Linux Replaces Sun At Weather.com 121
cwebster writes "Linux running on IBM Netfinity servers will be replacing Sun Enterprise 450 servers at weather.com. Sun will still have a place though, running IBM's websphere application as a back-end on Sun E4500 servers. You can read about it here at CNet." This is actually more than it sounds like, and gives a little glimpse into what IBM is thinking.
Re:Fast != Good (Score:1)
A view from the inside (Score:1)
This actually explains a lot about the weirdness that had been going on. weather.com is in the middle of a complete site redesign, and one of the things that Came Down From Above was that linux servers were going to be used instead of exclusively Sun servers (the CTO had to be Informed that these boxes were not in fact NT servers-- he called them such in a meeting and nearly gave everyone in the room a heart attack). Originally, a long time ago (1996
So you can really understand the impact here, let me explain: weather.com has several different kinds of web servers. The general www servers are a dozen 4500s, there are 8 or so image servers that only serve images (formerly 450s), 8 or so cgi boxes that do various cgi work, and maybe a dozen or so miscellaneous boxes each handling a particular odd job (dns, mail for the mailed-out weather reports, international pages). If you analyze a page from weather.com, you can see a lot of this in action: images come from image.weather.com or maps.weather.com, ads come from ads.weather.com, cgis and fcgis come from.. well, you get the idea. The machines they're planning to replace with linux boxes are for now the image servers. Those boxes have been semi-optimized to spit out images as fast as possible-- no web server logging is done on them, for example (an image by itself is never a pageview, so it can't contribute to the almighty Pageviews Per Day total, which was running from 4 to 7 million a day when I left). The cgi/fcgi boxes probably won't be replaced, simply because then all the scripts that run on them would have to be tested to make sure they run on the new OS ok, and neither will the www boxes (the 4500s) because those are honkin' BIG boxes and it would take quite a few linux boxes to replace one of those, and it's no fun as it is maintaining the ones they have.
So the moral of this story? It's much easier to change to using linux when there's the will to from the top, rather than pressure from the people that do the work that actually know better. The upper muckity-mucks still send out email with Word attachments, for pity's sake; hell they even managed to send out a Word macro virus that way one time (this was before anyone had heard of Melissa or ILOVEYOU). Just before I left I got dinged by my boss for not writing up documentation in Word (because it'd look better in Word, see).
Apologies if I've revealed the small man hiding behind the curtain, but since I've Been There, I thought it needed to be said.
Been there (Score:1)
As of early 2000, weather.com was pulling down on the average between 4 to 7 million pageviews per day. I'd get more recent stats for you, but it looks like they've finally locked down the webserver that has that data on it (used to be, all you needed to know was the acctname and password, which hadn't changed in 2+ years). Most of that traffic comes during business hours-- ramping up in the morning, staying high during the afternoon, then tailing off at 4:30-5pm or so. During the last big hurricane last September, that was upwards of 15M per day for 4 straight days, with a peak of 22.5M pageviews. Of course, pageviews and actual web server hits are two different things-- exact details are hard to come by since among other things, the hosts that only serve images do no logging at all-- but I'd estimate that probably between 10-20 actual web server hits make up each page, and that number just keeps increasing as they find new and more creative ways to increase the number of ads per page.
Actually, weather.com uses 4500s for the main www boxes; the 450s that serve images are the ones being replaced by linux. Load balancers sit in front of those, so that not only do you never get a dead web server, you also in theory don't overload any one particular one too much. Last I heard (which was as of a year ago, I'll admit) cnn.com DIDN'T use load balancing, just round-robin DNS, which is why every once in a while you'll go to cnn.com and it just takes FOREVER to get that page-- you managed to hit the bum webserver that time.
I doubt they'll ever go to linux for the main www webservers, mostly because those 4500s are hefty boxes, loaded up with 8 or so processors per. It'd take several linux boxes to replace 1 of those, and the data distribution is already pushed to the limit getting the data to those (Every Single One of those bloody city pages changes every hour, and all the radar images change too). Granted, weather.com doesn't have to deal with user transactions much, but the sheer bulk of changing data that has to be continually updated on those web servers is Immense.
Actually the 'moderate-sized room' comment made me laugh; half of weather.com was at one point contained in an 8'x14' cage containing 10 racks. It was immensely cramped, of course, but it worked, and hey, we got to share a cage wall with www.sgi.com (funny story: their cage had among other things a couple NT boxes. We asked one of the guys in that cage why they had NT boxes in their cage, and got back the reply: "Don't EVEN get me started.").
more and more (Score:1)
Re:wahoo... (Score:1)
Re:Suns are overpriced? Which ones? (Score:2)
I've seen hundreds a UNIX workstations and (SMP) servers (from Apollo, Sony, Digital, Sun, and HP) pass through our offices over the last 12 years. Not one CPU has failed. I did see several memory modules fail, but that is easily explained: when we bought that batch of machines, we decided to save some money by going for third party modules instead of buying the real stuff from HP. Quite a few of these cheap beasts failed, none of the HP ones ever did. The stuff that fails most are the power supplies, the disks, etc.
--
Re:Suns are overpriced? Which ones? (Score:1)
Funny thing is that most companies that use Sun (and I'm only picking on sun here) as their mission critical platform use solaris 2.6, which suffers all of the weaknesses that you harp on. Here's the solaris stuff 12 months ago:
DMP for FCAL arrays under 2.6 was broken (last solution I saw was that FC/scsi emulation drivers were disabling one ring to work reliably on a dual-ringed JBOD). I don't know if this has been fixed.
Veritas' filesystem or volume manager, unless you tune the kernel in a manner that isn't documented anywhere but in sunsolve (and was damn hard to find, at that), you're likely to cause kernel thread stack overflows and crash your kernel as soon as you get a really high I/O volume.
You see, you can't sleep easy with sun either. You still have to be on your toes, and be ready to be on call 24/7. Until you shake out all of their problems for them (remember, with sun's 5x00 arrays, veritas comes with it) you have to assume the worst, because it will happen to you at 4:00am in the morning.
-Peter
I wish weather.com (the site) was this smart (Score:1)
How about "New York City"? Nope, "The city you entered was not found." No go for "Manhattan" either. It gives you a list of 4 Manhattans, none of which is in NY. "New York" is the only thing that will give you the page.
How about "Hartford, CT"? Nope, same result. "Hartford" works, but the one you want is buried in a list of 10 other ones.
Maybe they can spend some of the money they're saving on the servers and get a little smarts for the site.
Not true, there is help out there. (Score:1)
Keeping in mind... (Score:1)
Sun still growing fast btw... (Score:3)
Not bad particularly since they haven't done much in the way of new servers or new CPUs in 2 years. (there's been some little things though...). Come on Sun - hurry up and launch the UltraSPARC-III! (would be nice to finally see just how it goes) Looks like it might come out around July or something...
Another thing to chew up - around 50% of Sun's revenue comes from systems that take 8 or more CPUs - ie the E3500, E4500, E5500, E6500 and E10000. Each one of those generates over $1Bn in revenue per year. (actually, the 2-way E250 and 4-way E450 also generate about $1Bn per year each too)
Umm...Sun is way ahead of MS "NET" (Score:1)
Come on. (Score:4)
Ohh.. wait. This is the real world where servers simply need to run all the time no matter what and technical staff is allowed to choose the best tool for the job at hand.
When weather.com went online initially Sun was the best choice for a high traffic web site. Now Linux is the best choice. This includes price/performance and stability measures.
The big question is: How do you explain all those NT web sites out there? If Sun and Latter Linux are the best choices for doing big sites and Linux costs less than NT for small sites. It's not all about FUD and tricking suites into forcing NT on Nerds either.
You see if you are a suite and are building the site yourself, NT will probably let you get online with very little technical help. Fortunately Linux is heading in that direction. I just hope the Distribution companies remember that it should be locked down by default.
As for weather.com They have nerds paid to know this stuff so it's not such a big deal what distributions ship. They customize the hell out of it.
$10 for Solaris? How about $75?! (Score:1)
Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware (Score:3)
Oh, and there's the CPU scalability as well. SPARC architecture scales up to 64 CPUs. Intel boxes can just barely scale up to 4 CPUs, and even than, from what I heard, not all Xeons actually work properly in 4x configuration.
So, Sun boxes are good for the high end. However, as you correctly noticed, on the low-mid range PCs running Linux provide the same or better performance at much lower prices. But the low-end Sun boxes are expensive for the same reason Sony is expensinve.
___
Re:E450 not so expensive (Score:2)
Your Working Boy,
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:1)
Usenet and FAQs (this is great for the hobbyist and someone with time on his hands, but for the sysadmin whose mission-critical database just went down, it's not quite a
sure thing that you'll get your system up in no time). Availability. Guaranteed availability.
We had one of the people from the local Linux group work on some Suns being used for DNA crunching in the Biochemistry labs. While he praised the sophisticated hardware interface (and loved working with 200 GB hard drives), he sometimes complained that there was nothing like HOWTO's for Solaris - that if he had a problem he couldn't just search the web for the answer, he usually had to debug it himself.
Re:Come on. (Score:2)
When you are in that state, almost nothing is more important than getting out to market. If that means that you have to go with NT to be able to find talent, then so be it. Would I have personally preferred to go with a Sun or Linux solution? Sure -- but in the Seattle area I can make it to market so much quicker with NT.
Down in the bay area, the opposite is probably true. It's probably much easier to find Unix type talent.
The offshoot it that we have to spend more cash on redundant systems and on management of those systems but my product has been launched and our customers love it.
BTW, the url listed as my site (www.euonym.com) isn't the project I'm talking about. That's a tiny little(486 50Mhz) Linux box. In other words, there's no reason for everybody to visit it all at once and cause me to lose my uptime.
Why not linux on the E450's? (Score:5)
replacing Solaris on the E450's, than about the
hardware changing from Sun to IBM.
Suns are overpriced? Which ones? (Score:4)
At the higher end--say, the 6000 series and up--you can hot swap and hot-plug CPUs. What Linux-friendly x86 vendors (or Linux distros, for that matter) support that?
Mom-and-pops and boutique vendors like VAResearch and Penguin Computing make cost-effective servers for the low to mid range.. with a constantly-shifting product line and component mix that drives engineers nuts. It's sometimes nice to be able to buy the same model configured the same way with the same components twice more than a year apart.
What are you comparing this pricing to? Dell's cheesy desktops in server cases?
Next question: if you're running a 100GB database for a $400 million company, would you put it on Linux, with a filesystem that will need 20 minutes to fsck in the event of an emergency reboot? Is "experimental" support for a shared fiber-channel disk array good enough to allow you to sleep soundly? Calling Sun or another "expensive" high-end vendor starts making more sense here.
Linux is forcing sun to beef up the services side of its business for revenue, as IBM has, and has hurt them--and everyone else--on the low end (1-4 CPU machines), for good reason. But where there's a big database or a heavy-lifting server application, nothing beats the so-called expensive stuff.
Re:Come on. (Score:2)
Let's see a real argument that Sun/Linux/Other Unix is that much better that it actually makes any more than a marginal difference.
------------
Sometimes it's hard to avoid speaking in absolutes. NT is the right solution sometimes. As someone else pointed out in this forum, you might be located in Lower East Broken Stick, where you have a stock of NT programmers who actually are pretty damn good.
Or you might be working in an industry where the major software packages all run on NT, and all your customers expect you to run NT.
There's lots of reasons to run NT, I don't deny that. Just wanted to make the point that the competency of programmers and how many platforms they can juggle at once is a difficult problem for many companies.
Re:Come on. (Score:3)
>NT web sites out there? If Sun and Latter Linux
>are the best choices for doing big sites and
>Linux costs less than NT for small sites. It's
>not all about FUD and tricking suites into
>forcing NT on Nerds either.
Does your company claim that nobody but the best people get to be employees at your company. Funny....my company says the same. Probably *every* company says the same thing. Is there a company out there who claims to hire only the worst half of all programmers?
Someone's lying. There's companies full of programmers who can't pick up new technologies as quickly as others. There's companies full of programmers who never developed a refined sense of what is good about a computer, and learned to avoid all that is tasteless.
The managers who decided on Windows when it was the only game in town for desktop machines might have tried to navigate their company around the curve that the internet threw at them. Some were successful, and they were quick enough to learn new tech or otherwise adapt. The less nimble companies made do with their desktop knowlege and tried to apply it to the back end of the business.
Some companies can handle the operation of multiple architectures and operating systems, and some cannot. That leads to conservatism, and adoption of the safe choice. Lots of people look stupid for buying Microsoft, but hardly anyone gets canned for it.
Sun sells hardware (Score:2)
Sure, it surprised me too to see Sun turn in the growth figures they have, but in retrospect it was just because I didn't understand the market that well.
<petty>
I guess for you guys at Microsoft Sun will be another company you can watch go by on your way down. How did it feel to watch Cisco go by?
</petty>
--
I like this guy. (Score:5)
How in the world did IBM, famous for its entrenched monopolist corporate culture, manage to turn itself around so quickly and fundamentally?
Re:Sun vs. Linux. (Score:1)
Well, the volume management will be there in 2.4. I'm using it right now actually. It's very nice.
Logical Volume Manager (LVM) [msede.com]Re:Come on. (Score:1)
How's Sun making money then ?
Re:Come on. (Score:2)
The point is that non-techies and semi-techies (non-geek techies) will not go with the solution that works better, but rather with the solution that allows them to make the most money. It's that simple.
For instance, I was talking with a consultant, and I was arguing that Un*x requires less maintainance, thus lowering costs and ultimately allowing a fatter earn percentage. His reply was "but if everything works and I have to make less maintainance calls, I won't get any money for those calls".
It's as easy as that. If you think about it, the whole Microsoft business is not about creating good software. It's about creating software that works well enough to sort of do the job it's supposed to do, but bad enough that when in two years the Next Release (tm) will come to the shelves, you will have to buy it so that you won't BSOD every half a day. And the Next Release (tm) will require more powerful hardware to do the same tasks, so the computer manufacturers will be happy. And while it will actually convey some improvements, it will still lack some key features so that MS-trained professionals will have to be called to fix problems and the cycle will begin.
Can we do something about this? Damn right we can, but it will take time and hard work.
Re:Come on. (Score:2)
But I guess that they would do a leasing type of deal (and they throw maintainance in), or something like that.
But Suns are not really aimed at the consumer market: they're for business and research, where that kind of contracts is the norm, isn't it?
Re:Sun vs. Linux. (Score:1)
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:1)
>
I'm not sure this is quite true (though Win2K is
a great operating system), wasn't the benchmark
used for the Win2K tests one that was completely
parallelizable (sp?) so a group of servers
could run different bits independantly without
the usual overheads of distributed solutions.
AIX is not Cool? (Score:1)
All I can say is the Solaris on x86 systems I used in College were utter crap compared to AIX 4.3.3 on the H70s I deal with at work.
The AIX documentation is astounding compared to what you get from Sun!
Re:I like this guy. (Score:1)
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:2)
Just because you admire the scenery on a road doesn't mean that industrial trucks can't travel the same route. And there's a good reason why a truck costs more than an overgrown bicycle (think reliability, fuel efficiency, capital depreciation, etc). What people don't realise is that the average joe doesn't want to pay for functionality that is invisible (e.g. why have russian spelling checker if you can't speak russian?) and thus the model is shifting towards giving away client software/plugins in order to create a sticky service site (ie a defensive move to prevent consumer serfs from leaving their lucrative branded fiefdom). Microsoft have realised this and in the spirit of maintaing a presence on every desk, are determined to march their way up the food chain. Consumer computing isn't the entire world (not to mention all the other invisible world of real-time manufacturing control, embedded systems, trusted plant operations, etc).
LL
Weather.com is sloooooow (Score:1)
I am talking about upwards of 5-15 seconds to get a response when requesting area specific weather.
granted, this may also be a db problem, but that type of response time is just plain TERRIBLE
hopefully this will improve....
__________________________
Re:I like this guy. (Score:1)
2. FEAR
3. they didn't want to be like Xerox
Re:Where sun is (Score:1)
Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware (Score:2)
in one clock cycle. The x86 can only do one FP add per cycle, or one FP multiply every 2nd cycle.
So, floating point math is much faster on an UltraSparc.
This is the most trivial example. There are others...
Re:What about FreeBSD? (Score:1)
FreeBSD, the Choice of those who know how to Choose
I think your wrong (Score:1)
Vote Chad Okere in 2000!!! [dhs.org]
The majority of those who oppose the death penalty have never been a victim of violent crime -- CNN
Re:[OT] Re:I think you're wrong (Score:1)
Re:Linux replaces the sun? (Score:1)
Linus Replaces God At Earth Mark 8 (Score:1)
--
Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware (Score:1)
Hmmm?? I just picked up a pair of Ultra 5's on an educational discount for ~US$1250. IIRC, that's with 9gb drive, 128mb ram, and Solaris 8 Right-To-Use-License.
Curse their cheap-ass IDE drives, tho.
James - I generally curse most IDE drives, tho...
Re:Linux replaces the sun? (Score:1)
Thimo
--
Server Software (Score:1)
Re:Why not linux on the E450's? (Score:1)
Re:Server Software (Score:2)
Re:wahoo... (Score:1)
Supreme file system corruption.
SMP+NCR835+1GB Ram+Linux == complete crap
Wanna see the first inkling of a problem?
while 1
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad1 count=10000\
&
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad2 count=10000\
&
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/usr/tmp/choad3 count=10000
rm -f
end
let them run for about 5-10 minutes, watch your kernel panic and die. Sometimes you'll be ok, othertimes your file system will be hosed.
Re:wahoo... (Score:2)
I'm replacing an entire server farm of Linux boxes with Solaris X86 and FreeBSD because of Stability and security issues, not to mention Speed.
So far my big fat E4500's, E250's and even U10's run Oracle all day, 0 downtime for 6 months. I've had to re-install *EVERY* linux box on the site because of instability. Guess which side wins out?
Sun needs to get off their ass and pledge support for Solaris Itanium. It won't ever really compete with Sun's primary offering anyways, and it can only help their business.
Where sun is (Score:1)
Re:Suns are overpriced? Which ones? (Score:1)
Jun 24 04:21:50 xxx unix: panic[cpu7]/thread=30004949720:
Jun 24 04:21:50 xxx unix: CPU7 Ecache Writeback Data Parity
Error: AFSR 0x00000000.00800004 AFAR 0x00000000.00200000
Jun 24 04:21:50 xxx unix: syncing file systems...
done
Jun 24 04:21:53 xxx unix: dumping to
Jun 24 04:23:31 xxx unix: 100% done: 64801 pages dumped, compression ratio 3.35,
Jun 24 04:23:31 xxx unix: dump succeeded
Clouds replace Sun at Weather.com (Score:1)
that's good publicity (Score:2)
Sun vs. Linux. (Score:5)
Linux has a formidable barrier to overcome, though, before it's a realistic alternative to Sun in back-end architecture. The volume management isn't there, the shared memory performance isn't there and the heavy artillery hardware support (big fargon disk arrays, etc.) isn't there.
Of course I like to see that Linux is gaining market but these peices walk a fine line between truth and FUD for those who aren't determined to read the fine print. Sun actually understands the Linux market and is opening. Solaris media for $10 shipped? I don't see Microsoft doing that. A better story here would be a discussion on the technology gap between Linux and Sun/Solaris and how it is gradually closing. It's not a Sun vs. Linux story.
Sun is really in trouble (Score:3)
Atop this there is the consideration that Sun believes the future will look like the past, with millions of time-sharing clients begging for resources from massive servers. Contrast this to the view MS propounded yesterday (the
What does Sun have going for it in the long run? I see nothing apart from the fact that they have positioned themselves as the "anti-Microsoft", which sounds awfully promising when the DOJ is hovering over MS like a vulture. But really, is that the kind of world you want to live in? And is it really any kind of foundation for a company? Personally I don't think so.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Re:Linux replaces the sun? (Score:2)
Linux replaces the sun? (Score:5)
E450 not so expensive (Score:1)
Now, I don't intend to confute those of you who say that Intl-based Linux systems are so cheap in comparison with the E 450; all I am saying is that Intel doesn't necessarily mean "cheap".
Disclaimer: we might have gotten the E 450 at a lower price, since my company in general is buying Sun servers like hot cookies: we recently had to check whether the 3rd floor will resist the weight of all the E 6000 we stacked up there!
Is that why my customized Weather page fails? (Score:1)
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete
your request.
Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the
error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/1.3.12 Server at fcgi.weather.com Port 80
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:1)
--
Cheers
Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware (Score:1)
Sun hardware also has online CPU and memory replacement/addition (at least from the E3500 series on up). No Intel X86-based system offers that today. Sun's E10000 also has dynamic partitions, i.e. the ability to run multiple copies of the operating system inside one SMP servers and dynamically change the boundaries between the partitions. No other UNIX system, based on Intel X86 or otherwise, has that capability today.
The 32 bit architecture is limited to only 4 GB of RAM, which is not enough for large-scale DB servers.
True, but all Intel X86 processors from the Pentium Pro on are actually 36-bit processors, allowing them to support up to 64 GB of physical memory. In a 32-but OS, the processes themselves can access no more than 4 GB of memory, but system performance can still be enhanced by enabling faster access to memory using what are essentially large disk caches.
IBM: 2, Sun: 0 (Score:2)
However, I think it is premature to call this a "fundamental" turnaround for the company. IBM's server unit revenues were slipping in the first part of this year after falling by nearly 20% in 1999, putting it under huge amounts of pressure to strenghen its business. Under these conditions, it is likely to do almost anything to win key accounts.
Right now, a win based on Linux with a high-profile Internet customer is a great way to give Sun a black eye, but IBM still has to get a lot better at basic blocking and tackling in the market to sustain its success.
You know, you could post this on Segfault (Score:1)
- on topic
- appreciated
- not wasting people's time
Besides, they need more new material---CONFLICT!!---
Win2k replaces Linux at /. (Score:5)
from the say it isn't so dept.
CmdrTaco writes I've decided to change over to a Microsoft solution and deploy Win2k on all the web servers here. This is a very large investment, but I believe that this will lead to better security, better speed, and a better user experience for
___
Re:Linux replaces the sun? (Score:5)
So that's why the sky is blue.
___
Re:$10 for Solaris? How about $75?! (Score:1)
Re:Sun vs. Linux. (Score:1)
I think I just violated the NDA. Oh, I didn't sign anything. Damn, that felt good!
- technik
Re:Sun still growing fast btw... (Score:1)
- technik
Middle Tier Drift (Score:1)
Linux/Apache/dynamic presentation engine (tons of open source at this tier) ---- Solaris/App Server/ORBs/Big Expensive Enterprise Apps (virtually no open source at this tier) ---- RDBMS/Legacy System (Oracle and IBM own this final most expensive and least distributed of tiers).
hmmm (Score:1)
+5 funny! (Score:1)
ROTFL! +5 funny!
you must be joking, konstant--usually you're pretty insightful, but come on, that's absurd. Solaris kicks Windows 2000's ass for performance.
Re:Why Sun shouldn't fear linux (Score:1)
I dont think Sun really sees much of a threat from linux, mainly because of liability and support. Would you trust a task that earns you several $1000's per minute to a linux box because its free and "non-capatilist" or fork out a little extra for support that can have an engineer call you in 6 minutes and be on-site in 2 hours anytime?
When linux runs on E10K's then we can really compare them.. (trust me, I know someone who has plans to give it a go....)
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:1)
All these things come at a price, for sure, but for as long ass the sun will shine upon us, bosses will shell out money for neing able to pass the buck whenever something goes wrong in their lot. No matter what proof you give to clarify, that using Open Source solution would save money, works better and more reliable, than the product of vendor X, many managers will use the flaky product of vendor X over the better thing, simply because when it fails they can take them to court and thereby pass guilt and, hopefully, losses. Sun is such a company, and one of the best in providing added flavour, in my experience. Reliability, browsable help, and service, if you pay for the service contract. Expensive as hell, but, after all, if you don't make your customers pay for that, you've got no bussiness sense anyway, and will be bankrupt before long.
Stefan.
How come that last paragraph is indented, and how do I correct that?
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:1)
*sigh* Thank you for pointing out the obvious, I should have thought of it even if I had been thoroughly asleep. Just goes to show, when you're sure you're never making some kind of mistake, you'll make it, you just won't notice yourself making it. I mean, it is not as if the indentation is not a big, bright, flashing neon sign saying: "Hello, sunshine, we maybe missing an ending here!" Ah well, just have to hope extreme genious still borders on extreme stupidity. ;-)
Stefan.
It takes a lot of brains to enjoy satire, humor and wit-
Re:My thoughts on weather.com and GNULIX! (Score:1)
Re:Why does (Score:1)
wahoo... (Score:2)
Kicking some CAD is good for you [cadfu.com]
Quick? No... (Score:1)
It hasn't been quick. It's taken the better part of a decade, and it isn't complete.
But it is quite an amazing transformation.
Gordon.Adding Linux API (Score:2)
They're adding Linux-specific calls to AIX.
Actually, I can pretty much do this already. I'm finishing up a large project for IBM (can't say what). My portion is a multithreaded back-end process that interfaces with various separate DB2 databases. I wish I could say more, it's rather cool. I did the development on Linux, then took the code over to the RS/6000. The makefile needed mods for the IBM compiler, and I updated a set of #defines for AIX paths vs Linux paths. That was pretty much it. By sticking to POSIX as far as possible, there just wasn't a big deal.
Of course, I knew to stay away from things that AIX doesn't (yet) have. Once the API is updated, this won't be a consideration.
I think this is a verysmart move for IBM, as makes AIX a no-brainer upgrade for appliations that grow beyond what Linux can do. This gives IBM a much broader product line with cleaner upgrade paths than they had with OS/2 as their Intel-based OS -- and puts them in a much more competitive stance.
Gordon.
Re:Weather.com's past connections to linux (Score:2)
This kinda of follow-the-money-trail is very instructive. Since the parent of Weather.com is deeply tied (psychologically and financially) to Linux success, it is definitely not surprising to see this adjustment take place.
I wonder if the SEC would be interested in hearing about this symbiotic relationship--especially because the switch from high-profile Sun to high-profile Linux was announced in such a broad, high-profile kind of way. Hmmmm. Given the phenomenon of any Linux-related announcement directly affecting the so-called Linux stocks (in a direct, but disproportionate way) could it be far from the truth to suppose a positive bounce in Redhat, et al, would not be a regretted effect of this timely announcement?
This relationship between Landmark Communications, Weather.com, Great Bridge, and RedHat needs to enjoy the intense light of day (and if it survives, all the better).
Like I said, I wish I had mod points.
Re:I like this guy. (Score:5)
In 1993 Lou Gerstner took over as CEO of IBM. He had no experience in the technology industry (he came from RJR Nabisco), but he did have a solid vision for IBM and really saw IBM's strengths and weaknesses and how to leverage them. He transformed the overly formal and stuffy internal culture and policies (the "blue suits" stereotype), helped revamp the public's perception of Big Blue(a new and different ad campaign, more customer centric, more open), and set strong goals for IBM's future.
The details can be read in the book IBM Redux [fatbrain.com] by Doug Garr, a former IBM executive. It's a pretty well-written book about where IBM was (almost dead) and how they got to where they are today.
Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:5)
But anyways, having worked with all the OSes mentioned above, I can tell you why Sun is still great. Their server solutions work. And work _great_. You don't have to be a magician to make Solaris run well on Sun hardware. And if you ever do mess anything up, you call up Sun's tech support and they help you fix it. Contrast with Microsoft $9/min tech support - "Oh no, you don't have to call back, I'll wait while you reinstall Office". Or with Linux support, which until recently has consisted mostly of IRC, Usenet and FAQs (this is great for the hobbyist and someone with time on his hands, but for the sysadmin whose mission-critical database just went down, it's not quite a sure thing that you'll get your system up in no time). Availability. Guaranteed availability.
Of course, there's a price to be paid for the kind of solutions and service Sun provides. Their high-end stuff is priced accordingly. Why? Well, because there are obviously enough people in the world willing to pay for it. It's the beauty of the market economy. For the same reasons that Windows hasn't yet died a long-overdue death (and somehow controls the home OS market), Sun continues to sell mission-critical hardware for a premium: people think it's worth it .
Besides, you can hardly say that the Linux/Netfinity solution here is cheap. $1 million. And I'm pretty sure that's not all hardware.
I guess they should have gone with Windows 2000, the price/performance leader.
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Re:more and more (Score:1)
Forecast for today (Score:1)
Re:Sorry (Score:1)
you really should try 7.0 (Score:1)
The top vendors in the database world have all a product that has 90% of its functionality in common with the competition. 10% of it's features are unique. Oracle has more features than sqlserver, but mostly you don't need 'em or you can work around the lack of it. This works vice versa ofcourse. If you need a feature that's unique for oracle, you shouldn't use sqlserver. if you need handy stuff in sqlserver that's not in oracle or it's tools, avoid oracle.
Too many people however don't understand this and go for the 'well known product' while they'd better look out for the best fit for their needs.
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Re:Replacing the SUN at weather.com? (Score:1)
Linux replacing Sun? (Score:1)
Today will be partly cloudy, however, we will be able to see some Linux out there today.
Today will be a warm day and the Linux will be bright and shiny!
We won't be seeing any Linux today as it will be completely covered by this cloudy day.
Wow, Linux just keeps getting more powerful by the minute, doesn't it?
Re:Keeping in mind... (Score:3)
Oh please. I agree with your points, except this one. Serving web hits for a major Internet site is not in any way a "lightweight thing to do."
By major internet site I mean the type of thing that hundreds of thousands of users have as their default home page and millions view every day.. Not your ISP web hosting site- your dual-T3 redundant, backed up by load balancing and cacheing, monitored by a very large engineering team 24 hours a day type of site.
These types of sites are usually hosted on a bank of Sun E450-type machines.. enough to fill a moderate sized room. Seeing Linux being trusted to this type of thing is a major accomplishment.
I feel I can say this due to being part of the engineering team for a website [delta-air.com] that itself draws over 8 million hits a day... and I can only imagine how much busier weather.com must be.
Re:My thoughts on weather.com and GNULIX! (Score:1)
Yes please!
Re:Where sun is (Score:1)
Re:Uninformed question about Sun hardware (Score:1)
1.) The 64-bit Sparc seti client makes a pretty big difference with applications that deal with large numbers.
2.) The Sparc processor is much more efficient/faster at floating point ops.
3.) 8MB of Ecache is *really* nice!
Sun vs Linux (Score:1)
The effect of this is organisations that dont have tonnes of cash (from IPOs and VC) are having to change to other OS's.
Universities in particular seem to be switching to linux since it is far cheaper to deploy.
Why Sun shouldn't fear linux (Score:1)
Sun know fine well that linux isn't going to run well (if at all) on machines of that calibre simply because it's developed by individual users, I'm very sure that 99% of the linux machines in existance have two or less cpus. And at the end of the day this is probably what linux is best for - medium powered & low cost servers. Far too few linux programmers (in my imagination at least) run 16 cpu machines for the OS to mature well on these platforms.
This certainly cuts suns share of the low end server market, but i'm sure this was always fairly low profit for them since they have to compete with microsoft.
Flame me if you want, but I dont feel linux is quite ready for high end and mission critical operations.
Maybe now they can accurately predict the weather! (Score:1)
Anyone else think so?
Replacing the SUN at weather.com? (Score:2)
(Just kidding, I know what a Sun box is).
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Re:Sun is really in trouble (Score:5)
Ah Well. So much for getting all sides of a story on this forum.
This guy is right: check out tpc.org [tpc.org] and you will see an industry standard ranking of database servers. Windows 2000/SQL Server does indeed blow away all other contenders, running the heaviest IBM and Sun iron and Oracle.
However, I don't think Sun is really in trouble. Rather, Microsoft is. The are still the belligerent company they always have been, and I for one have developed a severe distaste of having to deal with incompatible software and devious methods to hook people into staying their customers. So what if it performs better, I need software that works well with everything else I use.
Take a lesson from IBM, and quit trying to dominate the world. Treat people as humans rather than competitors to be crushed, and perhaps the anti-Microsoft sentiment will fade. Until then, expect people to go with other solutions.
Re:Sun vs. Linux. (Score:2)
I've seen Linux servers as front end webservers, and even as email/web exchangers. Why? Because at least in one case, Exchange (shudder) is incapable of providing it's own defenses against attacks, and buffering it via a sendmail/apache+ssl setup in front actually provides your security for you. Not quite a firewall, but close, and tuned to order.
Weather.com's past connections to linux (Score:5)
So you could say (Score:2)
I like it.