Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2000 19:19:28 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> To: "Mike O'Dell" <mo@servo.ccr.org> Cc: David Murphy <drjolt@redbrick.dcu.ie>, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Voxware is toast. Get used to it. (Re: Suggestions for improving newpcm performance?) Message-ID: <v04220826b4fd6a2d9a16@[195.238.1.121]> In-Reply-To: <200003211647.LAA01778@servo.ccr.org> References: <200003211647.LAA01778@servo.ccr.org>
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At 11:47 AM -0500 2000/3/21, Mike O'Dell wrote: > i see. > > the justification is that it's ok for it to suck as > much as anything else one claims to be better than. I'm not sure I follow your logic. Our worst is far better than the best Microsoft has ever produced, so surely you can't be using that as the basis of this comment. The best that Sun has ever produced is probably better than the worst that we've ever produced, so that might be the basis of your comment. But I'm not sure. > my, my, what a glowing endorsement. > > "When all else fails, lower your standards." I don't think we're lowering our standards at all. My personal opinion is that FreeBSD is better than just about everything else out there on the market, freely available or not. IMO, the only places where FreeBSD is not yet superior to the other solutions available are on the ultra high end, where you're up against things like the Compaq/Tandem Himalaya non-stop systems that can truly claim to be fault-tolerant and not just fault-resilient or "highly available". We're producing a commercial-quality OS and letting people download and install it at no charge (or we'll sell them CDs at minimal prices), and we don't charge anything for the support that we provide today. I think that speaks very highly for us, very highly indeed when you consider that the largest and most heavily trafficked sites on the 'net depend on FreeBSD. However, relative to that extremely high standard, I believe that there are still a few rough edges in FreeBSD 4.0, and it is not yet quite ready to be considered suitable for use in production environments. There are people who can take it and turn it into a platform that is imminently suitable for production environments, but those are the same sorts of people who helped build 4.0 from 3.x, so they know enough about what they are doing that they don't have to worry about those rough edges. For everyone else, it's not quite yet at the "./configure; make; make install" no-brainer stage, where it would be suitable for use on production systems for those people who are new to FreeBSD and don't have the knowledge, skills, or talent necessary to take 4.0 and turn it into that kind of a production platform. In other words, you know enough that you can probably install FreeBSD 6.0-FUTURE on your production systems and do quite well. Places like Yahoo! and hotmail can install 5.0-CURRENT on their production systems, and be just fine. People like me can install RELENG_4 on a server that is not yet in production, and play around with it, do some benchmarking, and get some idea of what it's going to be able to do for us when we do finally put a release of 4.x-STABLE in production. Others will still be better off starting with 3.x-STABLE and learning with it, until such time as it nears its end-of-life and we're getting closer to releasing 5.0-STABLE. Personally, I think the sweet spot for 4.0-STABLE is somewhere in the middle of that curve, but we're not yet quite there. -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be> || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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