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Slashdot Moving To FreeBSD 228

Posted by AilleCat from the you-never-know-it-might-actually-be-mostly-true dept.
Newsforge, Slashdot, Freshmeat, and all Mediabuilder sites are moving to FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT for its increased SMP capabilities, this move should be completed by Beltaine (May 1st), leaving enough preparation time before the festival to sacrifice a goat to the SCSI gods.

CmdrTaco seems to be excited about the move, knowing there are several BSD experts on the network staff now.

"Linux's disorganization, and the fact it seems like a a bunch of unconnected developers tried to write an OS with no prior planning or agreements has been hard for us at Slashdot who have to work with the Operating System. To the users, there will be no difference, the upgrade will be seamless. Trish and Jim will be happy and they will stop their complaining about Linux," he said.

John Baldwin, a kernel hacker working on SMPng at BSDI's Open Source Division, said that "it should be able to handle Slashdot just fine, Are we done yet? I have things to code."

This also reflects a shift in focus for OSDN, as we are starting to move away from the politically charged Linux in favor of more reasonable, stable OSes.

You're sure to hear more about this transition in the coming weeks, along with some other important announcements.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Slashdot to move to FreeBSD More

Slashdot to move to FreeBSD

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  • Funnier Yet (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Linux's disorganization, and the fact it seems like a a bunch of unconnected developers tried to write an OS with no prior planning or agreements has been hard for us at Slashdot who have to work with the Operating System.

    What's funnier yet is this statement is ever so true.

  • Tasty Natalie portman. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I like to bury my cock in natalie portmans dripping snatch.

  • Re:Tomorrow's news: (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    In related news, kernel.org [kernel.org], the on-line headquarters of the Linux Kernel was defaced. The normal notes about progress of the Linux kernel were replaced with the cryptic message:

    GOOD EVENING GENTLEMEN

    ALL YOUR SLASHDOT ARE BELONG TO US

    The identity of the hackers responsible is yet unkown.

  • Re:Odor (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Who's this Natalie Portman?

    A young, attractive actress seen in Mars Attacks, Anywhere but Here, The Phantom Menace, and some other stuff. Look her up in the IMDB [imdb.com].

    Some relation of The Prisoner actor Eric Portman?

    Probably not. Portman isn't her real last name.

    What exactly are 'grits'?

    A barely edible breakfast food made from little pellets of corn and found mostly in the southern U.S. Standard diner fare. Look them up at dict.org [dict.org].

    I suspect you're not talking about the stuff you put on the roads in cold weather?

    No, though I'd argue (as a U.S. southerner, even) that our grits are barely more edible than the grits you suggest.

    What's all this "are belong to us"?

    "All your base are belong to us" is from a bad translation of some old video game. "Somebody set up us the bomb," "What you say!!" and "Take off every 'ZiG'" are from the same place. See screenshots of the game, as well as some varyingly amusing parodies here [gamespy.com].

  • Huh? Did you not see RFC 3092, Etymology of "Foo" [faqs.org]? It was posted a few days earlier, but it's still dated properly =)

    --

  • Posted by serpens:

    Is all of the poor stupid people who wasted their moderator points to moderate posts today.
    Of course it could be no worse than what I'm doing right now however.

    serpens`
    When I was a kid, April Fools Day ended at noon.

  • Heh (Score:1)

    by Nethead ( 1563 )
    I read it and thought; "about fsckin' time, I knew this all along."
    --
    Joe Hamelin
  • Some fool named CAILAS penned:
    things seem to be getting tighter and tighter, as the 'bad distributions' get weeded out
    and
    kernel 2.4 was (somewhat) recently released, bringing it quite near to par with the BSD kernel

    And they said there wasn't anything funny in this feature. See, nerds can be funny when they don't try.

  • Great! (Score:1)

    by Bake ( 2609 )
    Why don't you then take the opportunity and move your DB servers to something other than the hunk of schite called MySQL, like postgresql or even (omigod!) a commercial server like Oracle or DB/2?
  • and just to correct myself before anyone else does:

    SGI booted linux on a 64 /cpu/ Origin2000.
  • ehmmm.... SMP and NUMA are orthogonal.

    SMP describes processing architecture, NUMA describes memory architecture. (both in the abstract sense).

    As for memory locality, linux has supported this for quite a while. SGI did the work precisely for this reason.

    --paulj
  • since then SGI have booted linux on a 64 node Origin2000.

    --paulj
  • "A) Slashdot isn't coded for performance, never has been it seems like.
    It's an ad-hoc Perl/CGI implementation. This screams "bad performance"
    no matter what OS you put it on. Logically if they wanted a faster
    response time they'd code in mod_perl, php, or SOMETHING other than
    this archaic architecture."
    Umm... was that supposed to be an AFJ as well?
    HTTP/1.0 200 OK
    Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2001 06:45:51 GMT
    Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.24
  • Sprinkling real news with the occasional farce might even make the real news more interesting

    This is already a Slashdot Feature - go into the User Preferences page, then Customize Homepage, and make sure you have the "CmdrTaco" tickbox cleared. I found that ticking this box improved the coherency of Slashdot a great deal, at least as far as the stories were concerned.
  • Why the hell would I want a JVM for it? I like not having to have 1Gb RAM. Besides, since when did Application == Java?
  • Natalie Portman: an actress many slashdot trolls seem to be obsessed about. Her most well known role is as Queen Amidala in the latest Star Wars movie.

    grits: ground up corn as far as I can tell/know. Most popular in southeastern US. A popular side dish like mashed potatoes.
    All your base are belong to us: net humor/fad. Based on a poor english translation of a japanese video game called "Zerowing". It is mentioned on the lycos 50 [lycos.com].
    It us understandable to be surly sometimes.
  • No, if they were going to move to a real OS, they'd be moving to OpenBSD. Alas, though, SMB in Open is, well, not there ;)

    Seriously, though, I'd trust BSD code a hell of a lot more than Linux. Rumor has it that RedHat won't even compile from source anymore. They have to rebuild each rpm individually and what-not.

    BSD rules.
  • Couldn't imagine why people dont use *BSD for application servers more. Oh yeah, the lack of actual vendor support. You cant even get a half-decent JVM for the thing.

    Generaly, I've only had to use BSD in some situations where i needed a pretty robust networking setup with a small base supporting system of programs. I don't mind it being used because of its time tested firewalling (compared to netfilter, which really does kick a bit of ass, but is brand-spanking-new but who cares otherwise?

    Also, nothing stops a few hundred megabit smurfs. You can protect the load on your heavenly precious applications servers, but the poor, poor upstream and firewall taht have to deal with it. Too bad theres no good traceback yet on ICMP to deal with this. Yes, traceback on ICMP. Be afraid, you too might lose your privacy to ping. :)
  • We actually had a customer once who had their 10baseT fiber media convertor plugged into a lamp timer. At 5pm, internet access was cut off and the office had to go home. At 7am, internet access was back on and people could come to work.

    hilarious.
  • Slashdot Moving To FreeBSD

    Slashdot.org | Posted by AilleCat on Mon 02 Apr 04:00PM

    I always thought if you pulled an April Fool after midday, you were the fool. But this fella is still amping with the funnies at 4am the next day! Or maybe it's really true (and I don't see a punchline in there, do you?)

  • Hate to break it to you, bub, but Michigan is very much in the Eastern time zone. You have to get on the other side of Lake Michigan to be in the Central time zone.


    --
  • Actually, Slashdot is on the time zone you set in your prefs.

    --

  • You mean you don't!? Then how do you keep your chain safe from the bitloss demons? I honestly think that the mandated sacrifice of a black goat over a SCSI interface at least once a year should have been written into the specification...

    /Janne
  • april 2nd.
  • this was posted on April 2, (the Slashot clock wasn't set for daylight savings) but it can't be true.
    maybe if they're cruising their slashdot yacht in the bermuda triangle.
  • LOL... this is the BEST bit of this whole sorry april fools crap.

    Proud of my 8xxx uid, and not bothering to hide it, although I'm not so sure they're really sequential.
  • Yea, but before Daylight-savings-time Slashdot was on eastern time. Are you telling me it as a sudden unannouced descion for slashdot to move to Central time?

    The slashdot crew lives in Michigan, which is in central time. The physical servers are in California, which is in Pacific time. If you see times in Easter time, it's because you set them that way in your preferences.
  • 1) /. is coded in mod_perl, with precompilation of scripts and all, so it's not all that inefficient.
    2) Apache/mod_perl code is very portable between Unix systems; unless you go out of your way to use odd non-portable things like syscall(), the odds are that your Linux code will run on FreeBSD without a single change
    3) the source code of /. is opensource (see slashcode.com [slashcode.com], and has quite a following. I'm sure it's been tested on many OSs beyond Linux and FreeBSD.
  • This not funny. FreeBSD makes good business sense. *I FLAME RED HAT AND CURSE COMMERCIAL LINUX OFFERINGS*
  • I can smell a big practical joke here.... it would have sounded much better if it was moving to Microsoft IIS instead...


  • For a time a couple of years ago, when CmdrTaco was still doing this for fun, and not profit. I beleive he did move to FreeBSD. Just because, at the time for tasks like web serving it is was such a better OS. Yes Linux has caught up in a lot of ways. You could argue that in some ways it has even surpassed its BSD cousins. Red Hat's ftp site was using FreeBSD for a while too.
    Cheers,
    Tomas
    ===========
  • ^^ Funniest April Fools gag all day
  • heh - wonder how many of these stories will make it into other "news" sites.
  • Why not take advantage of timezones next year ?
    Start the jokes when the first timezone goes onto April 1 and keep going until the last timezone is done with it.
    There ! Nearly forty-eight hours of side-splitting hilarity.
  • C'mon, guys. You guys have always been really good with the April Fool's gags, but this year's is just lame. It's almost like you forgot about it and pulled it out of your ass at the last minute. Oh well. Maybe next year.
    --
  • you obviously didn't read the entire RFC, they have to be carrier pigeons, you can't just grab some birds outa the park and hope to set up a wireless avian carrier network!!

  • one is good. two is OK. A day of mediocre april fool's jokes is NOT OK.

    I, for one, was really depressed by the lackluster April 1 RFC this year. I much prefer IP over Avian Carriers.

    *sigh*

    In the new millennium, there will be no good humor...

  • I knew right away it was an april fools joke by just reading cmdrTaco quote.

    I'm sitting here typing this comment and I really don't think this makes a good april fools joke.

    Actually, moving to FreeBSD wouldn't be a bad idea. While FreeBSD continues to improve SMP support this can actually become a reality.
  • COM and DCOM? Unix has had pluggable components that worked well with each other for more than twenty years.
  • You get 3 days to moderate. If you don't see anything you like today, wait until tomorrow.
  • Okay, this is a good move because of technical issues, but how many people are going to switch from linux to *BSD "just because slashdot uses it"? It's just as political, in this respect. I have not switched to BSD yet, though I have wanted to, because of my inexperience with it. This is the major hurdle for most computer related problems, I suppose, so I don't see why it has stopped me. Maybe I'm just too political.
    (but *BSD is so more 31337! ;)
  • I hate this tradition. I really do. As if it wasnt bad enough when I was growing up, its even worse on internet. EVERY news site just cannot resist making some lame-ass story that sounds ridiculous and is supposed to be funny. Unfortunately these people do not realize that they are not comedians, they are nerds who run a website. Theyre not funny. Christ.
  • Wellington, New Zealand. It's been April 2nd here for twenty fucking hours. Enough. Choose one, make it good, don't do this next year - it blows.

    Dave

  • editorial: (Score:5)

    by ywwg ( 20925 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:11PM (#321504) Homepage
    I'd just like to say that this has been the most stupid, pointless, unfunny april fool's day in the history of mankind, or perhaps just slashdot. If you're going to do a joke, at least either invest an oddly large amount of time in the project (bonsai kitten) or make it very funny. There is a reason sites like nytimes and cnn.com don't do these stupid things, and that is because they are reputable news sites whose job it is to inform their readership. Slashdot, while not terribly reputable ("post first, fact-check later!"), still claims to be a news site. I think a certain level of maturity is called for at some point.

    And if you're going to make jokes, make them funny, at least!

  • that they were switching to Windows 2000 instead of FreeBSD.

    Brian
    http://www.assortedinternet.com [assortedinternet.com]

  • No, 24.

    You're only allowed to fool until midday. Some of these weren't posted by midday in ANY timezone.

    Really. Even if they're going to crack bad jokes they could at least try to get the rules right...
  • Actually, RFC 1149 is being implemented:
    http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/ [linux.no]

  • except Java DOES run fast on OS X... -Marchie
  • hmm. dual or quad processors = memory bandwidth/n . go ahead sacrifice memory bandwidth, or just get 2-4 seperate uniprocessor machines and get better performance at about the same cost with a cluster... hrmph.... anyone else notice /. getting ahead of themselves here?
  • Like a certain editor will stop modding comments that question their integrity out of eye shot and out of the archives?
  • And plus, if you have a single, well-done april fools story in with a bunch of real news, you throw people off appropriately.

    If April Fools day were simply 24 hours of pranks (which is what it seems like on /. today) then it becomes very obvious and the posts get very trite very quickly. Newsworthy stuff did happen today. So we [the slashdot population] would read the articles with a grain of salt, but then again, everything should not be read like it was the word of god in the first place. Sprinkling real news with the occasional farce might even make the real news more interesting, and the fake news that much funnier. Doing this on a daily basis would be bad. But on April Fool's day, it has vast potential.

    ---
  • Bill Gates was quoted as saying "I'm too old for this [sexual activity]."
    The word is "shit", and if you believe that this is a sexual activity, then that explains why you can't get a date.
  • .300 Winchester Magnum reaches farther, flatter than 7.62 NATO, though it does kick. I once put my left shoulder against a tree and fired - my back was sore for a week!

    The .50 MacMillan single-shot is state of the art when you want to "reach out and touch someone." The .50 has range out to a mile, if you're really good, or lucky.

    Oh, he asked about Operating Systems? Never mind.

  • Tomorrow's news: (Score:5)

    by tomcrooze ( 33802 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:21PM (#321514) Homepage
    April 1, 2001: Today will certainly be known as a sad day in Linux history. A large component of what made Linux successful, Slashdot.org will be moving to the FreeBSD distribution.

    The White House has had tens of thousands of angry "Slashdotters" started to protest in DC, while 500 police and National Guard officers patroled the area. Angry comments to the police such as "You won't understand what Slashdot meant to me!" and "L33T HAXORS OWNZ J00!" were exchanged, resulting in a fiery clash that left hundreds dead. The remaining crowd set fires, destroyed property, and put all the W's back on the keyboards in the White House. Mysteriously, about 50 pairs of pants with what appears to be hot grits in them were left behind.

    Even Natalie Portman tried to appease the crowd by unveiling a carved petrified-wood model of herself.

    Riots in Redmond, Washington have also broken out, as thousands of pro-Microsofter's started tailgate parties and drunken orgies in the Microsoft parking lot. Bill Gates was quoted as saying "I'm too old for this [sexual activity]."

    The global economy has plummeted, the moon has decided to start moving back towards earth, and Linus Torvalds is traveling by armored plane to Rob Malda to propose a Linux unification standard. Whether it will work out remains to be seen.

  • look at the cold hard facts - ftp.cdrom.com/ftp.freesoftware.com's and OpenBSD's track records

    not to mention Hotmail's

  • maybe if you guys trimmed down on your HTML and overly image heavy pages, that would speed things up more considerably

    Probably would, although there are user options for getting lighter HTML (indispensible under Netscape. but Konqueror's progressive rendering is sufficiently awesome i've gone back to the fancier pages, partly because they have links the plain pages dont *cough*). As for images... i dunno, expand your cache or something (assuming /. doesn't set something that hoses caches). or turn off image loading.

  • The possibility is funny enough that it would redeem the rest of the nonsense.

    For that reason, I can't rid my mind of the idea.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • http://www.attrition.org/mirror/attrition/graphs/g roups_os.gif

    But in all honesty, the best argument is a straightforward upgrade path. I tried to upgrade a RedHat box, and after the fourth RPM that needed another RPM or was missing files or didn't compile correctly, I wiped the disc, mounted a couple dirs, and installed a fresh, current system with a few commands. If upgrading is hard, people do it less. That's why boxes get hacked, often.

    Boss of nothin. Big deal.
    Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.

  • Humorous aspect (Score:4)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:08PM (#321519)
    This is humorous simply because it's so 'last year' in nature. At this time last year, it seemed like linux might start to fracture. Now, things seem to be getting tighter and tighter, as the 'bad distributions' get weeded out, and the good ones take the precident. The fact that kernel 2.4 was (somewhat) recently released, bringing it quite near to par with the BSD kernel, just adds to the humor.

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • Origins are not SMP, they're NUMA. I find it hard to believe they can get decent performance/scalability on a NUMA machine without an OS designed for memory locality.

    See the k42 project [ibm.com].
    --
    Patrick Doyle
  • Its an almost funny AJF, but an interesting technical comparison...

    I realise that many experts believe linux2.4 is a better SMP system than openBSD but can someone please send a link to a document explaing the differences of the two OSes, with pro and cons in both designs.

    Some us are interesed (for personal learning) but don't get to play (and hence learn) with expensive hardware.

    Thanks
    Elivs

    PS- I don't want a flame war, just a technical piece.
  • Just gotta LOVE a site that starts out: "If you're using Lynx, you can use the Text-Only Skin" :-)
  • I've always prefered Deringer's .41 caliber with the .410 shotgun shells and 3x .357 balls per shell. With a double barrel model you can squeeze off 6 .357 balls at once :-)

    Admittedly lacks range, but up close its alota fun!

  • International readership = problem? (Score:3)

    by Manaz ( 46799 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @10:18PM (#321525) Homepage
    How the post looks in Sydney, Australia (GMT10+) [alpha.net.au].

    Gotta hate it when your April Fools joke bites you due to differences in time zones....
  • this was posted on April 2, (the Slashot clock wasn't set for daylight savings) but it can't be true.
  • Heh! This is probably an April Fools' day joke, which tells us all how clueless the Slashdot crew really is. To them, it's a joke that will never be true. To many of us, it's quite possible and it would be quite rational to move to FreeBSD for a high-load network service (i.e. website). Go figure!

    Good try, anyway!
    --------
    Genius dies of the same blow that destroys liberty.
  • Go to your Customize Homepage [slashdot.org] and choose the appropriate Daylight timezone.
  • God forbid they actually use something better suited to the job! I don't know if FreeBSD 5.0 is that product, but it is stupid to use an inferior product (not that Linux is that product!) just because you have groundless attraction to it.

  • Well... (Score:3)

    by Pseudonym ( 62607 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:04PM (#321549)

    I'm gonna go cybersquat on vabsd.com right now.


  • Perl code should actually port fine to Windows.
    There are subtle problems. Even something as stupid as hard-coding a "/tmp" path can make a program fail to port to Windows.


    Doing mod_perl, I can't imagine that one would be using material that's non portable. The caveat is C-compiled extensions, such as DBD::Mysql. I believe the windows client is freely available, but it might not be trivial to get everything going.

    As for coding to "/tmp", what's wrong with making a temp-directory? I thought the slashes were adaptable in perl.

    Not saying there might not be problems - Hell the CPAN module issue became a nightmare when we moved from Linux to Solaris - but most pure perl code should be inherently portable. Even the UNIX fork now works in windows (thanks to interpreter multi-threading).

    -Michael
  • ... the best april fool's joke on slashdot today was a banner ad:

    See Java run ...
    See Java run fast ...
    See Java run fast on Mac OS X.

    Mad props to Apple Inc. for that one.
  • While I am sure the flamebait is a comin', I must remark that I think Slashdot is being rather foolish. Nothing against FreeBSD 5.0. It is a great OS and may it live long and prosper. However, to move based on FreeBSD 5.0's SMP support is extremely stupid. First of all, FreeBSD 5.0's SMP support is at best par with Linux 2.4. The argument that Linux is splintering is even more stupid. All of my linux news pretty much comes from Slashdot links, and everything posted in the past few months clearly points to Linux becoming more centralized! Look at the Linux 2.5 debate! However, FreeBSD is a great OS, no question about it. But, I doubt that Slashdot will accomplish anything other than some extra IT expenses by moving to FreeBSD.
  • I have been told first hand by some people who work at VA that supporting BSD is something that they've been looking in to and have done a little of in the past.

    So I don't think that the possibility of /. switching is all that far-fetched. If it is a April Fools...Kudos to the editors for putting together a rather plausible goof.

    For anyone that will go to the grave exclaiming that Linux rules and *BSD sucks, look at the cold hard facts - ftp.cdrom.com/ftp.freesoftware.com's and OpenBSD's track records. I work on Linux and use FreeBSD at home because I prefer it. Maybe the BSDs are not as "bleeding-edge" but they work, plain and simple. No fragmented distributions and code-bases, just cohesive functiong product.
  • Just for your further edification, FreeBSD's SMP support is on a level with Linux2.0's. That means it has one giant kernel lock, and is really only useful up to 2 processors (and really not even then). Whereas Linux has had alot of tuning in this area, it scales up to around 8 processors, and can do 12 or 16 if you're really masochistic. (SGI had it running on 32, but said nothing of efficiency).

    For good FreeBSD SMP you're going to have to wait for 5.0.. But that probably wont be out until 2004.

  • Odor (Score:4)

    by Ledge Kindred ( 82988 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:07PM (#321561)
    Is it just me, or is there a squanty type of odor about this story...

    -=-=-=-=-

  • from the you-never-know-it-might-actually-be-mostly-true dept. Guess you never really know... ya right...

    --
    From: Aaron "PooF" Matthews

  • Packet Filtering (Score:5)

    by nihilogos ( 87025 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @10:19PM (#321564)
    I'm trying to put a line in my firewall script (iptables v1.1.2) which will reject packets based on source address and the date. Can anyone help? I think this would be useful for a lot of people.
  • If in doubt, nmap is your friend.
    -----

  • Finally?!?! NOT (Score:5)

    by Skrap ( 105397 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:42PM (#321581) Homepage
    I finally get to be a Moderator (supreme cosmic power at my fingertips!) and I get stuck moderating people's trolls on slashdot's april fools posts? Dah. Its a cruel cruel web.

  • Re:unsuspectedly ... (Score:3)

    by The_Messenger ( 110966 ) on Monday April 02, 2001 @12:57AM (#321587) Homepage Journal
    I'll never get why so many of you think Java is slow. Yes, it's windowing code sucks. But I don't use it for making GUIs. I use it for creating so-called "enterprise" software systems, where its unbeatable database connectivity, portability, purely OO design, excellent threading model, and short development times make up for any loss of speed.

    Yes, it uses interpreted bytecode, and is therefore slower than native machine code. But to be honest, on the kind of hardware that most of my clients use, you'll never get close to hitting the machine's limitations. I'm currently implementing an online exchange system on a cluster of RS/6000 M80s, for God's sake.

    Most of you have obtained your "knowledge" of Java from watching an applet crash your browser. Big fucking surprise -- applets are the weakest part of the language, and Netscape sucks fucking goat balls. Everyone on this site has used at least one Microsoft product, so I try to forgive the senseless MS-bashing, but I guarantee that less than 1% of you Java-bashers have hacked any Java, and only 1% of that 1% got farther than "Hello, world!" before screaming, "Ew, it's so different than PERL! Back to scripting languages for my dumb ass!"

    People like that are such fucking hypocrites. They think they're UNIX people, but resist Java in the same way that the ASM nuts laughed at UNIX. "You can't write an OS in C, it'll be too slow!" The joke was on them, and it'll be on you too.

    True, some languages are fads, but Java has proven years ago that it's here to stay. Working enterprise application developers -- even those using NT -- know this. Why are UNIX people so resistant? Java brings the power of COM and DCOM to UNIX, who wouldn't want that? (Yeah, CORBA does the same thing, and Java has CORBA support in case it ever catches on outside of Borland. :-) Personally, I happen to like the fact that I could, if necessary, port all of my software on my current project from UNIX to NT in a few hours:

    1. Install WebLogic on NT.
    2. cvs checkout exchange-code
    3. Start server

    And there will also come a time, not today, not tomorrow, but soon, when Java's GUI limitations will fall behind. Anyone who has used JBuilder 4 (yeah, I still use EMACS, but it was installed on my new box so I tried it out. Not too shabby!) or TogetherJ (very cool UML design tool, and much less expensive than Rose) knows what I'm talking about.

    --

  • A) Slashdot isn't coded for performance, never has been it seems like. It's an ad-hoc Perl/CGI implementation. This screams "bad performance" no matter what OS you put it on. Logically if they wanted a faster response time they'd code in mod_perl, php, or SOMETHING other than this archaic architecture.

    Slash is written with mod_perl. It's not CGI.

  • ahhh.. a perfect end to a perfect day (Score:4)

    by mr_gerbik ( 122036 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:09PM (#321591)
    Shall I get the flamewar kicking?

    WHAT???? FREEBSD 5.0 SUCKS! Why not move to OS X for godsake?! If yer gonna dump Linux, move to something worthwhile.. hell, Windows ME running Personal Web Server would be a step up!

    -gerbik

  • Re:Odor (Score:5)

    by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @11:42PM (#321593) Homepage Journal
    Slash is written with mod_perl. It's not CGI.

    Actually, slashcode is written in Gibberish. It's not mod_perl. (Well, ok, maybe it's Gibberish that plays mod_perl on TeeVee.)


    --
    News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]

  • Re:Odor (Score:4)

    by pi_rules ( 123171 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @08:08PM (#321594)
    I agree entirely here. At first glance at the story, I'm thinking, "Okay, makes sense .. FreeBSD is supposed to the superior SMP system, right?". Wait.. backup.

    A) Slashdot isn't coded for performance, never has been it seems like. It's an ad-hoc Perl/CGI implementation. This screams "bad performance" no matter what OS you put it on. Logically if they wanted a faster response time they'd code in mod_perl, php, or SOMETHING other than this archaic architecture.

    B) Tracking down any nuance in the Linux -> FreeBSD transisition wouldn't be transparent. It should be, and I've never looked at the Slash code but I'm really _really_ doubting it was built with portability in mind. :)

    C) With all the pro-Linux stuff I see on here I'd consider it more likely to see Natalie Portman waring a pants full of hot grits screaming "All your base are belong to us!" in the middle of Times Square than see Slahdot switch to a BSD.

    The above was ment to be moderately humorous... sue me if I didn't hit my target.

    Justin Buist
  • VABSD.com is taken.

    Registrant:
    ByteCode (VABSD-DOM)
    1550 Sonnys Way
    Hollister, CA 95023
    US

    Domain Name: VABSD.COM

    Administrative Contact, Billing Contact:
    Brooks, Kevin (KB842) brooks@BYTECODE.COM
    ByteCode
    1789 Glenmorrie Dr.
    Lake Oswego, OR 97034
    US
    (408) 565-9601
    Technical Contact:
    Operations Center, NetGate Network (NNO) noc@NETGATE.NET
    NetGate Communications
    473 Sapena Court, Suite 6
    Santa Clara, CA 95054-2427
    (408) 565-9601

    Record last updated on 12-Mar-2000.
    Record expires on 12-Mar-2002.
    Record created on 12-Mar-2000.
    Database last updated on 1-Apr-2001 15:09:00 EDT.

    Domain servers in listed order:

    NS.NETGATE.NET 204.145.147.12
    NS2.NETGATE.NET 204.145.147.16
    NS3.NETGATE.NET 205.214.170.254

  • I'm really sure he loves you for posting his email address on a public archived site for all of the spam-bots to feast upon.

    Except registering a domain itself will post your address on a public whois database for all the spam-bots to query.

  • So, now we have 2 april fool days? a whole week?
    --

  • FreeBSD? (Score:5)

    by DeeKayWon ( 155842 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:04PM (#321614)
    If it were "Slashdot moving to Windows/IIS", it might've been funny.
  • "Slashdot Moving To Windows 2000"

    In a somewhat surprising move, Slashdot administrators have chosen to move their primary web hosting servers to the Windows 2000 platform. While the audience of Slashdot is primarily unix-based and Microsoft-hating, CmdrTaco believes the move is justified.

    "You get what you pay for, so we're paying Microsoft a lot of money for our clustered servers. We like the fact that we can blame Microsoft when Slashdot gets overloaded with requests. In addition, Windows 2000 can run MySQL just as well as Linux. I also like to browse with Internet Explorer on the web server and click the pretty little widgets to mess with server hardware." he said.



  • MS Windows 95 was giving me a free BSD about every nth slashdot post. I couldn't handle the Blue flashing and resorted to using Blue-Blocker sunglasses for awhile. I still couldn't block out the free BSD and so I moved to Linux and X11. Now I only see the Almighty God's free BSD outside my Window, a cloud drifting by, no protection errors in mother nature...

    Then those "people", those stinking relatives arived and they were pissed because they couldn't do anything on my newly protected computer system. Ever since that transitional day, I put a tux sticker on every computer I owned... Life is good... when the relatives get their stepin'...

    Socialists and Communists have nothing to fear,

  • hehehe

    If you think that's bad, you should try starting OS 9.1 Classic from within OS X. Be prepared to go get a cup of coffee.

  • Ahem, Windows 2000 Professional (desktop) and Apache is kinda fun. :)
  • slashdot is currently in waltham, massachusetts [slashdot.org] eastern time.
  • this was posted on April 2

    Think about time zones. Where I am, it is 11:23 PM April 1. This is the central time zone. Don't forget that many of the slashdot stories for parties are what not occur on the west coast-Pacific Time. They have enough time left on their April Fool's clocks.
  • Perhaps if you guys were to just move Slashdot to some decent hardware instead of trying to run the site on that Palm III CmdrTaco got for Christmas 2 years ago, you wouldn't be having this problem.

    I agree though, I find the SMP as well as the RAID support on the Palm to be rather lacking, but I'll be happy to send you my modified kernel for it if you wanna give that a shot.

    Teaching your girlfriend to play "Palm Pilot" >>> The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]

  • You get 3 days to moderate. If you don't see anything you like today, wait until tomorrow.

    And suddenly, a whooshing sound was heard as humor suddenly flew over someone's head....

  • Community reaction (Score:4)

    by HongPong ( 226840 ) <hongpong@NoSpAM.hongpong.com> on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:18PM (#321649) Homepage
    In reaction to this announcement, Mr. Stallman screamed in anger. "This sort-of-closed-source BSD licensing scheme is inappropriate and unacceptable, and furthermore, the press release clearly says 'Linux,' not 'GNU/Linux.' I want Taco's head on a plate with a side of refried beans, now!!"

    --
  • Turns out that slashdot has returned back to Linux after their BSD experiment. The following is from the activities log

    10:02PM OK, thats it the slashcode is now running on an eight way CMP machine under FreeBSD

    10:23PM Started the synchronization process to sync the new system's disks to the old, this will take a while time for the copy to complete, time for dunkin doughnuts

    11:13PM Got paged on the RIM halfway through a double chocholate Kruler, system problem. Left the doughnut shop so fast the assistant now thinks we are undercover cops.

    11:45PM The console on the FreeBSD system is reading 'Kernel Panic', system is still up and running and the copy process is continuing

    12:34PM Cmdr Taco just discovered that although the system is still running it now reports only six processors, what happened to the other two? Should we take the system down?

    01:23AM This is wierd, according to the system console all eight processors are running, only two of them are now running OpenBSD.

    02:30AM Two more processors have defected, one has joined the OpenBSD cluster, the other is running a variant called SafeBSD.

    02:45AM Things are getting worse, the four renegade processors are demanding equal rights in the decision making process and an equal share of the X-Windows output server.

    03:44AM Two more processors have defected, one from the FreeBSD camp to OpenBSD, this is partly compensated for by another processor leaving the OpenBSD camp and moving to an earlier FreeBSD release.

    04:23AM Another defection, this time the CPU in question is demanding a byte-order change operation.

    05:23AM Civil war has broken out. The rival O/S factions are placing locks on the various system resources

    etc.

  • In a related move... (Score:4)

    by bryan1945 ( 301828 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @07:15PM (#321673) Journal
    Microsoft has decided to move to Mac OS X, while Linus believes that Windows ME 0.3 is the future of all computing. In un-related news, Sun loves AMD and SGI is may as well be dog-humping SCO. Steve Jobs has jumped in bed with the new Amiga company, and HP-UX will now be called BeOS. Wall Street has collectively commited suicide, and the American public pretty much just yawned, except for the 145 day traders who strung themselves up by the privates.....

    Newsweek says, "We like cheese"
  • Err what, I think you are confused. Maybe you are talking about the fact that RedHat put a bad version of gcc in 7.0. They have now corrected this and have a patch for it.

    Things I don't like about the different BSD's

    1)The Licence. (Expect for OpenBSD)
    2)The driver support, god it is worse that Linux. How the hell am I ment to get my geforce 2 GTS working in 3D.
    3)There are no real games. I can just about live with the amount of games for linux (just). But I would just have to crawl up and die if I could only chose between windows and BSD.

    Anyway that is the end of my karma.

    Mark Hillary

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