Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:

> On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 16:28:27 +0000
> Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
>>> Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>>>> On 11/16/2023 6:38 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>>>> It's never going to be portable to anything but Linux, that's enough
>>>>> to write it off for me.
>>>>
>>>> Is it surprising that a startup system for Linux is coupled with
>>>> Linux?
>>>
>>> Yes given that Linux purports to be a unix which has always had
>>> portability as a major feature.
>>
>> Portability to different CPUs, sure, but portability of system tools
>> to other kernels? Who ever said that was a goal of Linux as such?
>
> It's always been a goal in the unix world - which Linux seems to be
> leaving.

Maybe. It was certainly convenient for certain components to be
portable, like X11 as you mention, but I think it’s a stretch to infer
that there was a widely shared goal that the lower-level system tools
should be portable too. Things like, say, package management and device
driver handling have been very different across platforms for a very
long time (the former in fact even within Linux).

In the more recent case of systemd, a lot of the functionality depends
on Linux-specific interfaces. Porting it would presumably be a
non-starter until this existed in some form in other operating systems,
and nobody maintaining other operating systems seems to be interested in
doing so.

> Linux as an operating system exists because all the tools provided
> by the GNU project and MIT X-Windows and ... were designed to be portable
> across every variant of unix extant at the time (a lot more than today).

That doesn’t make it a goal _of Linux_, even if it was a goal of the GNU
and X11 projects.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 5:36:21 AM UTC-8, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
> >
> > Yes they are popular with banks and the like because they *also*
> >run their old OS-360 stuff without recompiling it, but to anyone who
> >doesn't need that they are very expensive for little gain. Guess what many
> >of their customers run in the RHEL environments - yep kubernetes and docker.
> The IBM systems are I/O machines. The CPU is just sitting there telling the
> I/O controllers what to do and most of the real work is being done by other
> hardware outside the CPU. So you can have incredibly high workloads and
> huge transation rates with relatively slow CPUs.

This was definitely the case 20 years ago. Today, IBM Z CPUs are quite interesting in their own right. Massive caches. The previous z15 CPU had four levels of cache, with a whopping 960 MB of L4 cache (eDRAM) per CPU drawer. The current z16 has a different architecture with 32 MB of L2 cache per core and an innovative cache design that allows any CPU to borrow cache RAM from other CPUs on the same die, different dies, or even different CPU drawers, dynamically creating arbitrarily large virtual L3 and L4 caches.

They're never going to beat x86, ARM, or POWER on raw per-core compute speed, but for the giant databases their customers run, with terabytes of RAM for caching and massive I/O throughput, mainframe CPUs are quite fast. They have SIMD for decimal floating-point (as well as binary FP and integer math) to accelerate COBOL, an embedded sorting engine for in-memory "DFSORT" acceleration (sort/merge/copy), an embedded zlib engine for fast compression, and now an embedded neural engine to enable running AI fraud detection models on every transaction.

IBM's sales pitch for running Linux on Z is that it's more power-efficient to have one or two mainframes than a much larger number of x86 blades doing the same thing. I'm sure that depends very much on workload. I should also mention z/VM, which is IBM's OS dedicated to running transactions (as opposed to z/OS, which is more general-purpose). z/VM is what all the airlines and Visa credit card transactions run on.

Finally, there's Parallel Sysplex, which is basically VMSclusters with dedicated hardware acceleration. Between that and all the redundancy and other RAS features, IBM can tout independent surveys showing 8 or even 9 9's of uptime! Their POWER10 servers don't look too shabby either.

https://techchannel.com/Trends/07/2023/ibm-z16-power10-high-reliability-servers

Of course you're paying a premium for all that custom engineering, but I think it's impressive, nonetheless.

On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 19:08:03 +0000
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> Maybe. It was certainly convenient for certain components to be
> portable, like X11 as you mention, but I think it’s a stretch to infer
> that there was a widely shared goal that the lower-level system tools
> should be portable too. Things like, say, package management and device
> driver handling have been very different across platforms for a very
> long time (the former in fact even within Linux).

Package management is a relatively new feature of unix (it's
about half the age of unix) - but NetBSD's pkgsrc is designed to be portable
and can be used on pretty much any unix including Linux. The FreeBSD ports
system (one of the first) is written in make and the system (but not the
ports themselves) would be easy enough to get going on any other unix with
a BSD compatible make available.

Device drivers are of course largely kernel dependent and generally
not portable - notable exception for DRI/DRM which are surprisingly
portable. That being said it is quite common to port device drivers between
the BSDs despite the divergence in the kernels over the years, none of them
would take Linux device drivers because GPL.

> In the more recent case of systemd, a lot of the functionality depends
> on Linux-specific interfaces. Porting it would presumably be a

Apart from systemd every other init system is shell script based
and reasonably easy to port, systemd is a huge departure from convention.

> non-starter until this existed in some form in other operating systems,
> and nobody maintaining other operating systems seems to be interested in
> doing so.

Nobody maintaining other operating systems wants them to become
Linux based which is essentially what would be needed.

> > Linux as an operating system exists because all the tools
> > provided by the GNU project and MIT X-Windows and ... were designed to
> > be portable across every variant of unix extant at the time (a lot more
> > than today).
>
> That doesn’t make it a goal _of Linux_, even if it was a goal of the GNU
> and X11 projects.

You missed the "and ...", Linux based OSs are the odd ones out in
this regard which is sad given that Linux as an OS owes its entire
existence to the fact that everyone else in the unix world cares about
portability. Without the GNU project's portable utilities there would be no
Linux distros, there wouldn't even be a compiler to build the kernel! If
MIT had chosen to make X11 tightly bound to a single kernel there would be
no Linux graphics.

IMHO it should be a goal of Linux OS development to be a good
member of the unix community without which there would be no Linux. But
you're right it seems that it isn't something that RedHat, Debian, Ubuntu
et al care about.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 16/11/2023 11:38, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 11:02:52 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Systemd will be fine now Poettering has finished pottering with it, got
>
> It's never going to be portable to anything but Linux, that's
> enough to write it off for me.

As time goes on it becomes easier to port other OS's to systemd, simply
by deleting all of the stuff which duplicates the ever increasing
functionality provided by systemd.

:)

---druck

In article <1f49caa7-6d19-4946-a433-3e85492b3e02n@googlegroups.com>,
Jake Hamby (Solid State Jake) <jake.hamby@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Thursday, November 16, 2023 at 5:36:21 AM UTC-8, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <ste...@eircom.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > Yes they are popular with banks and the like because they *also*
>> >run their old OS-360 stuff without recompiling it, but to anyone who
>> >doesn't need that they are very expensive for little gain. Guess what many
>> >of their customers run in the RHEL environments - yep kubernetes and docker.
>> The IBM systems are I/O machines. The CPU is just sitting there telling the
>> I/O controllers what to do and most of the real work is being done by other
>> hardware outside the CPU. So you can have incredibly high workloads and
>> huge transation rates with relatively slow CPUs.
>
>This was definitely the case 20 years ago. Today, IBM Z CPUs
>are quite interesting in their own right. Massive caches. The
>previous z15 CPU had four levels of cache, with a whopping 960
>MB of L4 cache (eDRAM) per CPU drawer. The current z16 has a
>different architecture with 32 MB of L2 cache per core and an
>innovative cache design that allows any CPU to borrow cache RAM
>from other CPUs on the same die, different dies, or even
>different CPU drawers, dynamically creating arbitrarily large
>virtual L3 and L4 caches.
>
>They're never going to beat x86, ARM, or POWER on raw per-core
>compute speed, but for the giant databases their customers run,
>with terabytes of RAM for caching and massive I/O throughput,
>mainframe CPUs are quite fast. They have SIMD for decimal
>floating-point (as well as binary FP and integer math) to
>accelerate COBOL, an embedded sorting engine for in-memory
>"DFSORT" acceleration (sort/merge/copy), an embedded zlib
>engine for fast compression, and now an embedded neural engine
>to enable running AI fraud detection models on every
>transaction.

There was an interesting talk at MIT a few months ago about how
specialized accelerator will be more or less required to
continue scaling. IBM has obviously embraced this on the
mainframe, but they've been using specialized satellite
processors to offload lots of processing from the main CPUs for
decades, as has been mentioned.

>IBM's sales pitch for running Linux on Z is that it's more
>power-efficient to have one or two mainframes than a much
>larger number of x86 blades doing the same thing. I'm sure that
>depends very much on workload. I should also mention z/VM,
>which is IBM's OS dedicated to running transactions (as opposed
>to z/OS, which is more general-purpose). z/VM is what all the
>airlines and Visa credit card transactions run on.

I find this surprising. z/VM is a hypervisor, mostly for
running VMs: users either log into a VM running under z/VM
or boot CMS (a small single-user operating system) that they
interact with. I think of it more as a vehicle for running
other systems that do useful things, like z/OS, CICS, and
all of that stuff.

>Finally, there's Parallel Sysplex, which is basically
>VMSclusters with dedicated hardware acceleration. Between that
>and all the redundancy and other RAS features, IBM can tout
>independent surveys showing 8 or even 9 9's of uptime! Their
>POWER10 servers don't look too shabby either.
>
>https://techchannel.com/Trends/07/2023/ibm-z16-power10-high-reliability-servers
>
>Of course you're paying a premium for all that custom
>engineering, but I think it's impressive, nonetheless.

Honestly, I think top-end x86 gear gives mainframes a run for
their money at this point.

- Dan C.

On 11/16/2023 8:20 AM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 11/16/2023 8:00 AM, Dave Froble wrote:
>> Our former clients moved to "cloud solutions". They learned rather quickly
>> that they would not have their prior capabilities. Not sure just how much
>> business they can now handle, and, it's taking much more manpower. "But, it's
>> what everyone else does." Really?
>
> I would think the capabilities depend on the software
> and not on where it is hosted.
>
> I assume they made two changes at the same time:
> * dedicated physical system -> public cloud
> * application X -> application Y
>
> The loss of capabilities has to be because of the
> second bullet.
>
> If your application had been ported to VMS x86-64 and
> the customers had deployed it in AWS/Azure/GCP/OCI then
> it would have worked as well as always.

I would agree, however, everyone in the company was well over retirement age.
We offered to help them set up their own shop. I guess they found it an
opportunity to switch to WEENDOZE.

--
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

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> writes:
> Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

>> Maybe. It was certainly convenient for certain components to be
>> portable, like X11 as you mention, but I think it’s a stretch to infer
>> that there was a widely shared goal that the lower-level system tools
>> should be portable too. Things like, say, package management and device
>> driver handling have been very different across platforms for a very
>> long time (the former in fact even within Linux).
>
> Package management is a relatively new feature of unix (it's about
> half the age of unix) - but NetBSD's pkgsrc is designed to be portable
> and can be used on pretty much any unix including Linux. The FreeBSD
> ports system (one of the first) is written in make and the system (but
> not the ports themselves) would be easy enough to get going on any
> other unix with a BSD compatible make available.

System V’s packages were, what, 1990 or so? So nearer a third of its
current age I would say. I’m not even sure they were the first.

Be that as it may the fact that some of them are in principle portable
doesn’t change the fact that nobody has ever much tried to use any
particular one outside its home platform. So I think they form a
reasonable counterexample to the idea of a common goal of portability of
system-level components.

> Device drivers are of course largely kernel dependent and generally
> not portable - notable exception for DRI/DRM which are surprisingly
> portable. That being said it is quite common to port device drivers
> between the BSDs despite the divergence in the kernels over the years,
> none of them would take Linux device drivers because GPL.

Well, yes, there’s practical reasons why it happened like that, but they
aren’t insurmountable: we have common extension APIs in many other
contexts, but apparently nobody was ever motivated to do it for drivers,
despite the obvious advantages.

>> In the more recent case of systemd, a lot of the functionality depends
>> on Linux-specific interfaces. Porting it would presumably be a
>
> Apart from systemd every other init system is shell script based and
> reasonably easy to port, systemd is a huge departure from convention.

SMF and launchd are both counterexamples AFAIK. A lot of the original
Unix design decisions were fairly novel at the time too but many of them
have proved to be good ones.

>> non-starter until this existed in some form in other operating systems,
>> and nobody maintaining other operating systems seems to be interested in
>> doing so.
>
> Nobody maintaining other operating systems wants them to become Linux
> based which is essentially what would be needed.

The lack of portability of systemd can hardly be an objection to it if
nobody in the platforms that it can’t be ported to is interested in
adopting it anyway.

>>> Linux as an operating system exists because all the tools
>>> provided by the GNU project and MIT X-Windows and ... were designed to
>>> be portable across every variant of unix extant at the time (a lot more
>>> than today).
>>
>> That doesn’t make it a goal _of Linux_, even if it was a goal of the GNU
>> and X11 projects.
>
> You missed the "and ...", Linux based OSs are the odd ones out in
> this regard which is sad given that Linux as an OS owes its entire
> existence to the fact that everyone else in the unix world cares about
> portability. Without the GNU project's portable utilities there would be no
> Linux distros, there wouldn't even be a compiler to build the kernel! If
> MIT had chosen to make X11 tightly bound to a single kernel there would be
> no Linux graphics.

There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal of
portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do, but
wanting isn’t getting.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> The lack of portability of systemd can hardly be an objection to it if
> nobody in the platforms that it can’t be ported to is interested in
> adopting it anyway.
>
LOL!

--
"And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch".

Gospel of St. Mathew 15:14

On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
> There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal of
> portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do, but
> wanting isn’t getting.

Who will bell the cat?

--
"And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch".

Gospel of St. Mathew 15:14

The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>> There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal of
>> portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do, but
>> wanting isn’t getting.
>
>Who will bell the cat?

GNU always has as its primary goal that of providing portable system-level
tools. For a long time, Linux was the kernel and GNU provided most of the
actual environment in the distribution.

However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU environment
and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment and philosophy...
now it is just a mess.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 11/16/2023 11:33 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2023 10:51:04 -0500
> Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 11/16/2023 9:59 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>> So they did it badly - not uncommon. Amazon could not function
>>> without a distributed, scalable, fault tolerant system, there's no way
>>> you could run Amazon mainframe style. Even their core database is
>>> distributed, scalable and fault tolerant relying on guaranteed eventual
>>> consistency rather than ACID which does not scale.
>>
>> I believe Amazon is using many different databases.
>
> AWS provides many databases. Dynamo was created to support Amazon's
> original core business of being a huge international shopping site.

That list was what Amazon use not what AWS offers to customers - that
list is longer.

>>> McDonald's did it well.
>>>
>>> <https://www.ciodive.com/news/mcdonalds-cloud-ETL-talend-digital-transformation/523132/
>>
>> It seems that article is about DWH not operational data. Different.
>
> It's about analytics that record every sale in every McDonald's in
> the world and drives their decision making. The point is that it scales
> beyond anything that could be done on a mainframe.

Very true.

When big data is actually big then clusters with thousands of nodes
is the only way to handle the data.

Arne

On 17/11/2023 12:39, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:
>>> There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal of
>>> portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do, but
>>> wanting isn’t getting.
>>
>> Who will bell the cat?
>
> GNU always has as its primary goal that of providing portable system-level
> tools. For a long time, Linux was the kernel and GNU provided most of the
> actual environment in the distribution.
>
> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU environment
> and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment and philosophy...
> now it is just a mess.
Engineers don't do philosophy usually (I am the exception) except '
Perfection is the enemy of good enough'

"An engineer can for five bob what any damned fool can do for a quid"

> --scott
>

--
There’s a mighty big difference between good, sound reasons and reasons
that sound good.

Burton Hillis (William Vaughn, American columnist)

In article <wwvy1ew7md9.fsf@LkoBDZeT.terraraq.uk>,
Richard Kettlewell <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>[snip]
>System V’s packages were, what, 1990 or so? So nearer a third of its
>current age I would say. I’m not even sure they were the first.

Maybe; it depends on how you define "package." Two things
happened in relatively close temporal proximity that contributed
here: 1) we had vendors shipping closed-source Unix
distributions coupled with their hardware; and 2) we started to
have networks of Unix machines at a single site.

With these, it became pretty clear that we'd need some kind of
principled way to build deploy and maintain third-party software
packages and configuration data; a number of different
mechanisms were invented, some ad hoc and based on convention,
others based on the idea of bundling up "packages" (which could
help OEMs and third-party software vendors distribute their
software). Work for this really started heating up in the mid-
to late-80s.

- Dan C.

On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.

I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
GNU-Linux didn't help.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:

> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.

Indeed from "The cathedral and the bazaar" to the cathedral and the
bizarre.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 17/11/2023 13:07, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
>> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
>> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
>> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.
>
> I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
> GNU-Linux didn't help.
>

A philosophical statement

There is reality. This is what physicists and engineers deal with.

Then there is how reality is described, what people *think* it is, what
people think it *ought* to be, and how people *think* it can be changed.

This is the world of the Left wing armchair intellectual and the
ArtStudent™.

It can for all practical purposes be safely ignored. It is in the end
mere 'Bandar Log-ic', the inane chatterings of the Monkey People...

"We all say it, so it must be true".

--
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered...
....than to have answers that cannot be questioned

Richard Feynman

On Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:26:53 +0000
The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> A philosophical statement
>
> There is reality. This is what physicists and engineers deal with.

Engineers deal with models that they hope correspond to reality but
don't always (cf. Tacoma Narrows bridge). Physicists attempt to build models
that correspond to reality but don't always (cf. contradictions between
general relativity and quantum theory). Then there are chaotic systems and
emergent phenomena which so far have proven extremely resistant to
modelling.

Nobody can prove that reality exists (cf. solipsism etc) but it is
the most useful assumption we can make. Even with that assumption nobody can
prove that reality is logically consistent - it might all be the whim of
God you can't prove that it isn't - but it is the most useful assumption we
can make and it hasn't (yet) been disproved.

The core unspoken (usually) theorems of physics are that reality
exists and that it is logically consistent. If you can prove either of them
I expect you're due a Nobel and an FRS at least.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 17/11/2023 15:58, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Nov 2023 14:26:53 +0000
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>
>> A philosophical statement
>>
>> There is reality. This is what physicists and engineers deal with.
>
> Engineers deal with models that they hope correspond to reality but
> don't always

No. Ultimately they deal with the reality of a bridge that collapsed

The models are always understood to be ad hoc, pro tem and only a guide.

Only climate scientists believe their models ARE reality.

(cf. Tacoma Narrows bridge). Physicists attempt to build models
> that correspond to reality but don't always (cf. contradictions between
> general relativity and quantum theory). Then there are chaotic systems and
> emergent phenomena which so far have proven extremely resistant to
> modelling.
>
Exactly, which is why engineers don't build machines that go anywhere
near chaotic behaviour

Or if they do,m they test it in a wind tunnel, not on a computer.

> Nobody can prove that reality exists (cf. solipsism etc) but it is
> the most useful assumption we can make.

Exactly,. We assume it exists and deal with its immutable aspects.

Even with that assumption nobody can
> prove that reality is logically consistent - it might all be the whim of
> God you can't prove that it isn't - but it is the most useful assumption we
> can make and it hasn't (yet) been disproved.
>
It cant be disproved - it is a metaphysical assumption.

> The core unspoken (usually) theorems of physics are that reality
> exists and that it is logically consistent. If you can prove either of them
> I expect you're due a Nobel and an FRS at least.
>
Quoting that Wanker Dawkins, 'Science works, bitches'
So does engineering.
Socialism does not.
Neither does praying to sky fairies, chanting 'from the river to the
sea' or sitting in your mums basement saying 'the world ought to be
different'...
Of course it ought, you wanker. It just isn't. That's why we call it
'reality'.

--
Climate is what you expect but weather is what you get.
Mark Twain

kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
> The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>>On 17/11/2023 09:36, Richard Kettlewell wrote:

>>> There’s still nothing there that demonstrates Linux ever had a goal
>>> of portable system-level tools. I get that you think it should do,
>>> but wanting isn’t getting.
>>
>>Who will bell the cat?
>
> GNU always has as its primary goal that of providing portable
> system-level tools.

That is ahistorical. The primary goal has always been production of a
complete free operating system, not just component parts that could run
elsewhere. See either the GNU manifesto or indeed the current project
standards, which still categorise Linux as secondary to the GNU kernel.

Portability of some components (e.g. language implementations) has
obvious advantages for that goal, at least until it’s been realized, but
that’s a means to an end, and it’s nowhere stated as a primary goal.

> For a long time, Linux was the kernel and GNU provided most of the
> actual environment in the distribution.
>
> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a
> concept took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the
> GNU environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix
> environment and philosophy... now it is just a mess.

Linux took off because it was a usable free platform that was easy to
download and run, and easy to contribute to. At the point it got going
the GNU kernel wasn’t ready (still isn’t) and BSD was mired in
lawsuits. Change either of those and history would have been quite
different.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

In article <20231117130709.1798abc63c60b0f3291598eb@eircom.net>,
Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
>kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
>> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
>> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
>> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.
>
> I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
>GNU-Linux didn't help.

No. In general, I think Stallman has done more harm than good to the
free software movement in recent years.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."

On 11/17/2023 4:06 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> In article <20231117130709.1798abc63c60b0f3291598eb@eircom.net>,
> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
>> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>>> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
>>> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
>>> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
>>> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.
>>
>> I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
>> GNU-Linux didn't help.
>
> No. In general, I think Stallman has done more harm than good to the
> free software movement in recent years.

Because in recent years it has not been about software.

When RMS talk about software then some adore him and some hate him.

But when he talks about anything else then everybody hates him.

Arne

On 11/17/2023 7:56 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 11/17/2023 4:06 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>> In article <20231117130709.1798abc63c60b0f3291598eb@eircom.net>,
>> Ahem A Rivet's Shot  <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>>> On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
>>> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>>>> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
>>>> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
>>>> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix
>>>> environment
>>>> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.
>>>
>>>     I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
>>> GNU-Linux didn't help.
>>
>> No.  In general, I think Stallman has done more harm than good to the
>> free software movement in recent years.
>
> Because in recent years it has not been about software.
>
> When RMS talk about software then some adore him and some hate him.
>
> But when he talks about anything else then everybody hates him.
>

Stallman was never worth a crap on software.
We had Open Source and Free Software long before he came along
to try and screw it up.

bill

On 11/16/23 10:46 AM, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On 16 Nov 2023 13:36:17 -0000
> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>
>> The IBM systems are I/O machines. The CPU is just sitting there telling
>> the I/O controllers what to do and most of the real work is being done by
>> other hardware outside the CPU. So you can have incredibly high
>> workloads and huge transation rates with relatively slow CPUs.
>
> Yes you can but ...
>
>> This was a huge win as late as a decade ago, but these days it's not that
>> much of a win unless you have a write-mostly database that is inefficient
>> to distribute. Because CPU has become so damn cheap that we just throw
>> CPU at problems now.
>
> Back in 1990 I was involved in designing a system that could not
> have been run on the mainframes of the day because they had insufficient IO
> bandwidth but a distributed solution spread across twenty high end 88K
> machines did.
>
>>> Tell that to Amazon, Google etc. look into the architecture of
>>> Amazon Dynamo and marvel at the way it scales and handles machine
>>> failures and network outages. Mainframes are great up to a point, right
>>> up until you can't get one big enough and then you *need* a scalable
>>> solution. kubernetes is an easy way to get one.
>>
>> This is true, but Amazon and Google -are- still slow and insecure in ways
>> that I don't think is apparently obvious. Instead of keeping one thing
>> secure, you have thousands upon thousands to keep secure.
>
> Yes but instead of trying to secure each one individually you write
> rules which are used by the deployment engine (kubernetes usually).
>
> A single instance implemented on virtual hardware is certainly
> slower than the same thing implemented on bare metal - the win comes from
> having a scalable design. The artful part is making the design scalable and
> not putting bottlenecks in it. If the single instance is 1/10th the speed
> of bare metal but you can run a thousand instances in parallel then you
> have 100 times the speed of bare metal.
>
>>> SAAS is huge in the large corporate world, it all runs on
>>> virtual machines and docker containers orchestrated by kubernetes. It's
>>> only insecure if you don't know how to secure it, the most security
>>> sensitive run it all in their own datacentres on hypervisors that they
>>> control. The rest trust the contractual obligations of the companies that
>>> run the data centres (Microsoft, Google and Amazon mostly).
>>
>> This is where the scary part is, yes.
>
> Yes it is - that's why my data lives at home. I don't need scalable
> solutions thankfully. Those who do and care a lot run their own.
>

Ok, there ARE apps like Google that NEED what are
essentially "infinitely scalable" solutions.

However the poster WAS right about something ... the
more you go that way the more vague and unmanagible
the 'security' issues become. Docker/Kubernetes are
NOT as secure as their authors like to claim and
indeed any super-"spread out" solution will also
suffer issues. It's a TRADE-OFF.

Big banks/biz, govt/mil, need to err on the side of
security. Google can err on the side of high-volume.

On Sat, 18 Nov 2023 01:16:41 -0500
"56d.1152" <56d.1152@ztq9.net> wrote:

> Big banks/biz, govt/mil, need to err on the side of
> security. Google can err on the side of high-volume.

Read this https://cloud.google.com/customers/revolut/

Revolut is one of the biggest banks.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/
Host: Beautiful Theory meet Inconvenient Fact
Obit: Beautiful Theory died today of factual inconsistency

On 17/11/2023 21:06, Scott Dorsey wrote:
> In article <20231117130709.1798abc63c60b0f3291598eb@eircom.net>,
> Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
>> On 17 Nov 2023 12:39:52 -0000
>> kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
>>
>>> However, at some point the momentum built up until "Linux" as a concept
>>> took off, and then everybody kind of forgot about GNU and the GNU
>>> environment and philosophy... then they forgot about the Unix environment
>>> and philosophy... now it is just a mess.
>>
>> I suspect that Richard Stallman trying to get everyone to call it
>> GNU-Linux didn't help.
>
> No. In general, I think Stallman has done more harm than good to the
> free software movement in recent years.
> --scott
>
Politics and ideology are always the enemies of sound engineering.

--
It is the folly of too many to mistake the echo of a London coffee-house
for the voice of the kingdom.

Jonathan Swift