Aren't in the US sick leaves taken from your holiday ? You might then have your response right there. Because in europe they are not, and you are quite encouraged (at least in my firm) to take the day off when you are a virus mothership spreading thema round coughing.
Not usually. Most have vacation days and sick days as separate things.
If you are in California, this is probably true, but I haven't seen it as such outside of CA in a while - my past few employers have had different policies for CA and 'everywhere else' and the everywhere else policy funneled everything under PTO
Does anybody know any good FREE programs to keep track of bandwidth usage? Something like NerWorx by SoftPerfect. I tried it and I liked it but for some reason it is tracking my usage incorrectly, I think by like a factor of 8 or 10. I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks!
There are two different units of measure at play here. Network bandwidth is measured in bits, or bits/second. PC storage is measured in bytes, where each byte is made up of 8 bits.
When your provider sells you a connection of, say, 1.544mb/sec - thats megaBITS not megabytes. You need to divide by 8 to come up with your connection speed in bytes.
Storage on a PC is based around a byte, which is 8 bits. The network usage captured is correct - it was simply displaying it in bits, not bytes.
but since I'm paying for subsidized phone whether or not I buy one (no discounts for owning my own phone), I'm going to buy one that way.
That's not fully true. T-Mobile will let you go contract-free and subsidy-free if you bring your own phone. For a Smartphone, with data plan, etc, it works out to be about $20 less a month. I think they call it 'Everything More Plus', although you can't buy it online any more, you can from a store or by calling in.
100 square feet? That's amazing. We're looking at putting in cubes, to replace the open floorplan we have now, and the cubes will be 8x6 (or 48 square feet).
People are looking forward to the change, too, because the open plan has been a disaster. Within a group, it may work, but when you've got open plan for four groups doing different things within the plan...
Don't forget the legitimate things that they can do during these long flights. Like studing the latest changes to the regulations, the latest company policies, etc. Most of these things are now available in digital form, so now what are they supposed to do? Print them out and scatter the pages throughout the cockpit?
This, I think, was the problem that has generated this rule change. Two pilots for Northwest (now Delta) were discussing the changes in policy around scheduling and flight regulations. One of the pilots had brought out the laptop to go over the new system with the other; they had the auto-pilot on. They then proceeded to overshoot their destination and missed numerous calls from the control towers and the flight crew because they were too engrossed in studying the new applications / changes to the rules. The flight finally got turned around when a flight attendant knocked on the door to get their attention and asked 'Weren't we supposed to land 5 minutes ago'? The pilots then turned the plane AROUND and flew back X miles (like 150?) to land.
It does make me wonder if it would just be cost prohibitively expensive to put in a radio that supports ALL used frequency band ranges. That way, you have a phone that will truly work on any network, with any provider, without having to buy a new handset.
I've heard rumor of a Qualcomm chip due out this summer that is supposed to support GSM, HSPA, HSPA+ and some CDMA stuff. A quick google turned up the following:
Qualcomm today updated its MDM family of cellular chipsets with some of the first anywhere to support dual, advanced 3G and 4G formats. The MSM7630 supports GSM, HSPA and HSPA+ standards but will also work on CDMA phone networks and support up to EVDO Revision B for 3G on those services. The addition would let a phone work on a CDMA carrier like Sprint or Verizon but still work with AT&T or T-Mobile and roam at speeds of up to 21Mbps on networks from Rogers, other international carriers, and eventually T-Mobile USA.
They could add native PDF support in an update for us Gen 1 owners too, but haven't, so don't hold your breath:(
People thought they weren't going to add native PDF for the K2 either, and that happened with the new 2.3 release that just came out. I'm not saying it'll happen for the gen1, but people were thinking it wouldn't happen for the k2 either...
Thanks for the description of how things are. That has been my sense of things. I guess that I'm stuck with WoW. Not that I don't enjoy playing it, but it would be nice to have some alternatives and the Eve environment does seem pretty attractive.
It's not as bad as all that. No-one says you have to jump into 0.0 on day one, and if you did, things might not look as great.
I've been playing EVE for something like 10 months now, and for 6 of those months, work was really demanding and I didn't get much play time at all... (maybe 15 minutes a week). You're not going to earn tons of ISK that way (or any), but you can still learn your skills.
EVE differs from WoW in that you don't have to be in-game to progress. No levels, no XP grinding. To be able to use your equipment better, you need to skill up - and skills train in real time.
Now, granted, if you aren't in a corp, you're not going to easily find people to play with, but with some basic skills and attention to detail, you can run solo missions just fine. Your tutorial agent should be able to hand you off to a beginner agent, and with the ISK you earn from those missions (mission rewards, time bonuses, bounties, and loot) you should be able to get a decent frigate for your race, and fit it properly. With a properly equipped combat frigate - tech1 equipment or cheap named, not even tech2 - you should be able to complete the majority of level 1 missions. With the ISK from that, you can buy the skills and ships to move up a half step to destroyers, which should let you stomp any level 1 and a good chunk of level 2s, or into cruisers which should allow you to complete the majority of level 2s. By that point, you'll be more familiar with the game and ready to take a look at one of the thousands of different corps available in game.
And while everyone mentions mining as a way to make money, there's more options than that. You can run missions, do trade runs, produce goods, all sorts of things.
Anyways, take a look at Hammer's EVE, a kind of guide for EVE for current WoW players.
I'm about a stone's throw from IAD. I'm not even 1000' from the Verizon CO. They won't sell me DSL. They still have the DSLAM and will support existing customers, but 'they are rolling out FiOS now'. Because they've started to deploy FiOS in my area, they flat out refused to sell me DSL. Now it's a year later, FiOS still isn't available in my complex (but it is in the complex across the public road...) and they still won't sell me DSL. Their solution: dialup. No thanks. I ended up getting cable service from Cox, which is okay when it works, but their track record there isn't too hot...
Latency isnt introduced because your PC is stupid, its introduced because you're waiting the time it takes for packets to travel to your ISP, to its ISP, to its ISP, down to its child, down to its child, and back to some other PC, and having to interact with the 20 routers, gateways, and switches along the way.
Close... Routers don't take very long forwarding packets - < 1 ms. What takes so long is driving the data down the pipes. Once your signal gets to the Internet backbone - and hell, even before then - you start getting limited by things like the amount of time it takes the light to travel down the fiber. Remember that you can't just connect a router in San Jose to a router in New York; you have to connect it to some form of long haul optical transport gear. That gear will take the signal (be it OC3 up to OC192) and take it cross country. Depending on the gear, every 60-150km you need to go through amplification, and every few amplifiers you have to go through signal regeneration where the optical signal is converted back into an electrical signal and then generated anew as an optical signal.
It takes 28-29 ms to drive from DC to Dallas, for example, 4 ms to drive from Dallas to Houston, 23 ms to drive from Houston to Phoenix, etc. So if you are in, say, San Jose and you're talking to a server in DC, you're looking at about 72ms of delay right there. And thats backbone router to backbone router, not factoring in any local optics (backbone to your ISP, your ISP to you, etc).
Thats not to say that there aren't other issues involved, but you can never factor out actual transit time to push those packets around. If you have to hop through a few routers in a single market, any delay seen isn't necesarrily from routing delays unless the router is severely overloaded but is instead from the time taken to drive the signal router to router.
Please note, I'm anything but an Apple fan boy. What the heck do I know though? I think KDE on FreeBSD is the bestest game around!
Hell yeah! I've been using FreeBSD as both a desktop OS and a server OS for years. Converted over from Linux and never looked back. Switched to XFCE a while back because of various issues (kde wasn't responsive enough on the hardware, and I've never liked gnome). Picked up a new machine about a year ago, and KDE + FreeBSD since then. So, I gotta say I agree - KDE on FreeBSD is the bestest game around!
I am a programmer and when I find bugs in my code "pre-release" I find it benefitial. However, some of the bugs I have to spend a substantial amount of time debugging to finally find a fix.
With the code as large as Oracle's code is.. it could take an extremely long time.
Yes, but they could have at least published a workaround the problem, even if they don't have the fix in place. There is a 4 line change to the Apache setup which acts as a workaround for the problem; David Litchfield posted it to Bugtraq himself in the move that got Oracle so upset with him. Here it is:
Add the following four lines to your http.conf file then stop and restart the web server
Interestingly enough, I saw Litchfield's post to Bugtraq on this issue. He did not disclose any 'real' information (compared to other posts detailing what problems are and where they are, or even proof of concept exploit code) about the vulnerability that would lead to a compromise, unless you already knew what the compromise was. He did post a workaround, which was an Apache mod_redirect config which catches the attack and rewrites the URI to the denied page.
But, hey, I'll let you all judge. Here's his posting to Bugtraq:
There's a critical flaw in the Oracle PLSQL Gateway, a component of iAS, OAS and the Oracle HTTP Server, that allows attackers to bypass the PLSQLExclusion list and gain access to "excluded" packages and procedures. This can be exploited by an attacker to gain full DBA control of the backend database server through the web server.
This flaw was reported to Oracle on the 26th of October 2005. On November the 7th NGS alerted NISCC (http://www.niscc.gov.uk/ to the problem. It was hoped that due to the severity of the problem that Oracle would release a fix or a workaround for this in the January 2006 Critical Patch Update. They failed to do so.
The workaround is trivial; using mod_rewrite, which is compiled into Oracle's Apache distribution it is possible to stop the attack. The workaround checks a user's web request for the presence of a right facing bracket, ')'.
Add the following four lines to your http.conf file then stop and restart the web server
I don't think leaving their customers vulnerable for another 3 months (or perhaps even longer) until the next CPU is reasonable especially when this bug is so easy to fix and easy to workaround. Again, I urge all Oracle customers to get on the 'phone to Oracle and demand the respect you paid for.
And its people who 'should' know better too. I know abuse handlers at large organizations and network security people - hell, even some computer forensics people - who use IE. A good friend of mine, who has done a bit of all the above, and is currently doing the online investigation schtick bought a new laptop a month ago. He still hasn't installed Firefox on it... still using IE. *shudder* I just don't understand it.
> Most of the cheap server solution uses this....of course if one day the IPv6 > rolls in, it'll be easier to have multiple IPs assigned to a single server > (one for each website).
Yup, that'll be the day. Not that IPv6 doesn't have plenty of address space - it does - but I don't know how well your 'solution' holds up against how its set up now.
Currently, end-sites (including your house!) gets a/48 assignment. A/48 is huge - it is approximately an IPv4 universe of IPv4 universes. They use the MAC address of your ethernet card (48 bits) as the unique identifier for your system... in other words, system are specific to the/64, which is half an IPv4 universe of IPv4 universes. Sure, theres alot of address space there, but you aren't supposed to use it because you may collide with a valid MAC address elsewhere. Subnetting is done at smaller prefixes, and you announce the single/48 prefix to your upstream ISP.
But wait, you want to multihome? Oh, well... no PI (provider independant) space in IPv6 for end-users... only for ISPs. So now you have N/48's, one from each different upstream provider. Each device now has the N ip addresses, but the last 48 bits are the same from network to network - namely the MAC address of the card.
Now, don't get me wrong... you can use a prefix longer than a/64... I've seen proposals about assigning end-sites/96's, but then the IPv6 purists go off about how its not right and the automatic assignment / collision prevention doesn't work. Truth be told, I'm fine with using really long prefixes for end sites and allocating IPs to devices out of a DHCP pool... assuming the DHCP support for v6 gets to where it is for v4. I personally don't think you need a globally unique address inside your subnet... noone's going to be putting 2^48 hosts on a single segment... well, ever, I suppose.
I do, however, have issues with the current multi-homing setup. shim6 is an ugly, ugly hack - nat pushed all the way back to the end devices. The problem boils down to how we use IP space... technically its a locator reference, but we're using it as identifiers as well. Maybe we need to carve a chunk of v6 space off and use it just as identifiers, and have some other protocol - some weird hash between BGP and DNS - to match identifiers to locators, and to indicate locator preference based on where the request is coming from (for traffic engineering purposes).
Either that, or I'm crazy. One of the two. Anyways, a little off-topic, but everyone still seems to be taking the 'IPv6 just works' pill, but noone is really looking at the operational reality of trying to make it work - assuming that everything in the v4 world holds true to v6.
Pfft. I work for a company that provides dark fiber, and there is literally tons of use for it. We drop fairly large cables in the ground (432/864), use a few strands ourselves, and lease the rest out. People use it for everything from fast-e over media converts on up to mass OC192 DWDM stuff. Some are carriers, some are normal companies. Dark fiber is usually alot cheaper in the long run that purchasing point to point or switched circuits from a carrier. Hell, Google's been doing this for a while, to connect some of their clusters, and to run their own circuits to ISPs. Theres nothing really new about any of this - companies have been doing this sort of thing for years.
Now the verdict here could make things very interesting indeed for the software world. For all of its evils (Windows included), Microsoft needs to have a verdict delivered against it. I do not mean this as a "down with MS cuz it sux" remark. Microsoft has done some really innovative things in the past. Without Microsoft, where would we be in the OS business today? They kinda were in it from the beginning....waaaay back with MS-Dos. I remember running MS-Dos on the PCJr. and it was cool back then to have a command prompt. No, for all of their faults, Microsoft has contributed in a major way to the advancement of computing. However, in the last 3-5 years or so, maybe longer, maybe shorter, they moved away from more of the pionering and development into the arm twisting business. The arm twisting business, unfortunately, is a bad business to be in. Microsoft got caught. I've worked in one of the larger electronics superstores, and it was no secret to us that MS had made certain deals with manufacturers and if the certain conditions werent met (IE latest edition of a certain browser bundled, or LACK of another browser bundled) then those companies would loose the right to either A) discounts on the MS stuff, or B) access to the MS stuff altogether. Using scare tactics, MS controlled certain manufacturers (before the products hit our stores, MS didnt bother with us except to make sure we obeyed licensing). For this Microsft must pay.
But to what extent? The breakup of the company? I dont think so. Fines? Yes. Say, lost profits to certain companies, punative damages to make sure they dont do it again. Deep punative damages. Splitting the OS part of MS from the Apps? I just don't know. I think it would make for a worse picture in the future in that area, not a better one. I think that with a forced split, the company would end up still working together, although not a closely as it had been. And what could the government do then? More fines. I'm just not convinced on the splitting part. I'm interested to see how others think the verdict should go. Could spark up an interesting debate.
But I'm done rambling for now, I do still need to get that sleep, been up for too long. Later./ers!
-Captain Keen --
Who's Responsibility Is It To Rate Things?
on
Weaving The Web
·
· Score: 2
Slashdotters- The book and the review bring to the surface a few interesting points about the future of certain liberties we have come to take for granted. Take, for instance, the rating system discussed near the end of the article. Who is responsible for determining what is "safe" for kids to view and what is not? Apparantly the Government has ideas in that area. Hey, why not, its the same government that takes 1/3rd of our earnings in taxes. Thats the funny thing about governments though, isn't it?
Last time I checked, they were supposed to be working for us. I don't know, maybe I'm too old-fashioned. But lets look at it this way. If the government made cars, a Chevy would cost $80,000 and you would have to refill the gas tank every 10 blocks. If we had to buy food like the Government buys weapons for the military, we would starve to death in the supermarket while deciding between brands of apples. What started out as a good and well intentioned thing has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yes, I can see the need to take taxes to make the government run. Yes, I can see the need to put checks on Military spending - but not to the extent where I go broke paying taxes and the military cant enter into a successful campaign with a lack of weapons.
Which brings us to what we are looking at now. Rating and potential censorship of the Internet. "For the good of the children". No. Sorry. Dont buy it. Some shmuck thinks that they know better then we do. It is not up to the government to decide what is safe for our kids (and us) to view on the Net and what isn't. It is not for the Government to decide what is safe for our kids to watch in TV or see in the movie theatres. I do not recall anything in the constitution delegating censorship or ratings to the Federal government, and I seem to recall something about all unlisted powers being sent to the state, in which case regulations are at the wrong level.
The Internet has always been a place of open-ness. Open standards, open software (for the most part). If I wanted to make a Web page, I could go out and find out how to and by god put up a Web page. If I wanted to host an IRC server, by god I could go out and download the server code and compile it. Or I could write one from scratch. We have a set of guidelines defined for everything, under the Request For Comment system. All IRC servers comply with the basic specs set out for IRC servers by the RFC. All SMTP servers comply with the basic specs set out by the RFCs. Private network IP addresses were set out by RFCs. We have flexibility, and that is good.
But flexibility can be bad as well. Take, for example, the XML issue Katz and Burners-Lee bring up. In order for the Internet to survive as a viable and open medium that we have all come to know and love, it has to stay open.
Perhaps I am rambling, it is a bad habit of mine. Perhaps next time I wont stay up 36 hours before I post to/.. These were merely the first thoughts that came to mine reading the review. The book sounds a bit dry, but I can guarantee I've read worse. I think I'll grab a copy and read it through. You never know, even naive people can have good visions. If you want an interesting look at a possible could-be, albeit a political one (god knows how far off track are political system is right now) try Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. You never know.
I'm done rambling for now. Maybe I'll go get some sleep so I can maybe regret and be embarassed by this post later.
Slash Dot Community- I read the Dvorak article, and some of the parts struck me as wrong. The overall impression was someone incredibly frustrated who wanted to take out his frustration on something. That's just what it seemed, by the tone and infliction of writing. Lets take a look at Dvorak's article and see what we can come up with.
Ask Linux advocates exactly why no IRC (Internet Relay Chat) server runs Linux. One of my networking gurus said that he has never seen any Linux system on the IRC--probably the roughest networking environment on earth--hold up to the strain. In this instance, we're talking about the three major IRC networks: DALnet, Efnet, and Undernet. With tens of thousands of users logging on at once with numerous clients and multiple connections and with constant attacks from sources around the world trying to shut down the service, Linux can't cut it--period. Why is this never mentioned by the Linux proponents who flood the critics with e-mail anytime anyone says anything to disparage the OS?
Well, information provided here isn't entirely true. I know of two servers down on Undernet running Linux. That alone right there proves that Linux can "cut it". As far as the Denial of Service attacks go, bring down all nonessential services. It's the first (and very useful) step in securing a server. For an IRC server, only run the IRCd, secure shell (ssh) and maybe BIND.
Just hating Microsoft is not a good enough reason to promote Linux above everything else. When Linux fails in various sub segments of the marketplace, people always assume the problem is its open-source nature. "You can't get support." In fact, many companies support Linux in the same way Sun supports Solaris. Linux often fails, simply because it isn't robust enough. Contractors know this but fear the wrath of the Linux community and blame support. It's a phony excuse. This BS factor is what bothers me. The inadequate-support explanation creeps in for no other reason than to keep the lunatic fringe of the Linux movement from clogging the e-mail system with complaints. The fact is, Linux has yet to prove itself at the top of the food chain, and until it can run eBay, for example, it will remain the "in-between" OS.
Dvorak does make a valid point with the first sentence. Hating Microsoft should not be the only reason one promotes Linux. Have reasons. I personally think that my uptime is a sufficient reason (at 65 days right now), which is also closely linked to system stability. I've run NT servers before, and I'm running one now. I just got done installing one about a week ago, and besides the persistent reboots from installing software, it is doing okay so far. It did crash numerous times during installing (It hated the ATI Mach 64 card, I had to replace it). We'll see how the new one goes, the other NT box I admin I have to reboot weekly. This isn't anti-Microsoft propaganda (well, maybe it could be viewed as such) however it is the truth. But back to the paragraph, the question on support is valid and not at the same time. I personally have never had to go to a support company, but oftentimes my problems with Linux have been misconfiguration issues that I had to resolve. As far as the eBay comment goes, well, I wonder what the eBay system runs for a backend. I would bet not NT, I would bet probably SunOS or Solaris on a nice Sun box.
The low end is where Linux should gravitate. By this I don't mean Pentiums running in offices. I mean on AMD chips in sub-$200 computers with small amounts of memory and $50 hard disks. Under a normal load Linux is quite remarkable. It's small, fast, and stable. It's quite amazing actually. But it's still Unix and used primarily as a command line OS. There are numerous GUI shells for the thing, and there's no reason the Linux community can't standardize one and stick with it (except that there seems to be a rule against even imagining such a concept as agreement).
Okay, another point which hits and misses entirely. Yes, Linux does perform exceptionally well on lower end equipment and older equipment. The performance is much better than with Microsoft software. Does that mean we jail it there? No. It almost seems (I may be out on a limb here) that Dvorak thinks since the MS software has been around for so long and has the user base (mainly due to lack of competition) the software has gained some right to always be the only thing running on higher end (and in Dvorak's case Intel) machines. Well, unfortunately enough (for Dvorak) the AMD chips perform just as well if not better (performance depends on environment and application) than the Intel chips, and MS software has no innate right to be run on higher end machines. Software has to earn the right to run on machines, it is not written (or "born") with that right. It is not like the Royal Family of England. As the processor levels go up, so does the performance on Linux machines. Of course, the same is true on MSOS machines, but because it is true there does not make it untrue elsewhere. The next point Dvorak makes is that Linux is still UNIX - Yes, Linux is a UNIX variant. True enough. The claim that it's primarily a CLI (command line interface) is another question. True enough, most remote administration is done on a CLI through telnet or SSH. Local administration and use is up to the operator. I know of many Linux users (mainly friends newer to Linux) that live and breath in the KDE and Enlight/Gnome window managers (wm), and I know NT server administrators that spend 90% of their time in DOS boxes. Dvorak's next claim that the increased usage of CLI is because of a lack of standard or common WM was incredibly hilarious and once again false. Choice is not an evil thing. Lack of choice can be considered to be, but is not necessarily the case. Please, Mr. Dvorak, lets not eliminate choice and free will here.
Now that you can combine a free OS with any number of cheap Linux-oriented office suites, it's time for a reemergence of VICs (very inexpensive computers). Microworkz has a $199 machine called the iToaster, which uses the kernel of the BeOS (the true competitor to Linux) to keep prices low. This trend will emerge within the next 12 months and will take the world by storm. Intel and the chipmakers know this. In case you haven't noticed, their strategies are going toward the low end in a near panic.
The OS running on a "VIC" is not the only contributing factor to the cost. They are also running with inferior parts. A lower quality hard drive (yes it makes a difference in performance AND reliability) and a lower quality processor (example: Cyrix) can contribute to the overall cost, reliability and stability of a "VIC". The cost, reliability and stability all go down. I used to work at a Best Buy store (as a technician who backed up to the sales floor), and I can reliably say that people looking for "Bargain Basement" (our term for VICs) computers were the first time computer users wanting to get a computer and see what it is like, without investing a lot of capital. After their first one, they would start looking at the higher end machines. Occasionally they would bring their machines back within the allotted return period to pick up one of the higher end machine. The reason given, most of the time was either reliability or performance. For our Best Buy store (at the time) the higher end machines were Hewlett Packard, followed by IBM, then Compaq, Acer, and then Packard Bell/NEC. The Acer, PB/NEC, and the eMachines were considered the "Bargain Basement" of the bunch - often run between $600 and $900. Cheaper should not be considered better. On the next point, the true competitor of Linux: How is Linux truly competing with anything. From the current social context of the word "competition" when related to business or computers typically comes down to sales and profits. Last time I checked, we could still get Linux for free from sites like MetaLab.unc.edu on the net. Now I suppose if you wanted to compare user bases, then all OSes are competing with all other OSes. Every OS has its various strengths and weaknesses, which will be discusses momentarily.
However, I would like to jump back to the IRC server question for a minute. I have played with the IRC source from the Undernet and DALnet servers before, on Linux machines with kernels ranging back from 2.0.32 up to 2.2.9. I will admit that IRC server performance under Linux (at least the 2.0.xx series) was not the greatest. Also, server capacity was limited. Under the 2.0.xx series kernels, by default you could only have 256 file descriptors per process, which limited the number of incoming server connections an individual server could handle. This is limiting in server performance for the higher traffic and load servers, such as DALnet. Now, I did cruise on through the DALnet and Undernet sites, and I grabbed a bit of information to share. This first quote comes from the DALnet site.
Linux has been found not to be workable with DALnet's traffic load. All DALnet servers running Linux have been switched to FreeBSD. Therefore, if you are currently running Linux on the server for which you are applying, we suggest you switch to FreeBSD as soon as possible, preferably before sending in your application. Servers running pre-2.0.31 Linux kernels cannot be linked to DALnet at this time.
Well, yes, under the 2.0.xx kernels, it was not the greatest of things to run the IRC daemon under Linux. Performance from identical machines running BSD was much better, and so was the reason to switch over. Now, I have not yet run with a high traffic load on a server running the 2.2.xx series kernels yet, I was going to start to play with traffic load in a few days. I know that under the 2.2.xx kernels there are 1024 file descriptors per process, and that does help with the ability to host clients. A lot.
The next quotes up are from the Undernet site:
Stable UNIX host available for 24 hrs a day with an average of a week's uptime. The kernel should also be able to handle a minimum of 1024+ open fd's for clients, and the server must be configured to allow that many client connections
The operating system must support a minimum of 1024 fd's per process.
Please also include information about the hardware, such as the amount of memory, and what other services the machine runs or will (not) run, such as HTTP/news/mail servers, and what other restrictions the machine has, such as a limit of 256 fd's per process. Output from the uname -a, limit/ulimit -a, and dmesg commands are required. Minimum Hardware: Pentium 266Mhz (or comparable if sparc, SGI, etc...), and 128MB of RAM (256MB recommended).
The only things the Undernet network is looking for is a Unix based host (Linux applies) and a minimum of 1024 file descriptors per process. Now, it is possible to adjust the number of file descriptors on the 2.0.xx series of kernels, I just never went that far. I will discuss this more in a minute. I have one last quote from the Undernet site, and here it is:
The only ircd acceptable for use on the Undernet is the Undernet ircu2.10.xx, which is the current release software. Although a windows NT port of the software has been written, windows NT servers will NOT be permitted to link to the live network. The NT-based server version was written as a proof of concept experiment, and not meant for production servers on the Undernet.
It looks like Windows NT is not considered stable or reliable enough (those are the reasons given for the decline elsewhere in the site) to connect to the live network. IRC servers run very well under UNIX, but performance differs from flavor to flavor.
I have a friend who administrates the box that a higher capacity web server runs on. He has upwards of 40 hits a second, and transfers 50 Megs of HTML and images in about 10 minutes of uptime to requests all over the world. He was running Linux, back when the 2.2.0 kernel hadn't been released yet. His server's performance was well below acceptable, and Apache was having uptime problems. After anywhere between 5 minutes and 10 hours, the server would "freeze up" and not operate anymore. It would have to be restarted (Apache, not the system). He had a UNIX programmer friend (mutual) come over and heavily mod his kernel. (The friend is an accomplished Linux and BSD programmer). He upped the file descriptors per process to 1024, and performed a large number of tweaks and optimizations to the Linux kernel. The server still wasn't performing as well as it should have been. I went in and redid his apache configuration file. We went through and optimized the entire machine. We still couldn't get reliable performance from it. We ended up switching the machine over to FreeBSD, where it also runs the Apache web server. The server is now performing acceptably, and has not had an uptime (Apache, not system) problem since. For reference, the server had 256 Megs of RAM, about 6 gigs in a SCSI U2W chain, and as I recall, a 300 or 250 MHz processor.
The point of the long, rambling paragraph being that Linux is not the only answer. I am a Linux advocate, and I will promote its use wherever applicable, however, it is not the only answer. Sometimes BSD performance is better. Sometimes (but rarely, in my experience - mostly limited to people who didn't want to go a different was) NT is the answer. Sometimes Solaris on a SPARC is the answer. We have to go with what works for the situation. With the continuing Linux development, for most things, Linux works just great! Fabulous even.
But wrapping things up since I've managed to confuse myself with the direction I took with this: Some of the points Dvorak made were on base. A lot were not. However, there are always two sides to an issue, and oftentimes more then that. We should look at them all, and consider the applications for it. Just because Linux may not be the greatest at hosting an IRC server doesn't make it any less of an Operating System. Windows NT can't do it reliably either. If you want to go out, and rewrite an IRC server and make it best for Linux, go right ahead. Do so with my blessing. If you don't, that's perfectly fine as well. We can't afford to get caught up in squabbles over which UNIX derivative is the best - all UNIX is good UNIX. Boost it where we can, support it where we can, because we of the Linux community are trying to show people another way. Its not the only way, but it is another way.
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Aren't in the US sick leaves taken from your holiday ? You might then have your response right there. Because in europe they are not, and you are quite encouraged (at least in my firm) to take the day off when you are a virus mothership spreading thema round coughing.
Not usually. Most have vacation days and sick days as separate things.
If you are in California, this is probably true, but I haven't seen it as such outside of CA in a while - my past few employers have had different policies for CA and 'everywhere else' and the everywhere else policy funneled everything under PTO
Does anybody know any good FREE programs to keep track of bandwidth usage? Something like NerWorx by SoftPerfect. I tried it and I liked it but for some reason it is tracking my usage incorrectly, I think by like a factor of 8 or 10. I couldn't figure out what the problem was.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
There are two different units of measure at play here. Network bandwidth is measured in bits, or bits/second. PC storage is measured in bytes, where each byte is made up of 8 bits.
When your provider sells you a connection of, say, 1.544mb/sec - thats megaBITS not megabytes. You need to divide by 8 to come up with your connection speed in bytes.
Storage on a PC is based around a byte, which is 8 bits. The network usage captured is correct - it was simply displaying it in bits, not bytes.
but since I'm paying for subsidized phone whether or not I buy one (no discounts for owning my own phone), I'm going to buy one that way.
That's not fully true. T-Mobile will let you go contract-free and subsidy-free if you bring your own phone. For a Smartphone, with data plan, etc, it works out to be about $20 less a month. I think they call it 'Everything More Plus', although you can't buy it online any more, you can from a store or by calling in.
100 square feet? That's amazing. We're looking at putting in cubes, to replace the open floorplan we have now, and the cubes will be 8x6 (or 48 square feet).
People are looking forward to the change, too, because the open plan has been a disaster. Within a group, it may work, but when you've got open plan for four groups doing different things within the plan...
Don't forget the legitimate things that they can do during these long flights. Like studing the latest changes to the regulations, the latest company policies, etc. Most of these things are now available in digital form, so now what are they supposed to do? Print them out and scatter the pages throughout the cockpit?
This, I think, was the problem that has generated this rule change. Two pilots for Northwest (now Delta) were discussing the changes in policy around scheduling and flight regulations. One of the pilots had brought out the laptop to go over the new system with the other; they had the auto-pilot on. They then proceeded to overshoot their destination and missed numerous calls from the control towers and the flight crew because they were too engrossed in studying the new applications / changes to the rules. The flight finally got turned around when a flight attendant knocked on the door to get their attention and asked 'Weren't we supposed to land 5 minutes ago'? The pilots then turned the plane AROUND and flew back X miles (like 150?) to land.
A solution to the problem does exist, though. It's called "everything in moderation."
... including moderation.
I find I personally like my moderation in moderate amounts.
Is the new 4g an actual standard that all of these carriers will use or will 4g be another mismash of frequencies and formats?
No surprise here, but a mismash of frequencies and formats.
It does make me wonder if it would just be cost prohibitively expensive to put in a radio that supports ALL used frequency band ranges. That way, you have a phone that will truly work on any network, with any provider, without having to buy a new handset.
I've heard rumor of a Qualcomm chip due out this summer that is supposed to support GSM, HSPA, HSPA+ and some CDMA stuff. A quick google turned up the following:
Qualcomm today updated its MDM family of cellular chipsets with some of the first anywhere to support dual, advanced 3G and 4G formats. The MSM7630 supports GSM, HSPA and HSPA+ standards but will also work on CDMA phone networks and support up to EVDO Revision B for 3G on those services. The addition would let a phone work on a CDMA carrier like Sprint or Verizon but still work with AT&T or T-Mobile and roam at speeds of up to 21Mbps on networks from Rogers, other international carriers, and eventually T-Mobile USA.
From http://www.electronista.com/articles/09/11/12/possible.verizon.iphone.candidates/
They could add native PDF support in an update for us Gen 1 owners too, but haven't, so don't hold your breath :(
People thought they weren't going to add native PDF for the K2 either, and that happened with the new 2.3 release that just came out. I'm not saying it'll happen for the gen1, but people were thinking it wouldn't happen for the k2 either...
If only I could leave a recipe open for more than 10 minutes w/o the stupid screen saver like image coming on.
This has been fixed in the 2.3 update - the screen timeout is now set to 20 minutes.
Quite.
If your UID wasn't so low
That's a low UID nowadays?
Thanks for the description of how things are. That has been my sense of things. I guess that I'm stuck with WoW. Not that I don't enjoy playing it, but it would be nice to have some alternatives and the Eve environment does seem pretty attractive.
It's not as bad as all that. No-one says you have to jump into 0.0 on day one, and if you did, things might not look as great.
I've been playing EVE for something like 10 months now, and for 6 of those months, work was really demanding and I didn't get much play time at all... (maybe 15 minutes a week). You're not going to earn tons of ISK that way (or any), but you can still learn your skills.
EVE differs from WoW in that you don't have to be in-game to progress. No levels, no XP grinding. To be able to use your equipment better, you need to skill up - and skills train in real time.
Now, granted, if you aren't in a corp, you're not going to easily find people to play with, but with some basic skills and attention to detail, you can run solo missions just fine. Your tutorial agent should be able to hand you off to a beginner agent, and with the ISK you earn from those missions (mission rewards, time bonuses, bounties, and loot) you should be able to get a decent frigate for your race, and fit it properly. With a properly equipped combat frigate - tech1 equipment or cheap named, not even tech2 - you should be able to complete the majority of level 1 missions. With the ISK from that, you can buy the skills and ships to move up a half step to destroyers, which should let you stomp any level 1 and a good chunk of level 2s, or into cruisers which should allow you to complete the majority of level 2s. By that point, you'll be more familiar with the game and ready to take a look at one of the thousands of different corps available in game.
And while everyone mentions mining as a way to make money, there's more options than that. You can run missions, do trade runs, produce goods, all sorts of things.
Anyways, take a look at Hammer's EVE, a kind of guide for EVE for current WoW players.
Fly safe!
I'm about a stone's throw from IAD. I'm not even 1000' from the Verizon CO. They won't sell me DSL. They still have the DSLAM and will support existing customers, but 'they are rolling out FiOS now'. Because they've started to deploy FiOS in my area, they flat out refused to sell me DSL. Now it's a year later, FiOS still isn't available in my complex (but it is in the complex across the public road...) and they still won't sell me DSL. Their solution: dialup. No thanks. I ended up getting cable service from Cox, which is okay when it works, but their track record there isn't too hot...
As you say, it used to be 'You've got questions? We've got answers!'. Now its 'You've got questions? We've got blank stares! And cellphones!'
Close... Routers don't take very long forwarding packets - < 1 ms. What takes so long is driving the data down the pipes. Once your signal gets to the Internet backbone - and hell, even before then - you start getting limited by things like the amount of time it takes the light to travel down the fiber. Remember that you can't just connect a router in San Jose to a router in New York; you have to connect it to some form of long haul optical transport gear. That gear will take the signal (be it OC3 up to OC192) and take it cross country. Depending on the gear, every 60-150km you need to go through amplification, and every few amplifiers you have to go through signal regeneration where the optical signal is converted back into an electrical signal and then generated anew as an optical signal.
It takes 28-29 ms to drive from DC to Dallas, for example, 4 ms to drive from Dallas to Houston, 23 ms to drive from Houston to Phoenix, etc. So if you are in, say, San Jose and you're talking to a server in DC, you're looking at about 72ms of delay right there. And thats backbone router to backbone router, not factoring in any local optics (backbone to your ISP, your ISP to you, etc).
Thats not to say that there aren't other issues involved, but you can never factor out actual transit time to push those packets around. If you have to hop through a few routers in a single market, any delay seen isn't necesarrily from routing delays unless the router is severely overloaded but is instead from the time taken to drive the signal router to router.
Hell yeah! I've been using FreeBSD as both a desktop OS and a server OS for years. Converted over from Linux and never looked back. Switched to XFCE a while back because of various issues (kde wasn't responsive enough on the hardware, and I've never liked gnome). Picked up a new machine about a year ago, and KDE + FreeBSD since then. So, I gotta say I agree - KDE on FreeBSD is the bestest game around!
With the code as large as Oracle's code is.. it could take an extremely long time.
Yes, but they could have at least published a workaround the problem, even if they don't have the fix in place. There is a 4 line change to the Apache setup which acts as a workaround for the problem; David Litchfield posted it to Bugtraq himself in the move that got Oracle so upset with him. Here it is:
But, hey, I'll let you all judge. Here's his posting to Bugtraq:
And its people who 'should' know better too. I know abuse handlers at large organizations and network security people - hell, even some computer forensics people - who use IE. A good friend of mine, who has done a bit of all the above, and is currently doing the online investigation schtick bought a new laptop a month ago. He still hasn't installed Firefox on it... still using IE. *shudder* I just don't understand it.
> Most of the cheap server solution uses this. ...of course if one day the IPv6
/48 assignment. A /48 is huge - it is approximately an IPv4 universe of IPv4 universes. They use the MAC address of your ethernet card (48 bits) as the unique identifier for your system... in other words, system are specific to the /64, which is half an IPv4 universe of IPv4 universes. Sure, theres alot of address space there, but you aren't supposed to use it because you may collide with a valid MAC address elsewhere. Subnetting is done at smaller prefixes, and you announce the single /48 prefix to your upstream ISP.
/48's, one from each different upstream provider. Each device now has the N ip addresses, but the last 48 bits are the same from network to network - namely the MAC address of the card.
/64... I've seen proposals about assigning end-sites /96's, but then the IPv6 purists go off about how its not right and the automatic assignment / collision prevention doesn't work. Truth be told, I'm fine with using really long prefixes for end sites and allocating IPs to devices out of a DHCP pool... assuming the DHCP support for v6 gets to where it is for v4. I personally don't think you need a globally unique address inside your subnet... noone's going to be putting 2^48 hosts on a single segment... well, ever, I suppose.
> rolls in, it'll be easier to have multiple IPs assigned to a single server
> (one for each website).
Yup, that'll be the day. Not that IPv6 doesn't have plenty of address space - it does - but I don't know how well your 'solution' holds up against how its set up now.
Currently, end-sites (including your house!) gets a
But wait, you want to multihome? Oh, well... no PI (provider independant) space in IPv6 for end-users... only for ISPs. So now you have N
Now, don't get me wrong... you can use a prefix longer than a
I do, however, have issues with the current multi-homing setup. shim6 is an ugly, ugly hack - nat pushed all the way back to the end devices. The problem boils down to how we use IP space... technically its a locator reference, but we're using it as identifiers as well. Maybe we need to carve a chunk of v6 space off and use it just as identifiers, and have some other protocol - some weird hash between BGP and DNS - to match identifiers to locators, and to indicate locator preference based on where the request is coming from (for traffic engineering purposes).
Either that, or I'm crazy. One of the two. Anyways, a little off-topic, but everyone still seems to be taking the 'IPv6 just works' pill, but noone is really looking at the operational reality of trying to make it work - assuming that everything in the v4 world holds true to v6.
Pfft. I work for a company that provides dark fiber, and there is literally tons of use for it. We drop fairly large cables in the ground (432/864), use a few strands ourselves, and lease the rest out. People use it for everything from fast-e over media converts on up to mass OC192 DWDM stuff. Some are carriers, some are normal companies. Dark fiber is usually alot cheaper in the long run that purchasing point to point or switched circuits from a carrier. Hell, Google's been doing this for a while, to connect some of their clusters, and to run their own circuits to ISPs. Theres nothing really new about any of this - companies have been doing this sort of thing for years.
Now the verdict here could make things very interesting indeed for the software world. For all of its evils (Windows included), Microsoft needs to have a verdict delivered against it. I do not mean this as a "down with MS cuz it sux" remark. Microsoft has done some really innovative things in the past. Without Microsoft, where would we be in the OS business today? They kinda were in it from the beginning....waaaay back with MS-Dos. I remember running MS-Dos on the PCJr. and it was cool back then to have a command prompt. No, for all of their faults, Microsoft has contributed in a major way to the advancement of computing. However, in the last 3-5 years or so, maybe longer, maybe shorter, they moved away from more of the pionering and development into the arm twisting business. The arm twisting business, unfortunately, is a bad business to be in. Microsoft got caught. I've worked in one of the larger electronics superstores, and it was no secret to us that MS had made certain deals with manufacturers and if the certain conditions werent met (IE latest edition of a certain browser bundled, or LACK of another browser bundled) then those companies would loose the right to either A) discounts on the MS stuff, or B) access to the MS stuff altogether. Using scare tactics, MS controlled certain manufacturers (before the products hit our stores, MS didnt bother with us except to make sure we obeyed licensing). For this Microsft must pay.
./ers!
But to what extent? The breakup of the company? I dont think so. Fines? Yes. Say, lost profits to certain companies, punative damages to make sure they dont do it again. Deep punative damages. Splitting the OS part of MS from the Apps? I just don't know. I think it would make for a worse picture in the future in that area, not a better one. I think that with a forced split, the company would end up still working together, although not a closely as it had been. And what could the government do then? More fines. I'm just not convinced on the splitting part. I'm interested to see how others think the verdict should go. Could spark up an interesting debate.
But I'm done rambling for now, I do still need to get that sleep, been up for too long. Later
-Captain Keen
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/.. These were merely the first thoughts that came to mine reading the review. The book sounds a bit dry, but I can guarantee I've read worse. I think I'll grab a copy and read it through. You never know, even naive people can have good visions. If you want an interesting look at a possible could-be, albeit a political one (god knows how far off track are political system is right now) try Tom Clancy's Executive Orders. You never know.
The book and the review bring to the surface a few interesting points about the future of certain liberties we have come to take for granted. Take, for instance, the rating system discussed near the end of the article. Who is responsible for determining what is "safe" for kids to view and what is not? Apparantly the Government has ideas in that area. Hey, why not, its the same government that takes 1/3rd of our earnings in taxes. Thats the funny thing about governments though, isn't it?
Last time I checked, they were supposed to be working for us. I don't know, maybe I'm too old-fashioned. But lets look at it this way. If the government made cars, a Chevy would cost $80,000 and you would have to refill the gas tank every 10 blocks. If we had to buy food like the Government buys weapons for the military, we would starve to death in the supermarket while deciding between brands of apples. What started out as a good and well intentioned thing has gone horribly, horribly wrong. Yes, I can see the need to take taxes to make the government run. Yes, I can see the need to put checks on Military spending - but not to the extent where I go broke paying taxes and the military cant enter into a successful campaign with a lack of weapons.
Which brings us to what we are looking at now. Rating and potential censorship of the Internet. "For the good of the children". No. Sorry. Dont buy it. Some shmuck thinks that they know better then we do. It is not up to the government to decide what is safe for our kids (and us) to view on the Net and what isn't. It is not for the Government to decide what is safe for our kids to watch in TV or see in the movie theatres. I do not recall anything in the constitution delegating censorship or ratings to the Federal government, and I seem to recall something about all unlisted powers being sent to the state, in which case regulations are at the wrong level.
The Internet has always been a place of open-ness. Open standards, open software (for the most part). If I wanted to make a Web page, I could go out and find out how to and by god put up a Web page. If I wanted to host an IRC server, by god I could go out and download the server code and compile it. Or I could write one from scratch. We have a set of guidelines defined for everything, under the Request For Comment system. All IRC servers comply with the basic specs set out for IRC servers by the RFC. All SMTP servers comply with the basic specs set out by the RFCs. Private network IP addresses were set out by RFCs. We have flexibility, and that is good.
But flexibility can be bad as well. Take, for example, the XML issue Katz and Burners-Lee bring up. In order for the Internet to survive as a viable and open medium that we have all come to know and love, it has to stay open.
Perhaps I am rambling, it is a bad habit of mine. Perhaps next time I wont stay up 36 hours before I post to
I'm done rambling for now. Maybe I'll go get some sleep so I can maybe regret and be embarassed by this post later.
-Captain Keen
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I read the Dvorak article, and some of the parts struck me as wrong. The overall impression was someone incredibly frustrated who wanted to take out his frustration on something. That's just what it seemed, by the tone and infliction of writing. Lets take a look at Dvorak's article and see what we can come up with.
Well, information provided here isn't entirely true. I know of two servers down on Undernet running Linux. That alone right there proves that Linux can "cut it". As far as the Denial of Service attacks go, bring down all nonessential services. It's the first (and very useful) step in securing a server. For an IRC server, only run the IRCd, secure shell (ssh) and maybe BIND.
Dvorak does make a valid point with the first sentence. Hating Microsoft should not be the only reason one promotes Linux. Have reasons. I personally think that my uptime is a sufficient reason (at 65 days right now), which is also closely linked to system stability. I've run NT servers before, and I'm running one now. I just got done installing one about a week ago, and besides the persistent reboots from installing software, it is doing okay so far. It did crash numerous times during installing (It hated the ATI Mach 64 card, I had to replace it). We'll see how the new one goes, the other NT box I admin I have to reboot weekly. This isn't anti-Microsoft propaganda (well, maybe it could be viewed as such) however it is the truth. But back to the paragraph, the question on support is valid and not at the same time. I personally have never had to go to a support company, but oftentimes my problems with Linux have been misconfiguration issues that I had to resolve. As far as the eBay comment goes, well, I wonder what the eBay system runs for a backend. I would bet not NT, I would bet probably SunOS or Solaris on a nice Sun box.
Okay, another point which hits and misses entirely. Yes, Linux does perform exceptionally well on lower end equipment and older equipment. The performance is much better than with Microsoft software. Does that mean we jail it there? No. It almost seems (I may be out on a limb here) that Dvorak thinks since the MS software has been around for so long and has the user base (mainly due to lack of competition) the software has gained some right to always be the only thing running on higher end (and in Dvorak's case Intel) machines. Well, unfortunately enough (for Dvorak) the AMD chips perform just as well if not better (performance depends on environment and application) than the Intel chips, and MS software has no innate right to be run on higher end machines. Software has to earn the right to run on machines, it is not written (or "born") with that right. It is not like the Royal Family of England. As the processor levels go up, so does the performance on Linux machines. Of course, the same is true on MSOS machines, but because it is true there does not make it untrue elsewhere. The next point Dvorak makes is that Linux is still UNIX - Yes, Linux is a UNIX variant. True enough. The claim that it's primarily a CLI (command line interface) is another question. True enough, most remote administration is done on a CLI through telnet or SSH. Local administration and use is up to the operator. I know of many Linux users (mainly friends newer to Linux) that live and breath in the KDE and Enlight/Gnome window managers (wm), and I know NT server administrators that spend 90% of their time in DOS boxes. Dvorak's next claim that the increased usage of CLI is because of a lack of standard or common WM was incredibly hilarious and once again false. Choice is not an evil thing. Lack of choice can be considered to be, but is not necessarily the case. Please, Mr. Dvorak, lets not eliminate choice and free will here.
The OS running on a "VIC" is not the only contributing factor to the cost. They are also running with inferior parts. A lower quality hard drive (yes it makes a difference in performance AND reliability) and a lower quality processor (example: Cyrix) can contribute to the overall cost, reliability and stability of a "VIC". The cost, reliability and stability all go down. I used to work at a Best Buy store (as a technician who backed up to the sales floor), and I can reliably say that people looking for "Bargain Basement" (our term for VICs) computers were the first time computer users wanting to get a computer and see what it is like, without investing a lot of capital. After their first one, they would start looking at the higher end machines. Occasionally they would bring their machines back within the allotted return period to pick up one of the higher end machine. The reason given, most of the time was either reliability or performance. For our Best Buy store (at the time) the higher end machines were Hewlett Packard, followed by IBM, then Compaq, Acer, and then Packard Bell/NEC. The Acer, PB/NEC, and the eMachines were considered the "Bargain Basement" of the bunch - often run between $600 and $900. Cheaper should not be considered better. On the next point, the true competitor of Linux: How is Linux truly competing with anything. From the current social context of the word "competition" when related to business or computers typically comes down to sales and profits. Last time I checked, we could still get Linux for free from sites like MetaLab.unc.edu on the net. Now I suppose if you wanted to compare user bases, then all OSes are competing with all other OSes. Every OS has its various strengths and weaknesses, which will be discusses momentarily.
However, I would like to jump back to the IRC server question for a minute. I have played with the IRC source from the Undernet and DALnet servers before, on Linux machines with kernels ranging back from 2.0.32 up to 2.2.9. I will admit that IRC server performance under Linux (at least the 2.0.xx series) was not the greatest. Also, server capacity was limited. Under the 2.0.xx series kernels, by default you could only have 256 file descriptors per process, which limited the number of incoming server connections an individual server could handle. This is limiting in server performance for the higher traffic and load servers, such as DALnet. Now, I did cruise on through the DALnet and Undernet sites, and I grabbed a bit of information to share. This first quote comes from the DALnet site.
Well, yes, under the 2.0.xx kernels, it was not the greatest of things to run the IRC daemon under Linux. Performance from identical machines running BSD was much better, and so was the reason to switch over. Now, I have not yet run with a high traffic load on a server running the 2.2.xx series kernels yet, I was going to start to play with traffic load in a few days. I know that under the 2.2.xx kernels there are 1024 file descriptors per process, and that does help with the ability to host clients. A lot.
The next quotes up are from the Undernet site:
The only things the Undernet network is looking for is a Unix based host (Linux applies) and a minimum of 1024 file descriptors per process. Now, it is possible to adjust the number of file descriptors on the 2.0.xx series of kernels, I just never went that far. I will discuss this more in a minute. I have one last quote from the Undernet site, and here it is:
It looks like Windows NT is not considered stable or reliable enough (those are the reasons given for the decline elsewhere in the site) to connect to the live network. IRC servers run very well under UNIX, but performance differs from flavor to flavor.
I have a friend who administrates the box that a higher capacity web server runs on. He has upwards of 40 hits a second, and transfers 50 Megs of HTML and images in about 10 minutes of uptime to requests all over the world. He was running Linux, back when the 2.2.0 kernel hadn't been released yet. His server's performance was well below acceptable, and Apache was having uptime problems. After anywhere between 5 minutes and 10 hours, the server would "freeze up" and not operate anymore. It would have to be restarted (Apache, not the system). He had a UNIX programmer friend (mutual) come over and heavily mod his kernel. (The friend is an accomplished Linux and BSD programmer). He upped the file descriptors per process to 1024, and performed a large number of tweaks and optimizations to the Linux kernel. The server still wasn't performing as well as it should have been. I went in and redid his apache configuration file. We went through and optimized the entire machine. We still couldn't get reliable performance from it. We ended up switching the machine over to FreeBSD, where it also runs the Apache web server. The server is now performing acceptably, and has not had an uptime (Apache, not system) problem since. For reference, the server had 256 Megs of RAM, about 6 gigs in a SCSI U2W chain, and as I recall, a 300 or 250 MHz processor.
The point of the long, rambling paragraph being that Linux is not the only answer. I am a Linux advocate, and I will promote its use wherever applicable, however, it is not the only answer. Sometimes BSD performance is better. Sometimes (but rarely, in my experience - mostly limited to people who didn't want to go a different was) NT is the answer. Sometimes Solaris on a SPARC is the answer. We have to go with what works for the situation. With the continuing Linux development, for most things, Linux works just great! Fabulous even.
But wrapping things up since I've managed to confuse myself with the direction I took with this: Some of the points Dvorak made were on base. A lot were not. However, there are always two sides to an issue, and oftentimes more then that. We should look at them all, and consider the applications for it. Just because Linux may not be the greatest at hosting an IRC server doesn't make it any less of an Operating System. Windows NT can't do it reliably either. If you want to go out, and rewrite an IRC server and make it best for Linux, go right ahead. Do so with my blessing. If you don't, that's perfectly fine as well. We can't afford to get caught up in squabbles over which UNIX derivative is the best - all UNIX is good UNIX. Boost it where we can, support it where we can, because we of the Linux community are trying to show people another way. Its not the only way, but it is another way.
-Captain Keen
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