Linux-Advocacy Digest #854, Volume #27 Fri, 21 Jul 00 15:13:06 EDT
Contents:
Re: Some Windows weirdnesses... (Nathaniel Jay Lee)
Re: windows annoyances (again) (Cihl)
Re: If Microsoft starts renting apps (sylvain hutchison)
Re: BASIC == Beginners language (Was: Just curious.... ("Drestin Black")
Re: Just curious, how do I do this in Windows? ("Drestin Black")
Re: The real faux paus of the U.S. military... (was Re: The Failure of ("Aaron R.
Kulkis")
Re: The Failure of the USS Yorktown (Nathaniel Jay Lee)
Re: Some REAL fun before weekend (Nathaniel Jay Lee)
Re: Linsux as a desktop platform ("John W. Stevens")
Re: Am I the only one that finds this just a little scary? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Re: Am I the only one that finds this just a little scary? ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Nathaniel Jay Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Some Windows weirdnesses...
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 13:25:10 -0500
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> "Ferdinand V. Mendoza" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> >He-he-he... At least Mandrake 7.1 can tolerate this with reiserfs -if
> >you can't afford a UPS.
>
> Having recently converted my /var filesystem to reiserfs (with the very
> latest and greatest reiserfs stuff directly from the developer site),
> I am not completely convinced this is ready for prime time yet.
> Granted, the filesystem I converted is an ugly case of lazyness causing
> weirdness (it has a directory with 180,000+ files in it ;-), but still ---
> I backed everything up, remade the filesystem, copied everything back,
> and while doing that, the "invalid inode" messages started coming in.
> Huh?
>
> Well, it's mainly my news spool, and I made sure I had backup
> copies of everything (including everything coming in since the conversion),
> so I am sticking with it for the moment (and it *is* a great filesystem
> for directories with many files, no doubt about it).
> I also started getting "hdb: missed interrupt" messages that I didn't
> get before. Of course, it is possible that my disk is starting to go,
> and the beginning of that just coincided with me installing reiserfs --- but
> coinciding to the day?
>
> Also, my machine went down with a kernel panic a few times. I don't know
> why --- nothing got logged, and the register dump scrolled the panic
> message off the screen :-( That was with 2.4test3; I have since upgraded
> to 2.4test4 (which, from reading the patch, contains a whole lot of
> SMP locking fixes --- this is an SMP machine), and it appears rock stable.
>
> The unpleasant part about this was that INND mmap()s /var/lib/news/active,
> and that reiserfs seems to not update the on-disk copy regularly --- meaning
> that even though the crashes occured quite some time after the last
> changes to the active file, it ended up being out of date upon reboot.
> I had to write a small program to bring it up-to-date, to avoid new news
> overwriting older news.
>
> The lack of a reiserfsck means that I can't currently check whether the
> filesystem is about to eat itself, either.
>
> At the moment, I am still not convinced that reiserfs is anywhere near
> as usable and stable as ext2. I personally wouldn't use it for anything
> that I don't have comprehensive backups of.
>
> Bernie
> --
> Human blunders, however, usually do more to shape history
> than human wickedness
> A.J.P. Taylor
> British historian, 1906-90
I believe that if you "start out" with reiserfs you will have much
better luck. The distros that include it (as far as I know only SuSE
and Mandrake) include a known stable version of it and include utilities
for checking and reparing the filesystem.
I have been using the version of reiserfs included with SuSE 6.4 on
production machines (servers and workstations) since the upgrade came
out. I also have tried "manually" converting a couple of machines using
the method you described and had some of the same problems you are
describing (and I wasn't using a 2.3 or 2.4 test kernel, 2.2.14 I
believe?). I think if you start the filesystem from installation with
reiserfs (and I copied over home directories from old ext2 filesystems)
I don't think you will see nearly the problems you have described.
On my four Linux machines at home and my 24 systems at work I have
Reiserfs working without difficulty. Perhaps you just had the same bit
of bad luck I had when trying it the "manual" way.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nathaniel Jay Lee
------------------------------
From: Cihl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: windows annoyances (again)
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 18:30:07 GMT
Tim Kelley wrote:
>
> People complain about setup of linux distros?
>
> Today I was installing NT server, and required ethernet card
> drivers on a separate cd.
>
> After installing the drivers from the cd and placing the NT
> server cd in the drive again when prompted, the OS locked up.
> This happened twice, which was satisfactory for me to decide it
> was a confirmed NT fuck up.
>
> I wound up having to add a second CD rom to the machine to
> complete the install.
A second CD-ROM? How did you come up with that? Doesn't Windows
support all CD-ROM players, like Linux?
> This is the sort of thing MSCE's think is "normal" but linux
> users rightly think is absurd.
>
> Linux is a joy to install compared to any version of windows.
That's my experience too. The old Windows 3.11 install wasn't bad,
though.
--
You have changed the signature included in your e-mail.
For these changes to take effect, you must restart your computer!
Do you wish to restart your computer now?
[YES] [NO]
------------------------------
From: sylvain hutchison <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: If Microsoft starts renting apps
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 14:33:24 -0700
All I have to say is you will never have better sex than with the "one" you
truely love!!! In other words, how can you love Microsoft??
sly.
------------------------------
From: "Drestin Black" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: BASIC == Beginners language (Was: Just curious....
Date: 21 Jul 2000 13:31:17 -0500
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:8l8ko7$7hq$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>
> Stephen S. Edwards II <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> news:8l8clo$bsp$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
> >
> > : Drestin Black <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > : news:LlId5.36590$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > : >
> > : > Can you be more specific? In what way is VB failing on a large scale
> that
> > : is
> > : > not revealed to us "little scale" programmers who are having no
> trouble
> > : > using VB for most anything.
> >
> > : Can you write a an operating system kernel in BASIC. Say a
replacement
> for
> > : the Linux kernel?
> >
> > Actually, it would be possible, but not at all practical. However, it
> > might be practical to use VB to write a VB application kernel.
> >
> > The point Drestin is making here, is strictly from an application
> > programming standpoint, I think.
>
> I didn't notice that qualification of the argument, but even then he
> argument that VB is the equal of C would not be accurate.
>
>
I have not made the argument VB is the "equal" of C.
I think that VB shares much of the same abilities/functions of C. I think
there is very little you can do in C you cannot do in VB. Care to address
what I *have* said?
------------------------------
From: "Drestin Black" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Just curious, how do I do this in Windows?
Date: 21 Jul 2000 13:35:04 -0500
"Nathaniel Jay Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> Drestin Black wrote:
> >
> > "Nathaniel Jay Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > Drestin Black wrote:
> > > >
> > > > "Nathaniel Jay Lee" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
> > > > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> > > > > Drestin Black wrote:
> > > > <snip> >
> > > > > > oh give me a break... sigh... you know that no matter what I
would
> > write
> > > > > > you'd just pick it apart and either call it shit or say it was
> > copied.
> > > > It's
> > > > > > a no win scenario. I haven't used Fortran since college (or RPG
and
> > > > Cobol).
> > > > > > C++ , it takes half a page to write hello world, fuck that.
So...
> > piss
> > > > > > off...
> > > > >
> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > > #include<iostream>
> > > > >
> > > > > main()
> > > > > {
> > > > > cout << "Hello World!" << endl;
> > > > > return 0;
> > > > > }
> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > >
> > > > > Um, half a page?!?!
> > > >
> > > > I'm sorry, I exagerated a little :)
> > > >
> > > > of couse, in BASIC this would be
> > > >
> > > > --------------------
> > > > PRINT "Hello World!"
> > > > --------------------
> > >
> > > Well, joke to joke...
> > >
> > > To each his own and all that....
> >
> > Sorry? "joke to joke"? I don't follow.
>
>
> You don't need to take it personal. You exagerated the half a page, I
> came back jokingly that it wasn't half a page, you came back jokingly
> that it's less in BASIC. Joke to joke. You made a "mad" joke, I
> replied with an attempted humorous joke, you replied again with what
> appeared to be humor and I said joke to joke. I guess I don't see what
> I did wrong.
I took it wrong. I'm sorry.
>And the 'to each his own' was in reference to this
> incessant war of words we got going on in here about languages. Use
> what works for you. I've got no problem with that.
BINGO - I have ALWAYS claimed that about ALL my computer software/hardware.
>Although I myself
> wouldn't be using BASIC again anytime soon (I used to, ages ago, on an
> Apple II) in any form (and I know VB is a long ways from the old BASICs,
> but it's still BASIC to me), I don't have any problem with the people
> that do use it. Although I will say I have worked with some VB
> programmers that couldn't tell their "hole from a butt in the ground"
> (as one of my more tired buddies once said during a late night fragfest
> party), I don't think all of them are clueless morons as some are
> saying. I do however believe that clueless morons find it easier to use
> than other languages (which may lead some to the conclusion that all
> that use it are morons). This probably creates some of the problems
> with a lot of people claim they have with VB programmers. So, like I
> said, to each his own.
yes, the easier OS will attract the stupider users cause it's the only one
they can get working - but it's a mistake to think the OS itself is stupid
cause many of it's users are. Linux is a much much more difficult OS to
master so typically speaking it's users are more computer literate - but
that in and of itself does not make linux a "smarter" OS - I think any
reasonable person can follow that.
The same applies to langauges. Writing in VB is much easier than C or Java,
so there are perhaps a larger percentage of VB programmers that are not as
good/bright/capable (whatever) as those that program in, say, C++. Does this
necessarily and in and of itself make VB a "stupider" language than C? No,
of course not. And that is a point both of us are making and so I agree with
you.
------------------------------
From: "Aaron R. Kulkis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: The real faux paus of the U.S. military... (was Re: The Failure of
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 14:36:50 -0400
"Stephen S. Edwards II" wrote:
>
> Adam Warner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> 8<SNIP>8
>
> : "Sunk by Windows NT"
> : http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,13987,00.html
> : Contains advocacy paragraph:
> : "Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a
> : topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or
> : marketing, not an article on information technology," said John Kirch, a
> : networking consultant and Microsoft certified professional, in his white
> : paper, Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus Unix. "Technically, Windows NT
> : Server 4.0 is no match for any Unix operating system."
>
> : (The paper referred to is here: http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/)
>
> First of all, you must know several things:
>
> 1.) That paper was originally written back in the days of WindowsNT
> v3.51. Apparently, Kirch has (sloppily) updated it since then.
> 2.) That paper has been debunked, and disproved to death, countless
> times, by people on USENET, and in the industry.
> 3.) Kirch is nothing but yet another UNIX-elitist twit, who has
> absolutely no insight into operating systems design, or
> implementation.
>
> 8<SNIP>8
>
> : 1. We really can't tell whether the underlying NT OS did in fact crash, but
> : on the balance of probabilities I'd guess it eventually did and had to be at
> : least rebooted given the length of time it took to get the vessel
> : operational again.
>
> Considering that most of the data we can get has gone through several
> politicians, it's likely we'll never truly know. But my guess is that
> WindowsNT didn't fail, as I've never seen any Win32 app take NT down.
>
> : 2. Regardless, the application clearly did not contain enough error checking
> : and was primarily at fault.
>
> Given the available data, I agree.
>
> : 3. If it contains substance, the issue raised of political pressure to use
> : NT is probably the most damning. There's little point in us arguing
> : technical merits if the decision to use NT on the USS Yorktown wasn't
> : primarily a technical decision.
>
> Again, I agree. I like WindowsNT, but it doesn't belong in situations
> where people's lives depend upon it. If this country insists on using PC
> technology to power its military, then I think we can all say howdy to
> communism in the coming years.
>
> BTW, does anyone know exactly what "Smart Ship" connotates? I'd hope that
Naval vessels have a hell of a lot of manpower on board, especially
combat surface vessels.
My guess is that this ship is one which is highly automated, one which
can mostly be controlled directly from the bridge, as opposed to
passing instructions from bridge to section via voice phone, and
then relayed to the man who actually operates the equipment.
Wire is cheap, and redundant routing of control lines (especially
considering how TCP/IP was specifically designed to work under
conditions where sigments might be suddenly cut out) from the bridge
to various controls should allow the ship architects new possibilities:
1: removal of significan numbers of crewmen.
2: fewer crewmen sitting on long, boring, fatigue-inducing watches
which lead to accidents and injuries.
3: fewer men on board means less storage space for food, and smaller
fresh-water production capacity.
4. New flexibility in "engineering tradeoffs"... smaller percentage
of internal compartments that need extra armor plate leads to:
a) weight savings, and/or
b) thicker armor for crew-spaces and/or
c) more powerful propulsion systems and/or
d) more heavy weaponry on board and/or
e) more electro-mechanical automation (like motorized gun loaders)
> if the military is intending on implementing AI technology, that they'd
> have the insight to use a better suited CPU. CPUs are a vastly inferior
> solution for AI anyway, but _Intel_ for complex AI? Sorry, but I just
> can't buy that.
> --
> .-----.
> |[ ] | Stephen Edwards | http://www.primenet.com/~rakmount
> | = :| "I'm too polite to use that word, so I'll just say,
> | | 'bite me, you baboon-faced ass-scratcher.'"
> |_..._| --SEGA's Seaman on the "F" word.
--
Aaron R. Kulkis
Unix Systems Engineer
ICQ # 3056642
I: "Having found not one single carbon monoxide leak on the entire
premises, it is my belief, and Willard concurs, that the reason
you folks feel listless and disoriented is simply because
you are lazy, stupid people"
A: The wise man is mocked by fools.
B: "Jeem" Dutton is a fool of the pathological liar sort.
C: Jet plays the fool and spews out nonsense as a method of
sidetracking discussions which are headed in a direction
that she doesn't like.
D: Jet claims to have killfiled me.
E: Jet now follows me from newgroup to newsgroup
...despite (D) above.
F: Neither Jeem nor Jet are worthy of the time to compose a
response until their behavior improves.
G: Unit_4's "Kook hunt" reminds me of "Jimmy Baker's" harangues against
adultery while concurrently committing adultery with Tammy Hahn.
H: Knackos...you're a retard.
------------------------------
From: Nathaniel Jay Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: The Failure of the USS Yorktown
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 13:34:59 -0500
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> This incident of the U.S.S. Yorktown combined with the Pentagon computer
> failures caused by email macro virius; could lead to an incident worse than
> what the Japaneese did on December 7, 1941. Imagine a virus attacks a
> single navel ship that it is transmitted to the battle group, to fleet, to
> the Pentagon, and filters back down to the rest of the U.S. forces and at a
> given time they shutdown the bulk of entire U.S. military's ability to
> defend itself and citizens of our nation. Then hostile force then moves in
> a blitzkrieg style attack, that is a scenerio that I never want to see
> become reality.
I realize this is slightly Off Topic (and adds a humorous twist to a
stituation that isn't humorous at all), but is anyone else reminded of
the "battle" in Star Wars Episode I. One ship is knocked out (one
"computer" as it were) and every one of the "robot" warriors stopped
functioning. I can definitely see this as a possible reality. The
government keeps trying to find ways to make combat "cheaper" and not
caring at all about reliability. Imaging if all those robot warriors
were run by a single NT (or even Linux/Unix) server. One strategically
placed hit and (no more war).
Like I said, a little off-topic, but a nice humorous aside....
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nathaniel Jay Lee
------------------------------
From: Nathaniel Jay Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Some REAL fun before weekend
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 13:38:08 -0500
Krondor wrote:
>
> from the "whitepaper"
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/net/whitepaper.asp
>
> About .NET
>
> "Ten years ago Microsoft set out a vision of a world with Information at
> Your Fingertips. "
>
I thought it was Al Gore's "vision" that started the Information age?
Maybe they were working together here.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Nathaniel Jay Lee
------------------------------
From: "John W. Stevens" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Crossposted-To: comp.sys.mac.advocacy,comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy,comp.unix.advocacy
Subject: Re: Linsux as a desktop platform
Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2000 12:44:02 -0600
"T. Max Devlin" wrote:
>
> I am interested in expanding that group tremendously, if it will improve
> the control the user has over their experience with computers.
It won't. In general, the existing adpative scheduling algorithms do a
much better job of this than any user can.
> "Speed
> this up" and "slow this down, I don't need it soon" are not beyond the
> capabilities of any user to understand.
Except . . . there are more factors to consider than just CPU cycles.
"Speed this up by bumping the process priority" won't change anything if
the process is I/O bound.
The ability to tune a set of processes is limited to those who
understand the constraints.
> The question remains whether
> they can deterministically implement such changes to an operationally
> effective degree. The fact that the problem seems hypothetical, and was
> fixe a very long time ago, are both reasons why I am trying to discuss
> them today. I do not know if there is any possible benefit to the
> end-user of a desktop system to re-examining scheduling. All of the
> assumptions that it is not seem to be predicated on research done before
> there was such a thing as a desktop system, or a non-expert end user.
Your premise that a "desktop system" is somehow such an incredibly
different beastie that this work needs to be done from scratch, is
wrong. In point of fact, "desktop systems" are slowly but surely
migrating towards being "servers with a usable interactive interface".
The premise that no such work has been done is also faulty. Server
class machines with interactive interfaces are quite old technology,
now, and what few tweaks that are neccessary to make them responsive
have already been done in the workstation market.
The kind of "user level, soft real time response tuning" that you *MAY*
be suggesting isn't new either, as multi-tier schedulers are old had. As
already mentioned, rtprio (set a process to a real time priority) is an
interface that already exists on HPUX (and probably other OS'en, I
didn't look), and of course, there are actualy *three* tiers, not just
Real Time and Time Share, of supported priority groups supported by
HPUX.
Linux has a set of scheduling extensions that support what is sometimes
refered to as Real Time, and sometimes refered to as Soft Real Time.
> Constant suggestions that my questions aren't appropriate,
Nobody actually resonded that your questions weren't appropriate: many
people responded that your *ASSERTIOONS* weren't appropriate. Big
difference, there.
> But it seems possible, if not probable, to me, that maximizing the usage
> of system resources may in fact be counter-productive for maximizing the
> perceived performance by the end user.
Perception is important. However, the fix for that problem lies in
fixing the user, not in breaking the software.
In sort, teach your users a different perception.
> It is not without precedent that
> a sacrifice in efficiency may be worthwhile to optimize effectiveness.
I suspect some more semantic garbling, here. To an engineer, those
terms are very, very similiar, if not identical.
> The theoretical (and I do not mean that disparagingly) basis of the
> current PMT systems does seem to be heavily weighted towards
> time-sharing systems:
Nope. The current *implementations* of PMT usually default to a policy
dependent on the perceived audience: workstations are tuned to be more
response to user input, servers are tuned to be more responsive to
networking events . . . sorta, kinda. Again, your lack of techinical
background here forces my statments to be very imprecise.
> Again, I'm unsure of your use of "responsiveness" in this technical
> sense matches what a general use of the term may indicate. Please
> consider the case of a desktop, where there aren't multiple users. Does
> anything change at all?
??? What makes you think that a desktop won't have multiple users? I
suspect it is *your* assumptions that need to be questioned!
> They can potentially do work in CMT as well; it is still multi-tasking.
At a lower return on their investment.
> Consider: if the crucial difference, as I'm told, between CMT and PMT is
> the notion of a maximum quantum,
Nope. CMT has the concept of a maximum quantum. See the Apple
developers documentation.
The crucial difference between PMT and CMT is that in a CMT system, that
maximum quantum is really meaningless, as there is no way to enforce
it. In a PMT system, a maximum quantum constraint can be enforced.
Consider as an analogy a law that declares something to be illegal, but
grants absolutely no enforcement authority to the judcial system or
police. This is CMT.
PMT has the same law, but it adds enforcement capabilities.
> would not a CMT system in which all
> processes internally implemented a convention of a maximum quantum be
> similar in most respects to PMT?
Nope. Such a system would be a space heater, not an OS.
The sheer weight of implementing the same functionality that many times,
then actually wasting the neccessary processing to enforce it in each
application, would make your computer so slow as to be unusable.
A rough estimate of the additional overhead generates numbers that
boggle the mind!
And, the end result, would be so unstable as to make the system so
fragile that you wouldn't dare add applications to it after you finally
got it semi-working.
> I think personal computing *should* change the way computer resources
> are used.
Why?
> PMT as currently implemented seems focused primarily on
> multi-user computing.
Wrong. PMT, as currently implemented, focuses on maximizing the return
on your CPU cycle investment.
> The thing that slows PCs down the vast majority
> of the time is certainly I/O bottlenecks, to be sure.
Yes. PMT allows you to get a higher return on your CPU cycle investment
in this case.
> Perhaps the real
> reason I've been ignorant enough to wonder about this stuff is because
> of that faster and bigger you pointed out. My CPU is so much more than
> I need over any long time scale (seconds, minutes) that it doesn't
> commonly go above 2% utilization, AFAIK.
This indicates a flaw in your work habits. You need to stop being a
hard disk drive, and start being more human.
(Once again, you've been questioning the wrong set of assumptions . . .
)
What you really want seems to be a computer designed to let you more
comfortably waste your own time.
> Yet a CPU-intensive task
> doesn't seem to happen almost instantaneously, in my time frame, as I'd
> expect.
What CPU-intensive task are you refering to, and why would you expect it
to complete in less than 49.1 Million cycles? (aprox.! of course!)
--
If I spoke for HP --- there probably wouldn't BE an HP!
John Stevens
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Am I the only one that finds this just a little scary?
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 22 Jul 2000 03:50:57 +1000
[Note: Yes, I know you, Mike, are aware of the issues raised below. But
I thought it worthwhile to reiterate them for Drestin's benefit]
"Mike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>news:8l8lo9$3lf$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
>> "Mike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>>
>> >Stratus (for one) is able to supply systems with availability of
>> >99.9999%.
>>
>> No, they aren't. Or at least Status won't come out and say that they can
>> get downtime down to 30 seconds per year.
>Wrong, but I'll take some responsibility here. I pointed you to the index
>page. You'd have to have followed a link through to their news page to find
>it:
>http://www.stratus.com/news/2000/2000417hw.htm
Note the "hw" in that URL? That's for "hardware". Replace with "ov", and
you get the "overview" version, which will tell you that the 99.999% and
99.9999% for double and triple redundancy are *hardware* availability
figures.
Replace the "hw" with "sw", and you'll get to the page that talks about
software. This is where Windows NT reliability is eluded to, and strangely
enough, the string "99" appears exactly once on that page, in the string
"1999 press releases".
As we both know, hardware availability is nothing more than an upper bound
on system availability. And it seems that Stratus themselves are pretty
reluctant to say anything about the system availability of those servers.
That is probably prudent --- after all, those press releases are 3 months
old, and even today they can hardly have enough data collected on their
"hardened" W2k installations to make any meaningful guesses as to the
average software related downtime per year, unless that average downtime
is considerably higher than 5 minutes.
>They do claim 99.9999%, specifically with regard to their triple redundancy
>ftServer Windows 2000 machines.
For the hardware. They don't say anything about system availability.
In other words, Drestin wrote
There are vendors selling W2K solutions with 99.999% uptime - just
like the other *nix vendors.
and has yet to name a single such vendor.
Bernie
--
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens,
how incapable must Man be of learning from experience
George Bernard Shaw
Irish playwright, 1856-1950
------------------------------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Crossposted-To: comp.os.ms-windows.nt.advocacy
Subject: Re: Am I the only one that finds this just a little scary?
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: 22 Jul 2000 03:53:50 +1000
"Mike" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>"Perry Pip" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
>> It doesn't say 99.999% in regards to their NT solutions.
>Wrong.
>Not only does it say 99.9999%, it says it in regard to their ftServer
>Windows 2000 machines. Allow me to quote:
For some reason, those pages are not indexed by their search engine,
and it takes quite a bit of effort to find them any other way.
And, of course, it talks about hardware availability (and I'd love to
know how they come up with those numbers, especially those for triple
redundant machines they are yet to construct ;-).
Bernie
--
Nothing is illegal if one hundred well-place business men decide to
do it
Andrew Young
American Democratic politician, 1932--
------------------------------
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