In addition... with an Opteron setup under Windows, and various Warp Server setups on far slower machines... why in the world would I choose the Warp Server machines to do the transcoding if the Windows machine was more capable?
Even better would be to install eCS or Warp, run ffMPEG natively on it, and compare that on the same hardware running WinXP or Vista.
As for the rest of my "anecdote" simply searching for (I forget the site) the site/server history of Star Trek New Voyages, and finding the old forum on it and reading the downtime complaints will prove the rest. The original server was an SMP multi GHz Windows 2003 box running IIS. The current server is an ancient IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 with four 550MHz XEON III CPUs and 4GB of RAM. Inbetween the first server and it's current home, it was on a Linux box. The Linux box also crushed the Windows box (as would be expected) though it was a little more powerful (but had CPU and other resource restrictions in place on it). The current box hosts about 30 domains, runs our internal network, runs a plethora of other server daemons (FTP, MySQL, Time, domain controller, email and on and on). The Windows server simply ran the website.
Modern 2-engined aircrafts are designed to be able to cope with only one working engine. It's part of the tests.
Isn't that irrelevant in this scenario? Modern two engine aircraft are designed to be able to cope with one engine failure when flown by experienced pilots. PERIOD.
Here's now why your statement (and my emphasis on the PERIOD portion of my paraphrase) is irrelevant:
Modern two engine aircraft are NOT designed to be able to cope with one engine failure, various equipment failures, windshields with damaged/limited visibility, possible skin damage, possible mechanical damage (for instance to the flight control surfaces/devices) all at the same time due to flying through volcanic ash.
Basically, you simply forgot that there are a lot of other parameters involved here than simply an engine failure.
And additionally, even if no engine fails, that does not mean that sufficient damage has not happened to create an engine failure on a later flight. Very similar to how some bird strikes and such have not caused immediate failure, but failure at a later time. Add to that the fact that the airplanes may not be inspected again until a substantial period of time/miles has passed since their encounters with volcanic ash.
Many of us tried to use OS/2, and found that it wouldn't install because it was much more picky about hardware than Windows. That's probably a big part of why it died.
At the company I was working at, we wanted to switch, but after attempting installs on three machines and having three different kinds of failure, we stuck with Windows.
No, YOU missed the point. The DEMO CD does NOT install. It is a LIVE BOOT ENVIRONMENT... kinda like WinPE/BartPE/etc... He was NOT having installation issues as NO installation was taking place.
Over Windows Server 2008? Are you joking? When it comes to web serving, application serving, video transcoding (assuming one can do that stuff without a decent GUI interface to ffMPEG or mEncoder), it outperforms every version of Windows Server ever written.
Here's my earlier post on my real world experiences on the matter:
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Now Linux on the other hand, is a viable alternative... though I enjoy the use of REXX (a lot) and enjoy it's integration with the OS (eComStation/Warp) that cannot easily be duplicated on other operating systems... if I ever retire my OS/2 boxes, Linux is the direction I will move... but definitely NOT Windows.
Exactly, and agreed... those were the points I was trying to make. It is also what makes eComStation v2 attractive to a lot of businesses with such specialized setups. No porting to anything at all... and they can run a fast growing set of Linux apps as well.
And the Windows point... I'd never ever suggest porting to Windows. If porting was absolutely necessary, I'd recommend the business port the "back end" stuff to Linux and rewrite (as porting would not work) the GUI portion of the code to whatever windowing toolkit selection seemed appropriate. But, as you also noted, there are those developers who wanna try to gain bigger market share. But there's more than that too... it ensures the company developing the software has nice, lucrative support contracts. I mean really... think about it... run the stuff on OS/2 and rarely have a customer that needs support... port and rewrite the stuff for Linux and rarely have a customer that needs support... or port/rewrite it for Windows and... make more money on support.
A prime example of this (though not necessarily the motivating factor), when an IBM team I was involved with was bidding on the support contract for Bank of America/RIGGS Bank back in the late 90's, I (and I alone) was supposed to be the support tech for a large chunk of the eastern seaboard of the US. BoA has of course since (in the mid 2000's) moved to Windows. I can guarantee you that the support staff is many many times larger. I betcha the company that provides that support and set up that new infrastructure is very very happy with the switch to Windows. I wonder how much money BoA would have saved either staying on OS/2 or switching to Linux?
Your point only applies to ancient versions of OS/2 though. Warp 3 and 4 didnt care what ATAPI CD ROM you used. Older versions eComStation worked with faaaar more SATA setups than Windows XP. The newer eComStation (the version this article discusses) works on the latest hardware.
Oh - and they were all available with CD based install.
Your comparison and experiences are like comparing trying to install Win95 on new hardware.
So... to install on new hardware... get the new version. And just install... that simple.
You can always click the massive "VIEW ONLINE STREAMING" link on the front page, or the very prominent "View Online via DNA" (or however it's labelled) link on the episodes page.
Additionally, every episode except TSAMD1969 is available via Torrent. That too is indicated on the episodes pages.
Sorry you didnt notice all those links. I thought I made them more than prominent enough. I'll keep this in mind though the next time I do a site revision.
It is simply the truth. Windows 95 was patterned off OS/2 2.x with the addition of a close button.
Functionality wise (NOT eye-candy wise), symbolic links still suck and dont work properly (unlike on MacOSX and OS/2), the interface is getting MORE confusing (XP -> Vista -> Win7), the GUI is still prone to explorer errors (all versions from Win98 onwards - and though they have made massive improvements in this area, they still have not gotten that functionality to the point of MacOSX or OS/2).
You don't have to like my above post - but it's still true.
Sadly, how it works should always be more important - but in this day and age, in most markets (cars, computers, and so on) that is not the case. Another prime example are the people who would buy a Toshiba piece of shit over a Thinkpad because of the looks - even though the Thinkpads have always been more reliable and better built. Yes, there are those who made that purchasing decision based on price, but (having worked in retail at CompUSA) there were numerous people who, having the money to spend, stil chose the Toshiba because of how it looked.
To be fair, price and appearance are about the only factors that the "average" consumer can figure out when buying laptops. Things like "quality of build," "reputation," or part quality aren't easily discernable.
Heck, when I go into a CompUSA/TigerDirect wherever and look at laptops, unless I've read reviews lately, I feel pretty helpless (and rarely stmble across a salesperson like you who actually knows their stuff)...
Very true. And very difficult with places like Consumer Reports that rate brand new laptops on quality (how do you rate the quality/reliability of something only a few days old? Why do they even pretend that's possible? Why dont they simply open a new Toshiba and take a look at the fact that Toshiba has entirely removed any frame/rigid structures in the machine, melted the hinges to the plastic bottom case, moved the jack to a harness (good move but...) BUT secured the harness by a couple flexible, easily broken pieces of plastic that it slides into, and on and on).
It's just my first question would be "is this thing reliable?" or even better (as some of our customers would do) "can I speak to a tech? I've got questions about the reliability of this brand and about the support by the manufacturer" - which is where I'd come in to the equation.
It's not something I usually thought of either (in non-computer markets - obviously in the computer area, I had my own experience as a technician to draw from), but learned from a few of our (CompUSA's) customers who actually thought things out and realized "hey, the technicians are gonna know what's reliable a lot more than a salesperson is" - so, even being very savvy in that area, it's not something I woulda thought of either until CompUSA had customers asking for techs to ask such questions...
There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.
...fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting...
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
Ummm... what version of Linux do you select to run a bunch of specialized hardware? What GUI? What development toolkit(s)? Who will write the drivers necessary? What happens if the current OS/2 apps are simply WPS extensions for which Linux has absolutely NO equivalent? Or even simply just true OS/2 GUI apps?
On top of that, the OS/2 API hasnt really changed. No need to select one of... how many? APIs/toolkits used by the various Linux implentations/dev tools.
Gotta remember, porting a Linux app to OS/2 is "pretty easy" (Apache, PHP, MySQL, VLC, KMP, mPlayer/mEncoder, FFMPEG, Squid, Rsycn, ISC Bind, Scribus, Quassel, Postgres, GutenPrint, CUPS, Ghostscript, cURL, Python, Subversion, GCC, Cmake, GNU Core Utils, bzip, wGet, Perl, OpenLDAP, STunnel, Tar, VirtualBox - and those are only a FEW of the ports maintained by ONE OR TWO people - and a small list of the total Linux to OS/2 ports (GUI and non-GUI).
Porting an OS/2 GUI app to Linux? If it's a true OS/2 app that utilizes the WPS, it's near impossible to totally impossible. Most of these older specialized apps for the types of systems I was discussing fit that category.
You could simply follow the instructions and BOOT off the Demo CD like it was intended for. Or read the VMWare info online about running OS/2 in a VM session.
eComStation isn't for home users. It's for corporate users that really don't care how stylish it looks.
Sadly, how it works should always be more important - but in this day and age, in most markets (cars, computers, and so on) that is not the case. Another prime example are the people who would buy a Toshiba piece of shit over a Thinkpad because of the looks - even though the Thinkpads have always been more reliable and better built. Yes, there are those who made that purchasing decision based on price, but (having worked in retail at CompUSA) there were numerous people who, having the money to spend, stil chose the Toshiba because of how it looked.
As I was a technician, I was happy with that - it was guaranteed work (ie: I got to keep my job - at least till they closed the stores). I'd work on about 200 machines a month... roughly 70% of those were Toshibas. I saw a total of five Thinkpads in two years. CMOS battery (8 year old machine), broken chassis (customer was moving and packed a couple thousand pounds of stuff on top of the Thinkpad), cracked screen (left a pencil on the keyboard and closed the screen - when it wouldnt close all the way, they tried forcing it to), user forgot their "BIOS"/"BOOT" password and had enabled the TPM module, and finally; dead hard drive. Inotherwords, two real repairs (CMOS battery and dead hard drive) with the rest being ID-10-T errors.
Ooops... thought your response was attached to a different post of mine. My response should have been:
Yes, it's an installed base. BUT, it's also a market. It's those who need to procure new operating systems to run on new hardware who choose (due to their needs) an updated version of OS/2 over the expense and headache of switching to another operating system.
No, it's not (just) an installed base. It's a market - as in those who are tired of Windows and the need to get a ton of hardware to throw at a task to handle it well, who then switch to something better. That market grows the installed base of whatever their alternative choice is (whether MacOSX, Linux, or eComStation).
It would be an installed base if they were running OS/2 and decided to keep running OS/2.
I don't think it is a case that they aren't able to copy it rather than that they don't want to copy it. They are doing a reasonably good job of copying OSX's funcionality in Windows 7, and that has always been the way they've done things.
They have copied OSX's look, and tried copying OS/2's functionality is what you mean. It's spelled out pretty clearly in the DOJ docs.
Regardless of your believe on that, they have not copied the functionality very well from either operating system.
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Nope... it still has all the functionality of OS/2 2.x, 3.x, Warp, etc... it just adds more functionality, as well as support for newer hardware, more apps, etc.
As for the WPS, though it has changed somewhat, the core is still the same. That was the beauty of it's design. You could either subclass or even superclass any WPS class to add functionality without changing the core WPS code at all.
That includes transparencies, additional controls, additional status bars, different window/folder styles, added sort criteria or a plethora of other features; such as the "multimedia" folders where one could create music playlists that never break when you move around the actual media files and read ID3 info, added play/pause/stop/FF/REW/etc control buttons and sliders, etc... all to a standard folder class.
Ummm... what Win3.1 look and feel? You actually need to use the WPS before you make such an erroneous comment. In EIGHTEEN YEARS, Microsoft STILL has not been able to correctly duplicate the functionality of the WPS - even though they had a cross license agreement that allowed them access to (and rights to use) the code.
Wrong. Short answer, yes. Long answer, definitely yes.
There are still a lot of large companies out there using OS/2 installs who are attempting to replace aging hardware without having to have all their specialized software ported to something else. One such company is a Fortune 50-ish (it's in the 50-55 range) company that has a massive OS/2 install to this very day.
Do you have any idea how many specialized pieces of equipment out there are controlled by OS/2? Or the MASSIVE cost involved in having the software ported to Windows or Linux? Or the large amounts of time testing the stuff because it cant EVER fail while running? I, on the other hand, have some idea about that sort of thing... there are lots of such setups.
People dont hear about those types of setups, or even know about them, because they aren't desktop clients where some 9-5'er is running Word or whatever on it. They are systems that sit quietly in the background and run entire production lines, run automated machinery, run power plants, run transit systems, run elevators and so on.
In addition, there are new companies that are using OS/2 for specialized apps or as servers that have gotten fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting. I know... I install eCS boxes at a few of them. And, they couldnt be happier. I install em... come every few months to clean em (of dust and stuff) and otherwise no one ever touches them. They never had that type of a positive experience on their Windows server/app server boxes.
I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
Saved countless hours of problems.
Besides, the IT department just wants the good porn to go into the shared collection and for the job to be done. If I am waiting for a long-ass process to happen and would otherwise be left picking my nose or jabbering at someone who is trying to work, a bit of down time with a browser is not a big deal.
Technically, wouldn't it be UP time? At least, that's the direction mine points when it's in that "state"
Gosh, this is simple elementary school math. You take 206 and multiply by 2, then divide by 3. That answer equals an exact 2/3 as specified by law. I dont believe they even bothered wasting time arguing on how 2/3 is calculated. 2/3 is 2/3. Making a simple equation... 206 * 2 / 3... seems to solve it.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition... with an Opteron setup under Windows, and various Warp Server setups on far slower machines... why in the world would I choose the Warp Server machines to do the transcoding if the Windows machine was more capable?
Even better would be to install eCS or Warp, run ffMPEG natively on it, and compare that on the same hardware running WinXP or Vista.
As for the rest of my "anecdote" simply searching for (I forget the site) the site/server history of Star Trek New Voyages, and finding the old forum on it and reading the downtime complaints will prove the rest. The original server was an SMP multi GHz Windows 2003 box running IIS. The current server is an ancient IBM Netfinity 7000 M10 with four 550MHz XEON III CPUs and 4GB of RAM. Inbetween the first server and it's current home, it was on a Linux box. The Linux box also crushed the Windows box (as would be expected) though it was a little more powerful (but had CPU and other resource restrictions in place on it). The current box hosts about 30 domains, runs our internal network, runs a plethora of other server daemons (FTP, MySQL, Time, domain controller, email and on and on). The Windows server simply ran the website.
That's at least as embarrassing as having to buy tampons for your wife ;)
How would that apply to those of us on slashdot? Heck, I think even "girlfriend" woulda been a stretch... ;-)
Modern 2-engined aircrafts are designed to be able to cope with only one working engine. It's part of the tests.
Isn't that irrelevant in this scenario? Modern two engine aircraft are designed to be able to cope with one engine failure when flown by experienced pilots. PERIOD.
Here's now why your statement (and my emphasis on the PERIOD portion of my paraphrase) is irrelevant:
Modern two engine aircraft are NOT designed to be able to cope with one engine failure, various equipment failures, windshields with damaged/limited visibility, possible skin damage, possible mechanical damage (for instance to the flight control surfaces/devices) all at the same time due to flying through volcanic ash.
Basically, you simply forgot that there are a lot of other parameters involved here than simply an engine failure.
And additionally, even if no engine fails, that does not mean that sufficient damage has not happened to create an engine failure on a later flight. Very similar to how some bird strikes and such have not caused immediate failure, but failure at a later time. Add to that the fact that the airplanes may not be inspected again until a substantial period of time/miles has passed since their encounters with volcanic ash.
I think you missed his point.
Many of us tried to use OS/2, and found that it wouldn't install because it was much more picky about hardware than Windows. That's probably a big part of why it died.
At the company I was working at, we wanted to switch, but after attempting installs on three machines and having three different kinds of failure, we stuck with Windows.
No, YOU missed the point. The DEMO CD does NOT install. It is a LIVE BOOT ENVIRONMENT... kinda like WinPE/BartPE/etc... He was NOT having installation issues as NO installation was taking place.
Over Windows Server 2008? Are you joking? When it comes to web serving, application serving, video transcoding (assuming one can do that stuff without a decent GUI interface to ffMPEG or mEncoder), it outperforms every version of Windows Server ever written.
Here's my earlier post on my real world experiences on the matter:
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Now Linux on the other hand, is a viable alternative... though I enjoy the use of REXX (a lot) and enjoy it's integration with the OS (eComStation/Warp) that cannot easily be duplicated on other operating systems... if I ever retire my OS/2 boxes, Linux is the direction I will move... but definitely NOT Windows.
Exactly, and agreed... those were the points I was trying to make. It is also what makes eComStation v2 attractive to a lot of businesses with such specialized setups. No porting to anything at all... and they can run a fast growing set of Linux apps as well.
And the Windows point... I'd never ever suggest porting to Windows. If porting was absolutely necessary, I'd recommend the business port the "back end" stuff to Linux and rewrite (as porting would not work) the GUI portion of the code to whatever windowing toolkit selection seemed appropriate. But, as you also noted, there are those developers who wanna try to gain bigger market share. But there's more than that too... it ensures the company developing the software has nice, lucrative support contracts. I mean really... think about it... run the stuff on OS/2 and rarely have a customer that needs support... port and rewrite the stuff for Linux and rarely have a customer that needs support... or port/rewrite it for Windows and... make more money on support.
A prime example of this (though not necessarily the motivating factor), when an IBM team I was involved with was bidding on the support contract for Bank of America/RIGGS Bank back in the late 90's, I (and I alone) was supposed to be the support tech for a large chunk of the eastern seaboard of the US. BoA has of course since (in the mid 2000's) moved to Windows. I can guarantee you that the support staff is many many times larger. I betcha the company that provides that support and set up that new infrastructure is very very happy with the switch to Windows. I wonder how much money BoA would have saved either staying on OS/2 or switching to Linux?
Your point only applies to ancient versions of OS/2 though. Warp 3 and 4 didnt care what ATAPI CD ROM you used. Older versions eComStation worked with faaaar more SATA setups than Windows XP. The newer eComStation (the version this article discusses) works on the latest hardware.
Oh - and they were all available with CD based install.
Your comparison and experiences are like comparing trying to install Win95 on new hardware.
So... to install on new hardware... get the new version. And just install... that simple.
CarpetShark:
You can always click the massive "VIEW ONLINE STREAMING" link on the front page, or the very prominent "View Online via DNA" (or however it's labelled) link on the episodes page.
Additionally, every episode except TSAMD1969 is available via Torrent. That too is indicated on the episodes pages.
Sorry you didnt notice all those links. I thought I made them more than prominent enough. I'll keep this in mind though the next time I do a site revision.
Ummm... this isn't trolling.
It is simply the truth. Windows 95 was patterned off OS/2 2.x with the addition of a close button.
Functionality wise (NOT eye-candy wise), symbolic links still suck and dont work properly (unlike on MacOSX and OS/2), the interface is getting MORE confusing (XP -> Vista -> Win7), the GUI is still prone to explorer errors (all versions from Win98 onwards - and though they have made massive improvements in this area, they still have not gotten that functionality to the point of MacOSX or OS/2).
You don't have to like my above post - but it's still true.
Sadly, how it works should always be more important - but in this day and age, in most markets (cars, computers, and so on) that is not the case. Another prime example are the people who would buy a Toshiba piece of shit over a Thinkpad because of the looks - even though the Thinkpads have always been more reliable and better built. Yes, there are those who made that purchasing decision based on price, but (having worked in retail at CompUSA) there were numerous people who, having the money to spend, stil chose the Toshiba because of how it looked.
To be fair, price and appearance are about the only factors that the "average" consumer can figure out when buying laptops. Things like "quality of build," "reputation," or part quality aren't easily discernable.
Heck, when I go into a CompUSA/TigerDirect wherever and look at laptops, unless I've read reviews lately, I feel pretty helpless (and rarely stmble across a salesperson like you who actually knows their stuff)...
Very true. And very difficult with places like Consumer Reports that rate brand new laptops on quality (how do you rate the quality/reliability of something only a few days old? Why do they even pretend that's possible? Why dont they simply open a new Toshiba and take a look at the fact that Toshiba has entirely removed any frame/rigid structures in the machine, melted the hinges to the plastic bottom case, moved the jack to a harness (good move but...) BUT secured the harness by a couple flexible, easily broken pieces of plastic that it slides into, and on and on).
It's just my first question would be "is this thing reliable?" or even better (as some of our customers would do) "can I speak to a tech? I've got questions about the reliability of this brand and about the support by the manufacturer" - which is where I'd come in to the equation.
It's not something I usually thought of either (in non-computer markets - obviously in the computer area, I had my own experience as a technician to draw from), but learned from a few of our (CompUSA's) customers who actually thought things out and realized "hey, the technicians are gonna know what's reliable a lot more than a salesperson is" - so, even being very savvy in that area, it's not something I woulda thought of either until CompUSA had customers asking for techs to ask such questions...
There may be a market, but it's most definitely a dying market.
The vibrant Linux community, with all of its options, daunting, while the OS/2 community which died like a decade ago before BeOS was even around, looks better? If your shit needs OS/2 to run, that is what we call obsolete. Port it to Linux. If that's too daunting, find a vendor that sells stuff made some time in the last ten or 15 years.
Ummm... what version of Linux do you select to run a bunch of specialized hardware? What GUI? What development toolkit(s)? Who will write the drivers necessary? What happens if the current OS/2 apps are simply WPS extensions for which Linux has absolutely NO equivalent? Or even simply just true OS/2 GUI apps?
On top of that, the OS/2 API hasnt really changed. No need to select one of... how many? APIs/toolkits used by the various Linux implentations/dev tools.
Gotta remember, porting a Linux app to OS/2 is "pretty easy" (Apache, PHP, MySQL, VLC, KMP, mPlayer/mEncoder, FFMPEG, Squid, Rsycn, ISC Bind, Scribus, Quassel, Postgres, GutenPrint, CUPS, Ghostscript, cURL, Python, Subversion, GCC, Cmake, GNU Core Utils, bzip, wGet, Perl, OpenLDAP, STunnel, Tar, VirtualBox - and those are only a FEW of the ports maintained by ONE OR TWO people - and a small list of the total Linux to OS/2 ports (GUI and non-GUI).
Porting an OS/2 GUI app to Linux? If it's a true OS/2 app that utilizes the WPS, it's near impossible to totally impossible. Most of these older specialized apps for the types of systems I was discussing fit that category.
I'd call that daunting. Wouldn't you?
You could simply follow the instructions and BOOT off the Demo CD like it was intended for. Or read the VMWare info online about running OS/2 in a VM session.
Either way, the problem and fault are yours.
eComStation isn't for home users. It's for corporate users that really don't care how stylish it looks.
Sadly, how it works should always be more important - but in this day and age, in most markets (cars, computers, and so on) that is not the case. Another prime example are the people who would buy a Toshiba piece of shit over a Thinkpad because of the looks - even though the Thinkpads have always been more reliable and better built. Yes, there are those who made that purchasing decision based on price, but (having worked in retail at CompUSA) there were numerous people who, having the money to spend, stil chose the Toshiba because of how it looked.
As I was a technician, I was happy with that - it was guaranteed work (ie: I got to keep my job - at least till they closed the stores). I'd work on about 200 machines a month... roughly 70% of those were Toshibas. I saw a total of five Thinkpads in two years. CMOS battery (8 year old machine), broken chassis (customer was moving and packed a couple thousand pounds of stuff on top of the Thinkpad), cracked screen (left a pencil on the keyboard and closed the screen - when it wouldnt close all the way, they tried forcing it to), user forgot their "BIOS"/"BOOT" password and had enabled the TPM module, and finally; dead hard drive. Inotherwords, two real repairs (CMOS battery and dead hard drive) with the rest being ID-10-T errors.
Wasn't there even some cross-pollination between Amiga and OS/2? (IBM licensing REXX in exchange of some GUI tech, something liek that)
Yes. There are details on some of the OS/2 information pages.
Ooops... thought your response was attached to a different post of mine. My response should have been:
Yes, it's an installed base. BUT, it's also a market. It's those who need to procure new operating systems to run on new hardware who choose (due to their needs) an updated version of OS/2 over the expense and headache of switching to another operating system.
No, it's not (just) an installed base. It's a market - as in those who are tired of Windows and the need to get a ton of hardware to throw at a task to handle it well, who then switch to something better. That market grows the installed base of whatever their alternative choice is (whether MacOSX, Linux, or eComStation).
It would be an installed base if they were running OS/2 and decided to keep running OS/2.
I don't think it is a case that they aren't able to copy it rather than that they don't want to copy it. They are doing a reasonably good job of copying OSX's funcionality in Windows 7, and that has always been the way they've done things.
They have copied OSX's look, and tried copying OS/2's functionality is what you mean. It's spelled out pretty clearly in the DOJ docs.
Regardless of your believe on that, they have not copied the functionality very well from either operating system.
Well, one decently large site I run for a client runs on Warp Server for e-Business. It runs on an ancient box (10 years old) with a whoppingly fast set of 550MHz CPUs (Quad XEON 3's) and 4GB of RAM. It runs at an average of 3% CPU utilization. The site was originally hosted on a Windows Server 2003 box 4 or 5 years ago when traffic was one tenth of what it currently is. The Win2003 box was 4 times more powerful - and either bogged down or crashed repeatedly due to load.
When I do the final video transcoding for Star Trek New Voyages: Phase 2, it's generally done on an OS/2 box using mEncoder or FFMPEG... even on a much slower box than the one Windows machine here, those apps run far better, and even faster than the equivalent Windows versions (ie: it seems Linux ports run much much better on OS/2 than on Windows) and unlike on the Windows box, where the desktop becomes near unusable, OS/2's WPS is still snappy (even though the OS/2 box has 1/4 the CPU power). When I start using a "bunch" of threads on the Windows box (a "whopping" four) to do the transcodes, Windows slows to a crawl. Simple web pages in Firefox take 10 times as long to load. Windows takes forever to launch apps. The apps become unresponsive... all while the transcoder is set to normal priority. No such problems on OS/2. Windows XP and Windows Vista do not alleviate these problems - I dont know about Windows 7 as I have not tried it on that... but that still indicates that OS/2 seems to have a far better thread scheduler (coupled with the possibility that Linux ports simply run a lot better on OS/2).
So... as the site I host keeps gaining popularity, I could either get a FEW big 8 way state of the art system each running Windows Server 2008 to serve the web requests for it (and a bunch more IP addresses)... or I can simply keep running the website on ONE ancient Netfinity 7000 M10 and Warp Server for e-Business.
I've got a few clients who were tired of their Windows Server boxes... those boxes were replaced with eComStation, and run custom server side web based apps. For four years now. You have no idea how thrilled they are that they never have to call me because of a problem. And they only see me once every 3 months to clean the boxes out (ie: remove dust, clean fans, etc).
They dont care what such things are running. The only thing they care about is that they dont need to call me to fix some new issue that has arisen (server infected, machine restarted on it's own because MS forced an update even though automatic updates is disabled, some idiotic WGA error and limited functionality because some new WGA update was broken, machine is running horrendously slow for some reason, and on and on - those are actual problems the clients had with their previous installation and their previous support team).
Which do you think gets my market share?
Nope... it still has all the functionality of OS/2 2.x, 3.x, Warp, etc... it just adds more functionality, as well as support for newer hardware, more apps, etc.
As for the WPS, though it has changed somewhat, the core is still the same. That was the beauty of it's design. You could either subclass or even superclass any WPS class to add functionality without changing the core WPS code at all.
That includes transparencies, additional controls, additional status bars, different window/folder styles, added sort criteria or a plethora of other features; such as the "multimedia" folders where one could create music playlists that never break when you move around the actual media files and read ID3 info, added play/pause/stop/FF/REW/etc control buttons and sliders, etc... all to a standard folder class.
So... the WPS books are still quite relevant.
Ummm... what Win3.1 look and feel? You actually need to use the WPS before you make such an erroneous comment. In EIGHTEEN YEARS, Microsoft STILL has not been able to correctly duplicate the functionality of the WPS - even though they had a cross license agreement that allowed them access to (and rights to use) the code.
Wrong. Short answer, yes. Long answer, definitely yes.
There are still a lot of large companies out there using OS/2 installs who are attempting to replace aging hardware without having to have all their specialized software ported to something else. One such company is a Fortune 50-ish (it's in the 50-55 range) company that has a massive OS/2 install to this very day.
Do you have any idea how many specialized pieces of equipment out there are controlled by OS/2? Or the MASSIVE cost involved in having the software ported to Windows or Linux? Or the large amounts of time testing the stuff because it cant EVER fail while running? I, on the other hand, have some idea about that sort of thing... there are lots of such setups.
People dont hear about those types of setups, or even know about them, because they aren't desktop clients where some 9-5'er is running Word or whatever on it. They are systems that sit quietly in the background and run entire production lines, run automated machinery, run power plants, run transit systems, run elevators and so on.
In addition, there are new companies that are using OS/2 for specialized apps or as servers that have gotten fed up with Windows, and find the various fragmented releases of Linux to be too daunting. I know... I install eCS boxes at a few of them. And, they couldnt be happier. I install em... come every few months to clean em (of dust and stuff) and otherwise no one ever touches them. They never had that type of a positive experience on their Windows server/app server boxes.
Not entirely.
I personally warned the rest of the company about the McAfee problem earlier this week because I was goofing off on Slashdot.
Saved countless hours of problems.
Besides, the IT department just wants the good porn to go into the shared collection and for the job to be done. If I am waiting for a long-ass process to happen and would otherwise be left picking my nose or jabbering at someone who is trying to work, a bit of down time with a browser is not a big deal.
Technically, wouldn't it be UP time? At least, that's the direction mine points when it's in that "state"
Pure idiocy. It's 137.333333...
Gosh, this is simple elementary school math. You take 206 and multiply by 2, then divide by 3. That answer equals an exact 2/3 as specified by law. I dont believe they even bothered wasting time arguing on how 2/3 is calculated. 2/3 is 2/3. Making a simple equation... 206 * 2 / 3... seems to solve it.