The S/390 doesn't "die" from a hardware failure. A Parallel Sysplex cluster of S/390 hardware provides 99.999 percent availability (five minutes of planned downtime per year). Hotmail can't even remember to pay its DNS fees once a year.
Each S/390 computer is designed so that a component that fails can be swapped out without disrupting the workload. On the G5 and G6 systems, each CPU has a dual instruction/execution unit (does Windows 2000 run on any hardware with _redundant_ central processor units?). The systems have spare RAM in case some fails, and they can dynamically reconfigure their I/O channels to cope with increased traffic or failure.
When a processor in a Sysplex Cluster fails, the machine it's in automatically activates another in the cluster to handle the task. When you submit form data with your message to Hotmail, and CPU on the Windows 2000 server will only execute instruction "42", where does your message go? As far as I can tell from the web info, all the S/390 machines have (at the least) dual redundant power supplies, and an uninterruptable power supply as an option. The disk drives can be swapped out on demand.
The total weight of copper in the Statue is 62,000 pounds (31 tons) and the total weight of steel in the Statue is 250,000 pounds (125 tons). Total weight of the Statue's concrete foundation is 54 million pounds (27,000 tons). The copper sheeting of the Statue is 3/32 of an inch thick or 2.37mm.
Considering the copper accounts for only a thin 2.4mm skin, that 125 tons of steel must be somewhere in there holding it up.
AbiWord simply links directly with the Windows API present on all Win32 installations. For each platform AbiWord supports, it uses the native widget set (where Unix's native set is GTK+). This keeps the interface snappy and the overall feel complete. There are advantages to using one single toolkit across platforms (like GIMP does): very little work to support a new platform (as long as it supports the toolkit). Using a cross-platform class framework (like wxWindows) is a great idea when the classes match the functionality you need. AbiWord needs to do so much pixel twiddling (which can be made cross-platform at the device context level) that using cross-platform toolkits doesn't win us as much.
Where does he say that he wants to destroy your right to sell the fruits of your labor (software)? The last time I read The GNU Manifesto, which Stallman wrote, it encouraged me to sell free software to make a profit. In fact, it has an entire section devoted to feeding hungry programmers.
(In your text you don't even bother to mention whom you're attacking; I'll assume it's Stallman)
You're not making any sense here. How can any license prevent an other person from selling "your own creation?" Through your written words, you've completely reversed the meaning of the thought you seem to be trying to convey. The GPL does not, and can not deprive one from selling one's own creation. It can do even less to deprive a third party from selling your creation--those GPL simply does not recognize those situations. In fact, the GPL allows, and the Free Software Foundation's The GNU Manifestoencourages you to sell your free software.
If you had any clue what Stallman has done for "alternative technologies" as well as technologies that could only be described as utterly mainstream (text editors, hyperlinked help systems, compilers, source code-level symbolic debuggers, rule-based expert systems like "make", etc.), you would have respect for the man's opinions, if only in light of his wealth of experience. I think it's unfortunate that promising alternative technologies are saddled with the appearance of self-important gas bag detractors who can't be bothered to read publically available documents and always seem to find their way to Slashdot.
So instead of using the only distribution that seamlessly upgrades itself over the network, you're using which other distribution that's more current? I understand that software released in the past grows old after time, but unless Red Hat, LinuxPPC, Slackware, Turbolinux, Mandrake, and friends each have a time machine, I don't see how their situation would be any different--their releases get old at the same rate as Debians', but they're less convenient to upgrade.
I've been using Mozilla M15 with JunkBuster since M15 was released, and I've not turned off HTTP 1.1 (at least not manually, perhaps it's automatically negotiating the change). Earlier versions had problems setting proxies through the Preferences dialog, but M15 works just fine. I'm using the Debian Potato version of JunkBuster, which doesn't seem to have been modified in the protocol department (after an "apt-get source junkbuster" and a quick look through the patches). Works for me.
I don't know of a recent version of IP Filter (an excellent "firewall" package much more capable than the current Linux "ipchains" or the older "ipfwadm") that runs on newer Linux kernels. FreeBSD runs it very well.
Of course I'm not sure why they didn't just plop a $500 Celeron with two 100 Mbit network cards in front of their pipe to simply drop all packets on every ethernet device with a source or dest of 10.0.0.0/8, 127.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, etc. Linux would do this just fine.
MySQL is really fast, but it's not safe enough for everyone's data. If you're looking for a database with all the bells and whistles, and with a much nicer license than MySQL, look at PostgreSQL. Release candidates for version 7.0 are out and in testing, commercial support is offered by PostgreSQL Inc., PostgreSQL documentation is very extensive, and the community support (mailing lists, usenet) is very active. A very quick rundown of some of the features of PostgreSQL is available here (of course there's much more to a database engine than will fit in an HTML table).
I've never been much of a religious guy, but recently I've an inkling for some jihad. Specifically, I would pay great sums of money to see the Church of the SubGenius battle the Church of Scientology! It would be an awesome apocalypse.
And when I said battle, I meant it. My money's on the Slackers--the followers of Bob. First of all Bob is just more powerful than Xenu (look at the pipe; does Xenu have a pipe?). Second, take a look at last year's apocalypse! Find me a Scientologist who can win this--the Church of the SubGenius have been practicing since X-Day 1996.
If you can't afford the ElronTM, you might price the newest Cone Systems' BeldarTM. It doesn't scale as well; I hear its performance tapers off a little near the top end.
Your analogy is quite flawed. A more fitting one might be: Mr. Jones lives in the house two doors down from me. I have known Mr. Jones since I moved in to my house a few years ago. One day a stranger comes to my door--he's on his way to visit his friend Mr. Jones, and he's lost, so he stopped by my house to ask directions. "No problem," I say, "Mr. Jones lives just two houses away, he's my neighbor," and I point him towards Mr. Jones. The visitor says "thank you" and goes over to Mr. Jones's house to buy smack.
I didn't know Mr. Jones sold drugs, my redirection ("link") was simply to Mr. Jones. Am I a criminal?
I don't know, I've seen a very slow SkyView in the middle of linkage from APOD (Astronomy Picutre of the Day), one of the world's best web pages to wake up to. Browse the APOD Archive or Index, especially if you have a fast connection and enjoy looking into the universe.
So Microsoft is replicating SkyView? SkyView is very cool; beside the HTML forms-based access, they even have Java and X Window clients.
If you're not an astronomer, try out the non-astronomer page, pick your wavelengths, and browse around the sky. Hopefully NASA's servers can handle a Slashdotting.
I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation, except for the little bit of Jason I knew.
I met Jason Haas and Jeff Carr at LinuxWorld Expo in 1999, in San Jose. They were there to represent LinuxPPC, I was there for AbiSource. Our booths were about 30 feet apart. On setup day, they were nowhere to be found, and I wondered if their flight had been delayed. By the first day of the show, however, they had everything setup and a good crowd in their booth.
Through Jason and Jeff, LinuxPPC was even willing to lend AbiSource an iMac (running LinuxPPC, of course) to demonstrate AbiWord in our booth. Our little green iMac drew lots of attention those two and a half days. Later LinuxPPC donated a dedicated build host to AbiSource for automated builds and releases.
During a lull in the crowds (or near lunch, I don't remember), I wandered over to the LinuxPPC booth just to see what they were doing. It was there I spotted some of the portable Apple hardware running LinuxPPC, and was pretty impressed. I remember talking to Jeff and Jason about the video display, the PowerPC processor, the trackpad, external USB, and the battery life as they patiently fielded questions from other booth visitors--I didn't own a laptop, and at this tradeshow, one in two people had one. I wanted one, and these guys seemed to have an excellent plan.
So it turns out the PowerBook I'm using to type this comment came to me in large part because of Jason. It's an odd connection between the keys my fingers now touch, the smashed up cars in a junk yard in Wisconsin, and Jason, who probably doesn't yet remember LinuxWorld, August, 1999.
Offtopic? How would you argue that discussion of a programming language does not belong in a discussion of programming languages? I responded to a query on the use of Perl as an alternative to C++ with a suggestion to try Python, because I like it better than Perl. It couldn't get any more "on-topic". Are you that stuck on Perl that you can't even discuss the alternatives?
You'd probably want Python instead for larger applications. Its large standard library and object model makes handling large projects quite easy. Python is a very nice language, for all sized projects.
He probably already knows this, but he likes to live with the illusion that everything Apple makes is perfection in plastic. Help him maintain his illusion--it keeps him passive. Many of these Apple apologists want to think that they have something special, something they can't get without enduring the operating system crashes, lack of pre-emptive task scheduling, and not having the desire to ever want to do something cool with the hardware they already paid for.
Most likely our Anonymous Coward uses his Mac to draw pretty pictures, check his Hotmail accounts, and of course show up to inflict his thoughts on others on Slashdot (it would be too much trouble for him to create an account here, it appears). It wouldn't occur to him that people who want modern operating systems (multiple users, multiple processors, protected memory, and source code) would want to use Apple hardware. Apple produces very good hardware products, but they change their specifications and components so often that it's hard to keep reverse-engineering them. I'm typing this on a PowerBook that compiles, networks, serves web content, and has an uptime of 89 days, and you can bet it doesn't run MacOS. And you can bet that as soon as a PowerPC laptop comes about with even cooler hardware, and true specifications so that the PPC Linux guys know their drivers will work, I won't be here blubbering and drooling over Apple--I'll be ordering one of those new computers. I'll be doing real work.
Don't do what xanim does, it's not a solution at all. A pre-compiled binary is absolutely useless to those of us running Linux on real architectures (Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS). If we wanted a $2000 video game console, we would have bought an Intel PC with Windows in the first place.
Is Microsoft using "WMF" for its streaming media? Isn't that their own Windows Metafile extension? I can view those with hundreds of free tools.
I think you have that backwards. I own a Mac and I never use MacOS. You couldn't pay me enough to run 1984's operating system. Apple's hardware is very good for the price--my PowerBook has every feature I need built in, a large bright screen, even SCSI, and very good battery life. Why would I want to run an operating system that still doesn't use protected memory?
No, you'll shatter them. I grabbed a few from LinuxCare at the August 1999 LinuxWorld Expo show, and stuck one in my checkbook (internal "pressure" is lower than the wallet). I took it out two months later, to use it, and it had shattered into twenty or so small wedges of CD.
Maybe my mistake was to use the checkbook (which is more flexible, but has more room to move around). Perhaps the less flexible wallet would have been better.
Slashdot Mirror
The S/390 doesn't "die" from a hardware failure. A Parallel Sysplex cluster of S/390 hardware provides 99.999 percent availability (five minutes of planned downtime per year). Hotmail can't even remember to pay its DNS fees once a year.
Each S/390 computer is designed so that a component that fails can be swapped out without disrupting the workload. On the G5 and G6 systems, each CPU has a dual instruction/execution unit (does Windows 2000 run on any hardware with _redundant_ central processor units?). The systems have spare RAM in case some fails, and they can dynamically reconfigure their I/O channels to cope with increased traffic or failure.
When a processor in a Sysplex Cluster fails, the machine it's in automatically activates another in the cluster to handle the task. When you submit form data with your message to Hotmail, and CPU on the Windows 2000 server will only execute instruction "42", where does your message go? As far as I can tell from the web info, all the S/390 machines have (at the least) dual redundant power supplies, and an uninterruptable power supply as an option. The disk drives can be swapped out on demand.
--
--
You could always go to www.sourcegear.com and take a look. If it's too hard to figure out after just one visit, we really need to fix the website.
--
AbiWord simply links directly with the Windows API present on all Win32 installations. For each platform AbiWord supports, it uses the native widget set (where Unix's native set is GTK+). This keeps the interface snappy and the overall feel complete. There are advantages to using one single toolkit across platforms (like GIMP does): very little work to support a new platform (as long as it supports the toolkit). Using a cross-platform class framework (like wxWindows) is a great idea when the classes match the functionality you need. AbiWord needs to do so much pixel twiddling (which can be made cross-platform at the device context level) that using cross-platform toolkits doesn't win us as much.
--
Where does he say that he wants to destroy your right to sell the fruits of your labor (software)? The last time I read The GNU Manifesto, which Stallman wrote, it encouraged me to sell free software to make a profit. In fact, it has an entire section devoted to feeding hungry programmers.
--
You're not making any sense here. How can any license prevent an other person from selling "your own creation?" Through your written words, you've completely reversed the meaning of the thought you seem to be trying to convey. The GPL does not, and can not deprive one from selling one's own creation. It can do even less to deprive a third party from selling your creation--those GPL simply does not recognize those situations. In fact, the GPL allows, and the Free Software Foundation's The GNU Manifesto encourages you to sell your free software.
If you had any clue what Stallman has done for "alternative technologies" as well as technologies that could only be described as utterly mainstream (text editors, hyperlinked help systems, compilers, source code-level symbolic debuggers, rule-based expert systems like "make", etc.), you would have respect for the man's opinions, if only in light of his wealth of experience. I think it's unfortunate that promising alternative technologies are saddled with the appearance of self-important gas bag detractors who can't be bothered to read publically available documents and always seem to find their way to Slashdot.
--
So instead of using the only distribution that seamlessly upgrades itself over the network, you're using which other distribution that's more current? I understand that software released in the past grows old after time, but unless Red Hat, LinuxPPC, Slackware, Turbolinux, Mandrake, and friends each have a time machine, I don't see how their situation would be any different--their releases get old at the same rate as Debians', but they're less convenient to upgrade.
--
I've been using Mozilla M15 with JunkBuster since M15 was released, and I've not turned off HTTP 1.1 (at least not manually, perhaps it's automatically negotiating the change). Earlier versions had problems setting proxies through the Preferences dialog, but M15 works just fine. I'm using the Debian Potato version of JunkBuster, which doesn't seem to have been modified in the protocol department (after an "apt-get source junkbuster" and a quick look through the patches). Works for me.
--
Use JunkBuster. It's free software.
--
I don't know of a recent version of IP Filter (an excellent "firewall" package much more capable than the current Linux "ipchains" or the older "ipfwadm") that runs on newer Linux kernels. FreeBSD runs it very well.
Of course I'm not sure why they didn't just plop a $500 Celeron with two 100 Mbit network cards in front of their pipe to simply drop all packets on every ethernet device with a source or dest of 10.0.0.0/8, 127.0.0.0/8, 192.168.0.0/16, etc. Linux would do this just fine.
--
MySQL is really fast, but it's not safe enough for everyone's data. If you're looking for a database with all the bells and whistles, and with a much nicer license than MySQL, look at PostgreSQL. Release candidates for version 7.0 are out and in testing, commercial support is offered by PostgreSQL Inc., PostgreSQL documentation is very extensive, and the community support (mailing lists, usenet) is very active. A very quick rundown of some of the features of PostgreSQL is available here (of course there's much more to a database engine than will fit in an HTML table).
--
Sendmail is an MTA, not an MUA. I don't see how Sendmail (or any of the better mailers like postfix or qmail) would ever have this problem.
--
And when I said battle, I meant it. My money's on the Slackers--the followers of Bob. First of all Bob is just more powerful than Xenu (look at the pipe; does Xenu have a pipe?). Second, take a look at last year's apocalypse! Find me a Scientologist who can win this--the Church of the SubGenius have been practicing since X-Day 1996.
An Introduction to Slack
--
If you can't afford the Elron TM, you might price the newest Cone Systems' Beldar TM. It doesn't scale as well; I hear its performance tapers off a little near the top end.
--
Your analogy is quite flawed. A more fitting one might be: Mr. Jones lives in the house two doors down from me. I have known Mr. Jones since I moved in to my house a few years ago. One day a stranger comes to my door--he's on his way to visit his friend Mr. Jones, and he's lost, so he stopped by my house to ask directions. "No problem," I say, "Mr. Jones lives just two houses away, he's my neighbor," and I point him towards Mr. Jones. The visitor says "thank you" and goes over to Mr. Jones's house to buy smack.
I didn't know Mr. Jones sold drugs, my redirection ("link") was simply to Mr. Jones. Am I a criminal?
--
I don't know, I've seen a very slow SkyView in the middle of linkage from APOD (Astronomy Picutre of the Day), one of the world's best web pages to wake up to. Browse the APOD Archive or Index, especially if you have a fast connection and enjoy looking into the universe.
--
If you're not an astronomer, try out the non-astronomer page, pick your wavelengths, and browse around the sky. Hopefully NASA's servers can handle a Slashdotting.
--
I'm not sure what else I can add to the conversation, except for the little bit of Jason I knew.
I met Jason Haas and Jeff Carr at LinuxWorld Expo in 1999, in San Jose. They were there to represent LinuxPPC, I was there for AbiSource. Our booths were about 30 feet apart. On setup day, they were nowhere to be found, and I wondered if their flight had been delayed. By the first day of the show, however, they had everything setup and a good crowd in their booth.
Through Jason and Jeff, LinuxPPC was even willing to lend AbiSource an iMac (running LinuxPPC, of course) to demonstrate AbiWord in our booth. Our little green iMac drew lots of attention those two and a half days. Later LinuxPPC donated a dedicated build host to AbiSource for automated builds and releases.
During a lull in the crowds (or near lunch, I don't remember), I wandered over to the LinuxPPC booth just to see what they were doing. It was there I spotted some of the portable Apple hardware running LinuxPPC, and was pretty impressed. I remember talking to Jeff and Jason about the video display, the PowerPC processor, the trackpad, external USB, and the battery life as they patiently fielded questions from other booth visitors--I didn't own a laptop, and at this tradeshow, one in two people had one. I wanted one, and these guys seemed to have an excellent plan.
So it turns out the PowerBook I'm using to type this comment came to me in large part because of Jason. It's an odd connection between the keys my fingers now touch, the smashed up cars in a junk yard in Wisconsin, and Jason, who probably doesn't yet remember LinuxWorld, August, 1999.
--
Maybe it's only the ones that begin with "p"...
--
You'd probably want Python instead for larger applications. Its large standard library and object model makes handling large projects quite easy. Python is a very nice language, for all sized projects.
--
He probably already knows this, but he likes to live with the illusion that everything Apple makes is perfection in plastic. Help him maintain his illusion--it keeps him passive. Many of these Apple apologists want to think that they have something special, something they can't get without enduring the operating system crashes, lack of pre-emptive task scheduling, and not having the desire to ever want to do something cool with the hardware they already paid for.
Most likely our Anonymous Coward uses his Mac to draw pretty pictures, check his Hotmail accounts, and of course show up to inflict his thoughts on others on Slashdot (it would be too much trouble for him to create an account here, it appears). It wouldn't occur to him that people who want modern operating systems (multiple users, multiple processors, protected memory, and source code) would want to use Apple hardware. Apple produces very good hardware products, but they change their specifications and components so often that it's hard to keep reverse-engineering them. I'm typing this on a PowerBook that compiles, networks, serves web content, and has an uptime of 89 days, and you can bet it doesn't run MacOS. And you can bet that as soon as a PowerPC laptop comes about with even cooler hardware, and true specifications so that the PPC Linux guys know their drivers will work, I won't be here blubbering and drooling over Apple--I'll be ordering one of those new computers. I'll be doing real work.
--
Don't do what xanim does, it's not a solution at all. A pre-compiled binary is absolutely useless to those of us running Linux on real architectures (Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, MIPS). If we wanted a $2000 video game console, we would have bought an Intel PC with Windows in the first place.
Is Microsoft using "WMF" for its streaming media? Isn't that their own Windows Metafile extension? I can view those with hundreds of free tools.
--
I think you have that backwards. I own a Mac and I never use MacOS. You couldn't pay me enough to run 1984's operating system. Apple's hardware is very good for the price--my PowerBook has every feature I need built in, a large bright screen, even SCSI, and very good battery life. Why would I want to run an operating system that still doesn't use protected memory?
--
echo 'user_pref("network.search.url", "http://www.google.com/");' >> ~/.netscape/prefs.js
--
No, you'll shatter them. I grabbed a few from LinuxCare at the August 1999 LinuxWorld Expo show, and stuck one in my checkbook (internal "pressure" is lower than the wallet). I took it out two months later, to use it, and it had shattered into twenty or so small wedges of CD.
Maybe my mistake was to use the checkbook (which is more flexible, but has more room to move around). Perhaps the less flexible wallet would have been better.
--