/IP listener, which does not scale as well as using the OCI interface (via Perl/DBI/Apache::DBI) does.
With the tweaking I do to my scripts and server, I've managed to get dynamic pages back to the user as fast as static pages (with MySQL; slightly slower for Oracle). For the amount of grief it has caused me, and the crappy tool SQL*plus is (I have lots of DBI scripts to dump tables in a readable manner), I disdain Oracle.
Sybase was much more pleasant to work with, however the driver support for Sybase on Linux is pathetic. Every molecular biology concern I know of seems to use Sybase on Solaris, where their JDBC driver is fully supported, and the replication features of Sybase allow the DBAs to sleep quite soundly. On Linux, though, it sucks.
Do yourself a favor and buy a MySQL license, or help Monty hack subselects and atomic operations (pseudo-transactions, really) into the MySQL code. The world will be a better place when there isn't a reason to use Oracle anymore.
And if you use JDBC + servlets, use connection pooling and caching -- mail me if you care. Servlets and Java Server Pages can obsolete ASP altogether if we work with Sun and they work with us... otherwise, delenda est Sun Microsystems!
PPP was a bitch for me (I had a Winmodem which I had never used and ended up buying the blue light special 56K external at Staples) and this was after running Linux for months (but always on a LAN or not connected at all).
I still haven't gotten around to configuring sound... anyways welcome to the dark side, enjoy!
you'll have to dig a bit, and it's alpha, etc. etc., but someone has of course cooked up a way to use GTK in multithreaded applications.
I have it lying around *somewhere*, unfortunately I'm dorking out with Perl and Java and databases instead of doing any real programming so I can't comment on whether it works well.
That's odd, I've never seen a physics or math grad student typeset their thesis in MS Word. Maybe they should reformat those equations so they can use a professional word processor instead of that wacky longhair TeX crap.
SCO UnixWare7 is the most broken piece of shit I've ever worked with in my entire life. It's worse than Windows 95.
I hope those bastards starve -- not only do they sell broken OSes and release broken software, even their friggin' compiler is a piece of junk so you can't fix anything!
Santa Cruz is a nice town, it's about time it stopped having its name dragged through the mud by SCO, anyways. Rat bastards probably delayed Linux's acceptance by a year or two, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Security products are only expensive if you're infringing on someone's patents and live in North America, the only place anyone respects patents on algorithms.
mod_ssl + rsaref + apache didn't cost me a damn cent and took about 3 hours to set up. I don't make $6667 per hour so I can't figure out where the $20K figure I saw being bandied about comes from.
Have fun writing those OS/2 device drivers, dickhead.
Linux just sucks less -- JWZ (paraphrase)
Two completely, utterly, totally different markets. Anyone you know run Oracle Parallel Server on a Beowulf? Anybody see physics labs writing up grant applications to buy new O2Ks?
No and no. ccNUMA boxes perform an entirely different class of applications (well) from DSM clusters (which when built from Common Off-The-Shelf, or COTS, hardware qualify as a Beowulf). SMP boxes like Sun's (the UE10K for example) are the one extreme of parallel processing, all CPUs capable of acting from a single memory image. Distributed shared memory (DSM) clusters like Beowulves are the other extreme -- totally discrete information is acted on by each processor. ccNUMA boxes are somewhere in between, though from a programmer's perspective they are more like a big SMP box.
More succinctly:
A business that is doing online sales wants a resilient, fault-tolerant architecture for taking orders. So they build a Beowulf or an even-more-loosely-coupled cluster of webservers. That's where DSM clustering shines -- spill a 2L of Pepsi into one of them and nobody notices.
Then one day they decide they need to profile trends in the orders -- say, they want to figure out whether ads on Slashdot generate a response, and whether those people buy stuff. The company has a big-ass database now, way too big to fit in the main memory of a 32-bit machine like one of their Beowulf (or neo-wulf, heh) nodes. So they take some money from the petty cash drawer, buy a Starfire box and an Oracle license, import the data they have collected, and grind over it until they get some answers. That's where SMP shines.
Even if you were only trolling, the point stands.
CC is kind of bogus. What would be nice is Purify, as someone mentioned. Especially for, say, MySQL ;-) heheh...
Anyways, if there are UML goombahs out there that haven't heard of Dia, LOOK AT IT. It's VERY raw right now but one of my favorite special-purpose tools. I started working on getting it to make diagrams from SQL scripts (just simple create table foo (YourMom varchar(255), Foo int); type stuff) and got distracted, but it doesn't look like it will be harder than necessary. The output format is XML and there's an active user community. Here is the homepage:
http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/dia.html
I think version 0.40 will be coming out soon.
Cringely is incisive and appears to be right on target in this piece. It's a damn fine read, although I suspect that a high-level market-based overview like this glosses over the alliances and deals that really make big business work. He hits on several of those (AMD + Microsoft being the big one); it would be nice if a followup piece were to look at the interests of Lucent and IBM relative to Intel and what might take place in a more open marketplace (i.e. one where cross-platform Linux support ala Oracle makes competition something other than a high-end phenomenon... a future which is most assuredly NOT a certainty...).
Anyways, it was a great way to start my workday.
but I think it was UPS's fault.
Anyways, they're idiots, but their OS is pretty well constructed, so I'll probably throw some more money at them when I get an older Sparc box.
I don't see why not, really.
is the One True Way. Client side java is bullshit.
Well, SQL*Plus sucks compared to the MySQL interactive tool, dealing with CLOBs is a nightmare, and basically anything like an update needs to work on a single field (when using DBI) to be processed (never mind their ANSI "compliance"). The JDBC drivers work okay, although the fast (OCI) one apparently is fuct.
;-)
But it works well enough for my employers to use it as the underlying engine for a document tracking application, and it comes with support when you buy a license. I call in TARs all the time out of pure laziness -- Oracle tech support is actually pretty good. Either that or they're very masochistic, because I make a point of only calling in really nasty problems.
All in all it isn't bad -- you can't beat Oracle for scalability, although I miss the creature comforts of MySQL (readline, for starters).
Postgres is supposed to have readline in the most recent CVS version (thanks Ari!) so I'm probably going to try that out at home.
Yeah, $0 down and $0 a month is a real burden...
Unless you want a JDBC driver ($2000) it's FREE.
The One True Debugger (or meta-debugger, if you prefer; or debugger GUI) is still DDD.
;-)
If wdb runs underneath DDD (like gdb, pdb, pydb, jdb, and dbx do) then it rules. If not, it sucks. End of story.
Seriously though, DDD is the greatest programming tool ever created. Well, it's tied with XEmacs. Anyone who bags on *nix/*BSD for having crappy IDEs hasn't used these two tools properly.
I'm going to check and see if Ripco and Lunatic Labs are still around (Ripco was, as of a couple years ago, and was an ISP to boot)...
It's amazing how trivial stuff like this can trigger a flood of memories. Every time I see stuff like this (and recognize names, to boot) it seems like the world gets a little smaller.
Then again, maybe it's just Slashdot.
yeah, oracle runs great on BSD...
;-P
and of course there are so many, many more BSD developers than, say, Linux developers.
No contest for Apache, but really, give it a rest. And of course KDE sucks eggs -- nice libraries, wish I had a 2nd hard drive to fit them on.
1) LinuxPPC
2) Debian, or
3) RedHat.
Of the two x86 distros, the feeling was that RedHat was for ordinary joes who wouldn't ask much from the system, and Debian was/is for people who want to make the system do backflips. Of course LinuxPPC had its own crowd.
No skin off my back though -- it would be amazing if someone working on Debian didn't already run it on a Netfinity 7000 or similar. They're great machines, the kind you'd expect a Debian maintainer to be working with ;-). Heheh...
(still waiting for my copy of Solaris 7 to show up so as to run Coda on Debian, Solaris, NT, and FreeBSD boxes)
That makes me wonder -- how is IBM going to respond to Coda, seeing as to how when Coda matures it will be a Better DFS?!? That may be the really interesting question... several of the Coda clients have BSD-style licenses.
An interesting paper comparing NFS, AFS, DFS, and Coda:
Bootstrapping an Infrastructure
>>Something should be noted: ftp into www.sprint.net. They're proudly running (an outdated version of) wu-ftp.
Geee, I wonder if it's vulnerable.
which is the point of this article.
Try reading a bit more carefully, or else posting an URL that offers some information if they've changed their minds about distributing Intel-only.
The requirements section clearly states that the release is for ix86 and I have seen no evidence of Sybase making ASE available for Linux/AXP.
I just remembered that you can, in fact, use the OCI interface with JDBC. Instead of loading the "Thin" driver, you load the OCI driver. My boss was against this ("no no no, we want to use the Thin driver") but I'm not -- a web server driven mostly by a database may as well reside on the same server (unless you're smoking crack and use applets or CGI scripts for everything, as opposed to mod_jserv + DBConnectionBroker and/or mod_perl + ApacheDBI). So sue me or whatever.
Let's put some bullshit to rest here, shall we?
1) MySQL can simulate the important part of transactions, namely, the atomicity of an update. Requesting a table lock for the duration of a multi-statement update, and releasing it at the end, is what you have to do. Who the hell uses rollback, anyways?
2) PostGreSQL is a pleasant database to use, but it's slow, and I can't for the life of me wrap my mind around the code. There are lots of spatial and object-oriented constructs in there which you don't need and which, in conjuction with totally- portable transactions, make it relatively slow.
3) Oracle is a bear to install, tune, and make behave. However, with enough memory on the server and enough competence in the DBA, it will scale from here to eternity. I have to administer an Oracle database as the backend of my company's corporate-infrastructure web application and it's not a pleasant job. Maybe if I could get mod_jserv to work on my server, I'd be singing a different tune -- the JDBC driver for Oracle is pretty nice. Unfortunately, it uses the TCP/IP listener, which does not scale as well as using the OCI interface (via Perl/DBI/Apache::DBI) does.
With the tweaking I do to my scripts and server, I've managed to get dynamic pages back to the user as fast as static pages (with MySQL; slightly slower for Oracle). For the amount of grief it has caused me, and the crappy tool SQL*plus is (I have lots of DBI scripts to dump tables in a readable manner), I disdain Oracle.
Sybase was much more pleasant to work with, however the driver support for Sybase on Linux is pathetic. Every molecular biology concern I know of seems to use Sybase on Solaris, where their JDBC driver is fully supported, and the replication features of Sybase allow the DBAs to sleep quite soundly. On Linux, though, it sucks.
Do yourself a favor and buy a MySQL license, or help Monty hack subselects and atomic operations (pseudo-transactions, really) into the MySQL code. The world will be a better place when there isn't a reason to use Oracle anymore.
And if you use JDBC + servlets, use connection pooling and caching -- mail me if you care. Servlets and Java Server Pages can obsolete ASP altogether if we work with Sun and they work with us... otherwise, delenda est Sun Microsystems!
PPP was a bitch for me (I had a Winmodem which I had never used and ended up buying the blue light special 56K external at Staples) and this was after running Linux for months (but always on a LAN or not connected at all).
I still haven't gotten around to configuring sound... anyways welcome to the dark side, enjoy!
you'll have to dig a bit, and it's alpha, etc. etc., but someone has of course cooked up a way to use GTK in multithreaded applications.
I have it lying around *somewhere*, unfortunately I'm dorking out with Perl and Java and databases instead of doing any real programming so I can't comment on whether it works well.
Big deal, so you use a typedef to mask this in the libraries. What's your point?
No, that's Gnulix.
In Forth, I believe.
That's odd, I've never seen a physics or math grad student typeset their thesis in MS Word. Maybe they should reformat those equations so they can use a professional word processor instead of that wacky longhair TeX crap.
Rrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiight.
You're full of it.
I for one won't miss them.
SCO UnixWare7 is the most broken piece of shit I've ever worked with in my entire life. It's worse than Windows 95.
I hope those bastards starve -- not only do they sell broken OSes and release broken software, even their friggin' compiler is a piece of junk so you can't fix anything!
Santa Cruz is a nice town, it's about time it stopped having its name dragged through the mud by SCO, anyways. Rat bastards probably delayed Linux's acceptance by a year or two, as well.
CICS sounds pretty cool, but it seems like IBM is hustling Java in a big way. I wonder if there won't be something similar to CICS/Java?
;-)
Anyways, I'm off to grab a free copy of DB2 if I still can. Like someone else said, MySQL is great for some things and unsuitable for others.
Although if you KNOW you need transactions (rather than just clumsy LOCK requests) what the hell are you doing running the DB on Linux?
(i.e. shouldn't you have a big AIX or Solaris box?)