James Newtons Massmind wrote: >Yes, yes, Linux is better. Ok? We give. Now please let us get back to work >solving real problems with the existing development systems rather than >waiting for someone to port what we need to Linux. > > We were talking about the original poster's corporate system that was a data-gathering system, and how it probably didn't have proper engineering up-front -- thus it got completely wiped out by a very silly security problem. Yeah, it was OT, definitely. However this could be more interesting talking about PIC devlelopment and more on-topic! (Yay!) >E.g. >- ICD debug support for *nix? >- Emulator support for *nix? >- SX Key debug support (for Ubicom SX; a faster PIC clone, in case you >didn't know) >- A complete and working C compiler for PICs (SDCC has been "on the way" for >years now) >- A simulator that supports the 16C57 (gpsim has the 54 and 55 but not the >57) or the SX18/28 or full support for the 18C/F chips. > >See? For now, we have to use Windows. I'd LOVE to use Linux, but I can't. > > How much would you "love" to use it? Would you pay for the initial development? Would you buy copies of all of the above at $50 a pop? How many people would? The problem here's an economic one -- companies decided to write their tools on the monopoly OS, which makes sense economically. Wouldn't you? I would. In order to "move on" someone has to fork up some money to support development on the alternate OS's. This doesn't happen much in the real-world so when people try to say that Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly I laugh at how naieve they are. You just proved it -- you'd move if you could -- but you can't afford to. On one of those items above... I do think gcc will cross-compile for PIC's now, won't it? I know it works for AVR's. >So get over it and stop burning cycles convincing us Win'ers that we should >be L'ers when that isn't even a possibility. > > I'm just advocating (in my previous messages) proper Engineering for any computer or networked computer system. I'm not telling anyone what to use. I'm telling people to not be lazy in their choices and not complain when they make bad ones. For a small cluster of machines doing a very specific task inside a company, loading a full copy of Windows is not good engineering design. It leaves too many open holes. Then it put the original poster and his management at odds with the "God-complex" IT guy, who's just trying to deal with the fallout... of the original bad engineering plan. And people don't see that. They want a subservient, stupid, happy, "here I'll reload your machines for you every time you screw up your design and leave network security out of it" IT person to come running, happy to assist, every time they don't do their original engineering design correctly. In other words, computers are just machines -- the whole industry needs to get over some really large emotional and political hurdles and get back to properly engineering the use of those machines. Like a hammer (to use one example someone used) or a farm tractor, or whatever... using the machine improperly leads to problems. I contend very NON-emotionally that using Windows in 80% of the applications out there is simply bad engineering. It's not that the person MEANT to do a bad job, but they did. And EVERYONE pays for it when the machines are part of a worldwide network. (None of my Unix machines are sending people spam, as probably the worst-case example, but hundreds of thousands of zombied Windows machines sitting in other countries are!) >Not to mention that the current PICList web site is running on an NT box >after two attempts to host it on Linux (both of which were hacked into). The >current ip is 66.13.172.18, please try to hack into my server so I can find >and patch any security holes. It hasn't been done yet... > > Moving away from PICs.... You bring this up a lot, but it only serves to prove you didn't know what you were doing on Linux. If you'd have asked for help, people would have. I know that's not a nice thing to say, and I don't mean to evoke emotions from you on it, but your argument is illogical -- "Linux is bad because I don't know how to use it" doesn't fly. AND... I'd be in the same boat if I installed an IIS server today -- it'd be hacked. So if I had to do it, I wouldn't do it without help from someone who's done IIS for years. To paraphrase Dennis Leary -- running machines on the Internet is hard. Get a helmet. Google, Amazon, and sites that take millions of hits a minute don't run on Windows boxes. Even Microsoft themselves struggled for two years to move HotMail from FreeBSD to Windows, and they've never published exactly how they pulled it off, that I've seen. People generally believe that the internal mail spools are still *nix-based, but hidden. It sure as hell isn't running on Exchange!!! Usually with IIS today it's not so much a problem of being hacked into, it's a server load issue. From the one location I have a DS3 available from I could probably overload IIS on that box and kill it, and probably pretty easily. But I don't do those sorts of things, as they're not worth the effort outside of a controlled lab environment. Apache on the same NT installation would probably fare better, and Apache on any *nix would simply shrug it off if there's not too much database activity from hitting the front page. Perhaps I'm reading too much into the warnings, but you have all sorts of warnings about "Don't Rip!" all over the site -- if it were tuned properly and running on a box that wouldn't die under the load of people "ripping" (isn't that what a webserver is SUPPOSED to do... serve up whatever data requested of it as fast as it can under varying loads and numbers of users?) -- you wouldn't need those at all. (Unless there's an outside economic force, like a bandwidth cap. You don't say in the warnings.) Since I moved away from running Windows webservers in 1995 or so, I haven't kept up on the latest tools and techniques used by IIS and such. I am curious though -- how often do you need to reboot the server? We had some IIS/ASP stuff that memory-leaked badly and had to be rebooted weekly at a pretty busy site around 1999 (run by a different group of admins than my group... I handled the *nix side of things by myself with two part-time developers for Perl stuff, a group of ten developers and three admins handled the Windows stuff... we had similar loads and similar "work" to do - no one ever looked at the bottom line and realized that). It also regularly lost database connections and had to be manually bounced (the network was fine) until MS Transaction Server came out and was stable enough to use in production environments. Anyway this is morphing away from PIC stuff again (sorry -- I'm passionate about what I do for a living... I wish more people were in the server-admin "industry"!) but I am curious about the "Don't Rip" thing... ultimately I know you can say that if you simply want to and not have a techincal reason and I may be reading into that message too much. Is it because the server would keel over dead? 'Cause we can definitely fix that!!!! I know from our discussions that you are passionate about PICList!!! (Yay!) There's a number of super-easy fixes for that "rip" problem. (Mirror sites, for example... one machine ALLOWED to "rip" and then rsync mirrors to other places with high speed donated bandwidth... just as one example.) By the way, that reminds me... Everyone DONATE to PICList!!! Keep James in bandwidth and toys!!! (GRIN) Nate _______________________________________________ http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist