The Blue Screen of Death (banned commercial video)

Youtube ^ | June 26, 2009 | Youtube

[max americana]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNqPTOb31S8

"and the last thing Bernard saw was not the BLUE sea but the Bl..."

[max americana]

Poor Microsoft..

[pnh102]

As if Sun is any better. What a has-been of a company.

[JRandomFreeper]

Sun's a great company with a great product. If I owned a power station and a coal mine, I'd have 2, or maybe 3 servers. Running Linux.

When the room lights darken (because of the current draw on the circuit) when you hit the monitor power button, and your watch stops working because of the de-gaussing coil.... On a desktop...... maybe you've hired to many old IBM guys in design.

/johnny

[rabscuttle385]

That is hilarious.

[Michael Barnes]

Laugh at their acquisition now, but wait for what is to come.

Server side, MS cannot compete with System V in raw processing power.

[pnh102]

Server side, MS cannot compete with System V in raw processing power.

They don't have to. The type of server hardware on which Windows and Linux run is so cheap compared to Sun that it doesn't matter.

[JRandomFreeper]

I don't recall the rules, but shouldn't this be moved to religion? Or sectarianism, at least? I've been here since ARPAnet, and the flamewars on hardware platforms are as bad as slight variations in OS's.

I still like the PDP-11, but that's just me. I was happy to see the punch cards go away and move to 9-track.

/johnny

[Michael Barnes]

And prone to error...

Oracle now has an OS and the engineering behind Niagara's. MS nor any linux distro has that. Not to mention, Oracle now has direct hooks into Java.

[advance_copy]

Ah, the old PDP-11/44, running RSX-11. Those were the days. But the real stuff, I mean the coolest of the cool, the neat-o-est of the neat-0, the raddest of the rad, was WANG.

You just cannot beat a tempest-tested WANG Alliance running OIS on a Z80 with 128k of RAM in the mothership and 64k Z80 workstations connected with dual co-ax 928 links. Did you know they would work on just one co-ax?

Did anybody else here learn the trade on WANG?

[JRandomFreeper]

I thought the cluster guys had worked with the MySQL guys to do real distributed processing and storage and solved the mongolian horde problem in Linux. Maybe not, but when I left them, they were aware of the problem and working on it.

/johnny

[Ramius]

Sun who?

[JRandomFreeper]

No Wang, but I did try the Altair and the other S-100 bus computers. Mine had tty, No Graphics Planes, and 16K of memory. I paid $400 per card for the memory. My terminal outlived 4 CPUs, one marriage, and died with a cup of coffee. VT-100.

/johnny

[ikka]

The old SPARC machines were heavy, used a lot of power for the level of performance they had, etc. BUT - I remember they could be very heavily loaded with processes running and still be quite responsive.

Now I still run Solaris but on AMD Opteron and soon the Nehalem CPUs from Intel - Solaris is for the tasks I run, better than Linux.

[JRandomFreeper]

I had an Enterprise 250 server running Slowlaris loaded to 9.8 and a w query took 2 minutes to return. I finally had to go in via the tty port to shut everything down. But keep from rebooting (part of my annual evaluation, the uptime).

That box got 702 days from initial start up to move required shutdown. I even faked it with an early linux appliance to re-direct, while we moved it. ;)

And yes, it was a power pig.

On reflection, a reasonable man would have had separate servers and distributed tasks. But my budget wasn't big, and my ego was large, when I was young.

/johnny

[ikka]

I had an E250 with the BETA of Solaris 10 with zones. Set my customer up with a pile of zones and they used all 2GB RAM plus about 4GB swap all the time. It would be slow, but it never crashed.

Their replacement server was a 1U, 16GB RAM, dual Opteron box also running Solaris - they moved the applications over relatively seamlessly and everything just worked great - they are still using the same machine 3 years later.

[JRandomFreeper]

You speak Swedish? Or Swenglish? We may have worked for the same company or something.

/johnny

[ShadowAce]

[pnh102]

And prone to error...

No more than any other OS. The idea that the Sun platform is somehow less error prone is off base. This comes from my own personal experiences with said platform, as well as with many others. Windows just isn't "that bad" anymore and its server solutions are fully capable of running most, if not all, mission critical systems that you can throw at it.

[pnh102]

The old SPARC machines were heavy, used a lot of power for the level of performance they had, etc. BUT - I remember they could be very heavily loaded with processes running and still be quite responsive.

I remember those things... and the ever persistant "white screen of death." Our lab guys would yell at us for manually power cycling the machines so we could get access to the window manager once again.

[ikka]

I never used the GUI, only server applications, so I have no idea how good/bad the X Windows setup was.