On 1/7/2024 8:05 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 1/7/2024 7:10 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 16:24:13 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>
>>> On 1/7/2024 4:11 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>>> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 13:21:05 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>>> Unless hard evidence to the contrary ...
>>>>
>>>> The report from the city council itself, that there was a net gain in
>>>> price/benefits.
>>>
>>> Counting what they counted.
>>>
>>> It is not necessarily a complete picture.
>>
>> You sound like HP, trying to second-guess what conclusion the council
>> itself came to, just to come up with something favourable to Microsoft.
>
> Nothing guess.
>
> The report clearly specified what they counted and what they did
> not count.
>
> And I noted that due to what they did not count, then no comptent
> CIO would use that report as evidence of anything.

There are lots of that kind of reports.

A well known example on the same topic but in the opposite direction
was the report made back in the same days that for some
web application, then a Linux solution was 2-3 times as
expensive as a Windows solution.

The numbers looked correct. But the report was still
absolutely worthless.

The web application needed an application server and
a database. For the Linux numbers they picked WebLogic
and Oracle DB EE.

Anyone that has ever seen an Oracle price list will
believe the result of the report.

But could it be used for anything? No.

That report was paid for by Microsoft, so nobody was expecting
a report that said that Linux was cheaper than Windows.

(in those days MS hated Linux - today MS loves Linux)

In the Munich case the city council was really asking the
IT department "did you make a good or a bad recommendation 10
years ago?" and not surprisingly the answer was "yes - we did"
and not "no - we fucked up".

Arne

In article <unfeg3$18ir4$1@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 23:50:32 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> You didn't offer a solution.
>
>I listed solutions for a whole bunch of cases, then asked if I needed to
>continue with even more detail.

No, you _think_ that you did. It's quite common for people who
are ignorant of the actual technical issues to provide some
simplistic "solution" to a problem like that and then feel like
they have addressed the issue. But they actually haven't; they
just can't recognize it because they don't understand enough to
know why what they offered is insufficient.

So no, you really didn't offer a solution. See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

- Dan C.

In article <unffp5$18nuk$1@dont-email.me>, chrisq <devzero@nospam.com> wrote:
>On 1/7/24 19:47, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <memo.20240107190811.16260s@jgd.cix.co.uk>,
>> John Dallman <jgd@cix.co.uk> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> They ended up selling themselves to Oracle, of course. Oracle's plan was
>>> vertical integration: tuning up SPARC and Solaris hardware for Oracle
>>> database so they had a price-performance advantage on their own hardware.
>>> A great plan, except that the tuning had already been done and there was
>>> no unrealised performance available.
>>
>> Well, when the main reason your systems are sold is to run one
>> program specifically....
>>
>> It's a shame.
>
>Back in the day, Vax etc, software was optimised and fine tuned
>to match the hw is ran on, so perhaps the Oracle "engineered
>systems" idea was just updating that concept.

The Sun acquisition was based on the observation that many of
Sun's customers were buying Sun machines running Solaris
primarily to run Oracle's DBMS. By acquiring Sun, Oracle was
able to offer a complete vertical solution, from hardware,
through OS, DBMS, and then layering on top very lucrative
services for custom application development and support.

>If you look at
>the last Sparc release docs, theres's a lot of database and
>high speed comms related included in hw. Far too expensive,
>of course, and perhaps the last gasp of proprietary hardware and
>os's, which can never hope to match the resources available to
>the open source movement.

Agreed.

>To be clear, the Solaris sold by Oracle is not the same as Open
>Solaris, which was independently developed from the original Sun
>source release.

Solaris and OpenSolaris were mostly the same code base; since
the Solaris code was re-closed, they've diverged, but I imagine
most of the code is still common between them.

>Openindiana, in constant development
>and a free alternative to the Oracle offering. Also used as the
>core of Joyent Smartos and other systems.

Not exactly; illumos is the base project. OpenIndiana, SmartOS,
OmniOS, etc, are all distributions built around illumos-gate.

>Solaris 10 was a major milestone, with the introduction of the
>ZFS filesystem, and lightweight virtualisation via Zones, or
>containers, whatever they are called now. This was a decade or
>more ago.

Yup. A lot of stuff converged in 10. Don't forget DTrace!

>The FreeBSD clean room ZFS implementation eventually
>became OpenZFS.

OpenZFS is not a clean-room implementation of ZFS; it's based
on the code from OpenSolaris. Notice the CDDL header and
copyright notices from Oracle (and others) in e.g.,
https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/blob/master/module/zfs/arc.c

>Finally settled on FreeBSD partly because that too had ZFS, a
>similar lightweight virtualisation implementation, a very
>disciplined development process and more. No systemd either.
>The clean room ZFS implementation eventually becoming OpenZFS.
>All in all, a worthy successor to Solaris...

Yeah, FreeBSD is pretty nice. I don't know about their
development practices, though.

- Dan C.

In article <unff7n$5ld$1@panix2.panix.com>,
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
>Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote:
>>My sense with the AIX tools was that they were trying to
>>insulate the system manager (or low-paid operators) from the
>>underlying system. If your use-case is a factory floor or a
>>business data processing shop, that may make some sense.
>
>This is the IBM WAY. The system manager does this, the operations staff
>does that, nobody is able to do anything else outside of what they are
>supposed to do, and if you want something else done you call IBM and they
>do it.
>
>IBM is a services company. They sell hardware only so that they can sell
>services for them. Their goal is to optimize your need for IBM services.

This is so true. I know some of the folks who worked on AIX,
and they're good engineers, but they were stuck in a weird place
that didn't really get what they were doing.

>>>Again, I think this was because the intention was to run a million
>>>workstations with a single admin. If something goes wrong to prevent
>>>booting, you just swap the machine out with a new one and have your
>>>on-site IBM FE fix it.
>>
>>Yeah, but when a room full of them are crashed and won't boot,
>>one wonders whether the cure isn't worse than the disease. :-)
>
>That depends whether you are an IBM shareholder or not.

Owning some IBM shares doesn't really help when you've got a
bunch of angry users shouting at you. :-D

- Dan C.

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:03:29 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 1/7/2024 6:45 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> So you tried to suggest that the problem couldn’t be solved, then when
>> I offered up a solution, you don’t like the solution.
>
> Because the proposed solution did not specify how it would solve the
> difficult part of the problem.

I asked you which codes you thought would be likely be difficult to
emulate, but you didn’t respond to that.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 01:58:29 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> In article <unfeg3$18ir4$1@dont-email.me>,
> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 23:50:32 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>
>>> You didn't offer a solution.
>>
>>I listed solutions for a whole bunch of cases, then asked if I needed to
>>continue with even more detail.
>
> No, you _think_ that you did. It's quite common for people who are
> ignorant of the actual technical issues to provide some simplistic
> "solution" to a problem like that and then feel like they have addressed
> the issue.

Feel free to point out where you _think_ the deficiencies in my outline of
a solution lie.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 00:31:33 +0000, chrisq wrote:

> No systemd either.

Shame. With all their smarts, they never thought to implement something as
clever as that.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> The Sun acquisition was based on the observation that many of Sun's
> customers were buying Sun machines running Solaris primarily to run
> Oracle's DBMS.

Oracle bought Sun to get control of Java. Nothing more, nothing less.
After the acquisition, they essentially threw away everything else.

And then got annoyed when Google found a way to make lots of money from
open-source Java, without paying them a cent.

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:01:58 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> All the Linux distros are based on the same kernel project,
> same GNU core utils etc..

Again: *why* are the BSDs not able to manage this?

In article <unfn0c$19hl0$2@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 01:58:29 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> In article <unfeg3$18ir4$1@dont-email.me>,
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>>On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 23:50:32 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>>
>>>> You didn't offer a solution.
>>>
>>>I listed solutions for a whole bunch of cases, then asked if I needed to
>>>continue with even more detail.
>>
>> No, you _think_ that you did. It's quite common for people who are
>> ignorant of the actual technical issues to provide some simplistic
>> "solution" to a problem like that and then feel like they have addressed
>> the issue.
>
>Feel free to point out where you _think_ the deficiencies in my outline of
>a solution lie.

Nah. You wouldn't understand it.

- Dan C.

On 1/7/2024 10:07 PM, John Dallman wrote:
> In article <unfn5d$19hl0$4@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
> D'Oliveiro) wrote:
>> On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 02:18:22 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>> The Sun acquisition was based on the observation that many of
>>> Sun's customers were buying Sun machines running Solaris
>>> primarily to run Oracle's DBMS.
>> Oracle bought Sun to get control of Java. Nothing more, nothing
>> less. After the acquisition, they essentially threw away everything
>> else.
>
> If that was the case, why did they leave Java as open source, rather than
> close it, as they did with Solaris?

It would have been practically impossible to do that.

There were other big companies with an interest in Java. If they had
closed it then IBM, Redhat, SAP etc. could have made a fork successful.

Not many big companies willing to invest heavily in Solaris when it
got closed. Commercial traditional Unix was loosing market share
fast. IBM and HP already had one of those.

Arne

On 1/7/2024 9:38 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:01:58 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>> All the Linux distros are based on the same kernel project,
>> same GNU core utils etc..
>
> Again: *why* are the BSDs not able to manage this?

3 main BSD's. 1 Linux. That is how it is.

3 <> 1

Are you asking why the teams behind the 3 BSD's did not meet
and agree to merge their efforts in a single UnifiedBSD?

Arne

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 23:08:56 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> On 1/7/2024 9:38 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:01:58 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
>>> All the Linux distros are based on the same kernel project,
>>> same GNU core utils etc..
>>
>> Again: *why* are the BSDs not able to manage this?
>
> 3 main BSD's. 1 Linux.

More like 350 Linuxes (Linuces?). Why is that?

On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:14:42 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:

> That report was paid for by Microsoft ...

As was the one on Munich City by HP, which you seem to be agreeing with.

On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 02:43:43 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:

> Nah. You wouldn't understand it.

There is a well-known saying among those of us who work in advanced
technical fields, that if you cannot explain something, that is a good
sign you don’t understand it yourself.

On 08/01/2024 00:29, chrisq wrote:
> On 1/7/24 00:19, Dan Cross wrote:
>> In article <uncqas$pust$1@dont-email.me>,
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>> On Sat, 6 Jan 2024 23:42:26 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>>>
>>>> I remember pretty specifically maximum user limits on versions of
>>>> commercial Unix.
>>>
>>> How would such limits be enforced? Presumably they only applied to some
>>> extra-cost "layered product", not to the core OS.
>>
>> No, they applied to the OS as a while.
>
> Don't remember that at all. Not on SGI, Sun or HPUX, nor Ultrix, fwir.
>
> Examples ?...
>
HP-UX came with a two-login license by default, one for the console and
one to allow remote administration. :-)

Well, 7, 8, 9, and 10 did, I don't recall ever installing 11.x from scratch.

You had to order more if you wanted them, and it would occasionally
throw the monkeys at HP, at least here in OZ: "Why do you need more user
logins to run Oracle??" "Because we don't just run Oracle, you luser."

Cheers,
Gary B-)

On Sun, 2024-01-07 at 20:12 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> > I'd sqlite3 it.
>
> No need to save it to persistent storage.

Now I'm convinced you're a troll.
--
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

On Sun, 2024-01-07 at 17:25 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:
> > I've gone through 32bit x86, 32bit SPARC, 32bit PPC, 64bit SPARC,
> > 64bit
> > x86 over the years. Hopefully Gentoo will still with me when I
> > boldly
> > go where no man has ever returned from.
>
> I think there's a pretty big difference between what you run on
> your personal machine and a distro supported over thousands of
> seats.  I'm pretty sure you're not a maintainer of either Gentoo
> or Slackware.

You'd be surprised. I once was a maintainer on Gentoo.
--
Tactical Nuclear Kittens

On 1/8/24 02:36, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 00:31:33 +0000, chrisq wrote:
>
>> No systemd either.
>
> Shame. With all their smarts, they never thought to implement something as
> clever as that.

Clever ?, debatable. More like an impenetrable trainwreck. A whole
shedload of complexity, for no good reason, and goes against all
principles of unix. Both Sun and FreeBSD did it right, in that their
system management layered on top of what was already there, via
xml scripts, in the Sun case. Classic software layered partitioning,
the correct way to do things, but doubt many brought up on a diet of
Java and Python would understand such software engineering
principles, or care...

Chris

In article <ung50a$1eqq3$3@dont-email.me>,
Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>On Mon, 8 Jan 2024 02:43:43 -0000 (UTC), Dan Cross wrote:
>
>> Nah. You wouldn't understand it.
>
>There is a well-known saying among those of us who work in advanced
>technical fields, that if you cannot explain something, that is a good
>sign you don't understand it yourself.

The irony is deafening.

Usually, when you make a technical suggestion, the onus is on
you to support it. "I'd do it in a compatibility layer" is not
supporting your idea; it's handwaving away all the details.
When pressed, if your response is to just double down and assert
that you already said how you would do it because you said you'd
do it in a compatibility layer without acknowledging any of the
complexities that would involve, then that means that _you_
don't understand what you are suggesting, or the problem that
was pointed out to you. This has been evident for some time.

I think we're done here. *Plonk*

- Dan C.

In article <f399fa237e142714abe936f72018d929bfc17494.camel@munted.eu>,
Single Stage to Orbit <alex.buell@munted.eu> wrote:
>On Sun, 2024-01-07 at 17:25 +0000, Dan Cross wrote:
>> > I've gone through 32bit x86, 32bit SPARC, 32bit PPC, 64bit SPARC,
>> > 64bit
>> > x86 over the years. Hopefully Gentoo will still with me when I
>> > boldly
>> > go where no man has ever returned from.
>>
>> I think there's a pretty big difference between what you run on
>> your personal machine and a distro supported over thousands of
>> seats.  I'm pretty sure you're not a maintainer of either Gentoo
>> or Slackware.
>
>You'd be surprised. I once was a maintainer on Gentoo.

Isn't anyone who submits a patch considered a Gentoo maintainer?
Kind of like being a "Debian Developer"?

- Dan C.

On 1/8/24 02:38, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 7 Jan 2024 20:01:58 -0500, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>
>> All the Linux distros are based on the same kernel project,
>> same GNU core utils etc..
>
> Again: *why* are the BSDs not able to manage this?
>
...which begs the question, why is that so important ?.
Diversity improves the breed and enables better fit to
a problem, based on requirements. Rather than a one
size fits all, as promulgated by Microsoft. Our way
or the highway, is always a compromise...

Chris

On 2024-01-05, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>
> "the year of the Linux desktop" is a known phrase (meme)
> eluding to the permanent expectation from some Linux users
> that Linux will take over the desktop market.
>

It bypassed the desktop and went directly to the handheld market,
where in fact it _did_ take over the market. :-)

Simon.

PS: ~200 non-spam messages over the weekend ? :-) Did you lot have nothing
to do this weekend ? :-)

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 2024-01-06, Neil Rieck <n.rieck@bell.net> wrote:
>
> The official CEO blurb from VSI is on their LinkedIn page:
>
> https://www.linkedin.com/company/vms-software-inc-/
>

I see they are still pushing the most secure operating system nonsense.

Simon.

PS: Interesting. When I visited that page for a second time, it is now
forcing me to create an account and login to continue. Yeah, right... :-)

--
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Walking destinations on a map are further away than they appear.

On 1/8/2024 8:18 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2024-01-05, Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>
>> "the year of the Linux desktop" is a known phrase (meme)
>> eluding to the permanent expectation from some Linux users
>> that Linux will take over the desktop market.
>>
>
> It bypassed the desktop and went directly to the handheld market,
> where in fact it _did_ take over the market. :-)
>
> Simon.
>
> PS: ~200 non-spam messages over the weekend ? :-) Did you lot have nothing
> to do this weekend ? :-)
>

They are arguing about how great Linux is. Misguided souls ...

--
David Froble Tel: 724-529-0450
Dave Froble Enterprises, Inc. E-Mail: davef@tsoft-inc.com
DFE Ultralights, Inc.
170 Grimplin Road
Vanderbilt, PA 15486