From owner-freebsd-stable Tue Mar 21 18:26:27 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from student-mailhub.dcu.ie (ns.dcu.ie [136.206.1.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1A57737BD6A for ; Tue, 21 Mar 2000 18:26:12 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from drjolt@redbrick.dcu.ie) Received: from enigma.redbrick.dcu.ie (postfix@enigma.redbrick.dcu.ie [136.206.15.5]) by student-mailhub.dcu.ie (8.9.3/8.9.3/893-FD) with ESMTP id CAA17493; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 02:24:51 GMT Received: by enigma.redbrick.dcu.ie (Postfix, from userid 2034) id 821237C94; Wed, 22 Mar 2000 02:24:52 +0000 (GMT) Date: Wed, 22 Mar 2000 02:24:52 +0000 From: David Murphy To: Doug@gorean.org Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Voxware is toast. Get used to it. (Re: Suggestions for improving newpcm performance?) Message-ID: <20000322022452.C34538@enigma.redbrick.dcu.ie> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: ; from Doug@gorean.org on Tue, Mar 21, 2000 at 04:58:34PM -0800 X-no-archive: yes Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Quoting by Doug Barton : > You've mentioned Sun several times. Back in my company's pre-Yahoo! > days we beat the snot out of our sun web servers, doing things that > were mentioned in the documentation, but no one had ever done > exactly the way we were doing them. At the risk of sounding > immodest, many of the special, custom-rolled solaris 2.5 patches > that sun developed specifically for us ended up in the gold version > of solaris 2.6. Same situation exactly, and no different because it > was a "commercial" product. Yes, Solaris 2.5.1 was a disaster as a web server. It was more-or-less the first release of Solaris exposed to 'real' levels of web traffic, and they found out they had a lot of work to do to make it a viable web serving platform. They had to make a lot of changes, you got a lot of custom patches, and they were later integrated into a later version of Solaris. As you say, no different because it was a commercial product. No doubt, you had some hassle convincing them it needed fixing, you had to quantify your problem to the Sun support people, etc. The difference, I hope is that you weren't expected to justify your basic eligibility to posess a copy of Solaris, or your right to suggest that it had a problem, or even your right to whine when something was broken that should not have been. > What's my point? Simply that this is the most -release worthy .0 > version I've seen in 3 major version upgrades, and I'm proud to be > associated with it. The bugs that are left (and of course, there are > some) are the kinds of things that can only be found through more > extensive use, which will only come if we encourage people, rather > than discourage them. :) Well, I personally have been using FreeBSD on and off since 2.1-R, and yes, that means I am not and was not a regular tracker of -stable, and was always a great proponent of it, but quite frankly, my recent experiences with it have caused me to seriously question my sanity in going anywhere near it, and that has nothing to do with the quality of the software. Think about that. At the end of the day, if you're not a kernel hacker, hell, if you're not a hacker of any shape or form, it doesn't matter a whit whether you have the source code or not. It hardly matters that you get the OS for free when the alternative is paying a few dollars for a Solaris licence on a seven figure equipment order. The difference used to be that you could get technically expert, friendly, email support from the free OSes, but these days that's gone right out the window, so if I'm paying for support, I may as well pay for people that are paid to give me some credit for having a clue, as well as knowing their own stuff. -- When asked if it is true that he uses his wheelchair as a weapon he will reply: "That's a malicious rumour. I'll run over anyone who repeats it." Stephen Hawking - [http://www.smh.com.au/news/0001/07/features/features1.html] David Murphy - For PGP public key, send mail with Subject: send-pgp-key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message