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Riiight, because Linux doesn't have problems which is why it did so well on netbooks, but that is to be expected with Linux having such a well thought out roadmap. Of course to have remote assistance you'd have to have functional hardware acceleration but who needs that, right? Why Linux is so secure and so much more stable than Windows why even needing that feature is unthinkable!

GOTOs can be a useful language feature, improving program speed, size and code clearness, but only when used in a sensible way by a comparably sensible programmer.

Linus Torvalds: http://kerneltrap.org/node/553 (mirror at the Wayback Machine)
Steve McConnell: http://www.stevemcconnell.com/ccgoto.htm

I wouldn't say that. Neither would Linus Torvalds, as it turns out.

Not that it didn't have it's share of problems. (Of course, I would say the same for any language.) It certainly wasn't broken in some fundamental way. It's apparently fun to bash, but you'll find that most criticisms are either empty or pitifully shallow.

The REAL problem people have with VB is that it was absurdly easy to learn and use. This caused two problems:

  1) A Lot of crummy amateur code was produced that needed to be maintained by more experienced staff. That's not the fault of the language. Being easy to use is a good thing, after all! Of course, dealing with all that crummy code didn't exactly inspire a lot of good will from those who had to clean up the mess.

  2) As it was so simple that an absolute beginner could learn the basics of computer programming near instantly (and produce real, working, programs) it became a real threat to a large and vocal group of insecure developers. Believe it or not, some people actually believe that the ability to write computer programs requires a "special mind"! Having that skill makes them feel special, smart, and important. Having no other skills, they rightly felt threatened by VB. Never mind that half of Slashdot taught themselves to program between the ages of 8-12. (Hell, back in the 80's, computer programming as a hobby among pre-teens was so popular that there were tons of children's books that included type-in programs. Some, like the Magic Micro series, were targeted at early readers. Other books had type-ins that the reader had to modify or debug to solve the protagonist's problem and progress the story. There were many others aimed at teaching computer programming directly to the 8-12 set.) They've got a lot of their ego wrapped up in a skill that the average child can learn on their own VB, aimed at professionals, threatened more than their jobs; it threatened their ego. Can you really blame them for spreading FUD?

The remaining hate seems to come from the same kind of people who believe GOTO to be inherently evil. They don't really know why VB was horrible, only that "everyone" says that it is. It's an easy meme to put out there as they're likely to get a good bit of praise for their comments and unlikely to get much (if any) criticism for restating their borrowed opinion. It makes them feel like part of the community. It also makes them feel smart for holding the majority opinion, even though they didn't form it on their own.

If you're building a finite state machine with code, the code can often be made cleaner with labels and gotos (since that's essentially what a finite state machine is).

It's also popular in error handling in places like the Linux kernel. You can search for it there, or read this thread, with a good example down at the bottom.

Which isn't to say you CAN'T do those things without gotos, just that often it is more readable with them.

Next up: vegetarians against using 0xdeadbeef to detect memory corruption? Well, Fuck me gently with a chainsaw!

argh, link failed, here is the missing link from the top of that prior post

You may find this interesting

Why only microsoft ? And, for that matter why would this be limited to US security services ?

I would assume that US, Chinese and at least a few other security services have moles in every company that has a lot of software on the world's computers, or important software. That list would include the likes of microsoft, google, siemens, redhat, skype, nokia, ... 99% sure have at least one relatively high-placed mole for each of the worlds security services. High profile attacks have been discovered against more than a few telco's, often leading to the conclusion that nobody really knows how long the network was tapped. You may fear a call over AT&T is less than secure against US authorities, but it would amaze me that it'd be secure against Chinese eavesdropping, or even French eavesdropping for that matter.

And of course, it isn't even a decent challenge to put a "mole" in linux, although arguably they would have to be smarter than they'd have to be inside microsoft. Although there's blatant attempts to do this as well : anyone remember this ?. Now these guys were discovered, of course, but I find it rather hard to believe people wouldn't try harder. And I particularly like the scenario of exploited compilers, where the exploit wouldn't even have to be present in actual source code.

Not just that, but any company that has more than a specific hiring rate would be easy to infiltrate "on demand", and even more easy now that everybody's clamoring for "equal opportunity" hiring practices, which are laws that have the exact purpose of subverting hiring decisions. Any company with, say, over 2000 employees would be easy to infiltrate these days (not just because those laws mind you, people are easily dumb enough without help from others).

It is known that chinese authorities somehow got access to more than a few gmail boxes. It is known that the greek telephone system was hacked for at least 8 years, allowing tap on demand, and the reponsible party has never been found. It is known xerox photocopiers were moles for US authorities inside soviet embessies. It is known someone (probably russian) downloaded cisco's entire source code base, although the hackers were russian, there just happens to be a huawei software image that, in a diff, happens to share 2mb of code with a cisco image. Anonymous got into, well, the list is rather large today, isn't it ?

And given the fact that Obama could get a group of apparently less than 100 hackers operate under the radar of the security community itself for, what, around 3 years ... They easily slipped past people who spend ~40% of their waking lives looking for security exploits, which presumably means they would slipped with equal ease past the kernel "lieutenants".

Global hacking is not quite the province of nation states anymore. I'm sure that there are multiple companies that do it, given the fact that it requires but a few dozen people.

Please don't quote RMS. if you have a quote from Torvalds or Perens or frankly anybody else then great, but RMS tried to claim [..]

I won't consider myself a RMS fan or a free software zealot, just by knowing some of RMS' opinions and quoting them when I think they provide a valid point on some issue. On the other hand, you seem to be a complete anti-RMS zealot. "Please don't quote RMS"? Just because some of his stuff is too extreme for your taste?

You think Torvalds is any better? Hey, I have a quote for you (source)

We will hereby start scouring the net for people who say git is hard to understand and use, and just kill them. They clearly are just polluting the gene pool.

If I were you, I'd rather ask people to not quote Torvalds than to not quote RMS.

You don't understand how a copyleft works. The long and protracted discussion of it can be found here.. What mechanism do you think is used to make calling programs honor what the callee's license is?

how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?

Black box testing assumes that the software is written by friendly people who make mistakes. It is not able to pick up attacks by hostile programmers. There are real world examples where attempts to put in this kind of back door, have been made and some have been remarkably successful. If you look at the Linux kernel example it was sufficiently well hidden that if they hadn't been spotted by other means they would at most have thought that it was an accidental bug.

These backdoors tend to be triggered by a software state which is extremely unlikely to be reached in black box testing. If you have to go through, for example 10 steps of choosing locations on a touch screen (probably from an effective choice of about 20 locations) you end up having to do 10^20 tests just on the touch screen alone in order to detect a problem (and remember you have to test everything in the same way). This would end up taking longer than the heat death of the universe. Obviously nobody does that.

Security testing is not the same as normal black box testing and even security testing does not pick up this kind of trick; having a full and detailed code audit is a beginning, adding on full source change control is crucial; in the end you must have fully trust worty programmers and engineers for every component of your system, down to and including the ICs that go to make it and still you have to have HR processes monitor them to check that none have been turned.

how do you tell if the computer is cheating? Well, you don't need paper to tell if a computer is broken; you just need a reliable QA test. Black-box testing is the heart of modern software quality control. We don't insist that our accounting programs print us a receipt for everything. Why do we trust accounting software, but not voting software?

Black box testing assumes that the software is written by friendly people who make mistakes. It is not able to pick up attacks by hostile programmers. There are real world examples where attempts to put in this kind of back door, have been made and some have been remarkably successful. If you look at the Linux kernel example it was sufficiently well hidden that if they hadn't been spotted by other means they would at most have thought that it was an accidental bug.

These backdoors tend to be triggered by a software state which is extremely unlikely to be reached in black box testing. If you have to go through, for example 10 steps of choosing locations on a touch screen (probably from an effective choice of about 20 locations) you end up having to do 10^20 tests just on the touch screen alone in order to detect a problem (and remember you have to test everything in the same way). This would end up taking longer than the heat death of the universe. Obviously nobody does that.

Security testing is not the same as normal black box testing and even security testing does not pick up this kind of trick; having a full and detailed code audit is a beginning, adding on full source change control is crucial; in the end you must have fully trust worty programmers and engineers for every component of your system, down to and including the ICs that go to make it and still you have to have HR processes monitor them to check that none have been turned.

Thank you for living proof that FOSSies are batshit. you still think that I'm a guy that I can't even get along with and to this very day we don't agree on anything OTHER than the fact you're batshit? delusional much? but if its a pimp slapping of your craptastic OS you want, enjoy! See that's the nice thing about reality, while all you have is insults I have facts! Where are YOUR facts? oh right, they don't exist :-(

Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.

BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.

Would you like some more reality? well here it comes! Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retaile

This is the FSF's position, but some people think the requirement to preserve the BSD license text is a "further restriction" relative to GPLv2.

Even if those people are correct (one might argue that the text the BSD license says must be preserved falls under "appropriate copyright notice", or is close enough that a court would not find it a substantial breach of the GPL), explicitly dual licensing is useful to satisfy said people's paranoia, especially if you want your code merged into their project.

Of course, if we're going to start interpreting the GPL that strictly to the letter, section 2a of GPLv2 gets violated constantly...

REALLY *don't* use goto. I am serious.

Linus Torvalds would disagree with you.

What's funny about this meme is that you likely use goto all the time; it's just called 'break' or some other name or is in some other functional equivalent.

I second that. It was him that included my first kernel driver ( http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/linux-driver-devel/2010/8/5/6885969 ). He is also a Gentoo developer belonging to the kernel team: http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/kernel/

No that's false. That's called an implicit contract and the law does not accord them very much respect at all.

Implicit? It is so implicit that it is all over the kernel source files. You can only not see it if you willingly close your eyes. By the way, if that's implicit and invalid, then the rest of software licenses (both open and closed) are invalid. Of course, then all this discussion is futile, because they are implicit.

E can assert that F doing action K creates a contract, F can K and no contract is in place.

F accepts a contract which restricts F's actions (on how to distribute in this case). The contract exists before F does any other action.

We have kernel developers on record saying that's not their understanding. They believe that the kernel copyright is the standard GPLv2, but that the kernel collectively is not exercising the GPLv2 -> v3 transition. So again we know that's not true.

References, please. If what you say is true, there is no need to collectively transition to GPLv3. All it takes is someone taking the kernel and changing the license. They don't do it because they can't without permission of all the people that has provided code to the kernel. And that's because it is GPLv2 only.

That's again one of the myths of the open source community. Courts have held that entering into a conjoined work creates new licenses.

Excuse me? You talk about a license as being implicit and now dare to talk about new licenses being created? References, please.

In general publishers want unambiguous copyright but publishers have pushed ahead in conjoined works where individual copyright holders for a conjoined work didn't agree with relicensing. A good example of this is collections of articles originally published in magazines and then republished in a book.

I can't help but wonder what would have happened if the authors decided to sue... or why they didn't.

You are trying to have it both ways. There is no "kernel license" without a corporate entity that holds that license. Either there is a bunch of individual licenses or there is an implicit corporate entity.

What's an implicit corporate entity? "We, the kernel developers, being of caffeinated mind and tired body..."?

Further there is no obligation on any contract to enforce its terms. A3 is not infringing by indicating his understanding of the contract is more lenient.

Oh, that's true. You can ignore a contract... and you can ignore a law. What happens after that fact (losing your distribution license) doesn't change because you "misunderstood". There is no good (for some values of good) will eximent.

Illegal from whom? Who in your opinion has standing?

Illegal for A3, who is not the owner of the code he wants to relicense (if he doesn't have the permission of the authors). Of course, the ones entitled to do the relicensing are the authors and the people they collectively allow to relicense.

Thank you, but I'm just a humble retailer that got tired of being lied to. I mean if their OS was actually good then why has ASUS has given up on Linux? If it is so stable then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? If it is so secure then

how, do you explain these?

So you see somewhere on the way to be a good OS Linux quit being an OS and became a religion. Admittance of the myriad of problems is NOT allowed, anymore that you could question the Koran or Bible in the home of a fundie. Frankly Canonical could change the default picture to Goatse and we'd see apologists come out of the woodwork to explain that is actually a biting social commentary on our times.

Here are some facts: Fact 1- All the major OEMs frankly ignore Linux not because of some secret M$ Ninja conspiracy, but because its so damned unstable thanks to Torvalds treating the kernel as his own playground. this attitude which is expressed by the man himself right here mean a company either has to do like dell and pay a team to basically run their OWN distro, no small task, or deal with a broken mess when Torvalds goes 'Lol Goatse!" and breaks shit. this is why even Canonical admitted there is a FOUR TIMES higher return rate for Ubuntu netbooks which makes linux a money LOSER for any company foolish enough to try. Walmart, Asus, these companies don't just abandon a product willy nilly you know, they did it because of the reasons i listed.

The sad part? All the basic parts are there, a modern kernel, DEs that with some serious polish could be great, plenty of drivers, but the zealots and itch scratching devs make sure Linux goes exactly nowhere. the ONLY reason it has gotten anywhere on servers is MSFT's frankly ass raping prices on CALs. If MSFT dropped the price of WinServer to $100 and the price of CALs to a buck a pop Linux would dry up and blow away, anybody that was honest would admit this. As a Linux admin i know put it "if you give a Windows and Linux admin the same job that the Linux guy has done repeatedly then the Linux admin WILL win, but if its a completely new task? the windows admin will be home making a sandwich before the Linux admin is done Googling".

But instead of admitting that CLIs are for servers and GUIs for desktops you'll get 300 page treaties on how "CLI is leet!" and how much better the world would be if "They would only embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the god damned force. So instead all you get is flag waving and fangirls. notice how many above me rushed to say "And I'm not a fanboi"? Every time you read that the translation should be "I'm such a fangirl I squee like a tweener at a Beiber concert when i see a Bash prompt!"

Ultimately though their denial can't change reality and the simple fact is their precious awesome OS lower than JavaME , a shitty third rate cellphone OS. Why? If it is sooo good why is it so low? Because it ISN'T good, its a buggy, fiddly, unfriendly, unintuitive, CLI heavy fiddly bitch that is about as far from the level of polish from OSX and Win 7 as it is from here to Europa. If they weren't so busy drooling over bash prompts maybe they'd ask the most important question, which is "What are our competitors doing right that we are doing wrong?' but that would mean admitting 70s terminals are as out as Disco, and they'd rather choke on RMS's sandals that admit that little truth.

So your answer is works for me along with imaginary problems kill windows is that correct? If you are gonna use the same memes every lintroll has used since the beginning of time could you PLEASE just use the linux TMs and save us all some time? kthanx. Now be sure to claim I'm a secret M$ ninja dirty poo poo head hiding in a hole in Redmond while you are at it.

BTW, how many machines have you sold at retail? How many systems have you built for sale? Could that answer be.....zero? I've been building and supporting systems and users since before there even WAS a Windows, back when Gem and DOS and a dozen others out there fought and bled and died. And i'm sorry friend but your problem and why Linux will never ever in a million damned years go anywhere on the desktop is twofold. One Linus Torvalds, who says such brilliant things as Linux isn't designed, it just grows like a virus Yeah linus its called an STD and thanks to you asshole Linux will NEVER have a stable ABI even though OSX, BSD, Solaris, Windows, hell even OS/2 has one, and two because the developers are all geeks scratching itches and don't give a flying piss about USERS. Since MSFT doesn't make any money if they ignore the users they have no choice, linux devs since they don't get paid simply tell the users "LOL Goatse'. For examples see GNOME Shell and unity.

So please, go back to patting yourself on the back for "sticking it to teh man" meanwhile when i'm finished this brand new Windows 7 quad WILL run pretty much non stop for the next 8 years, no bugs, no crashes, no CLI or forum dances or broken drivers. Can you HONESTLY say the same about YOUR OS? I think most definitely not. Good day sir.

I can tell you EXACTLY what went wrong, that damned Linus Torvalds is what went wrong! between his constant kernel fiddling breaking drivers (He needs to just change the logo for Linux from tux to Goatse because frankly it feels like he's trolling) and Canonical getting everyone on an INSANE 6 month release schedule (which means nothing gets fixed, just new versions that add new bugs on top of old bugs) the quality has backslid BAD and QA is right out. I mean when one of the top 4 OEMs has to run their own repos because even on a TEENY TINY subset of hardware they can't even get enough QA from Canonical to keep the drivers from taking a big old shit if you run the default repos? Something be stinking in Linux land.

Pulse Audio, Linus kernel Goatse, DEs getting tossed, frankly the guts in Linux is as stable as the shifting sands now. I've tried Linux on just about every off lease and refurb that has come through my shop and in ALL CASES the drivers shit themselves, the DEs gets screwy such as settings not "sticking" after reboot unless you input the data by CLI, its just one big fucking mess, that's what it is.

And they can complain about "Waaah they won't give us drivers waaah!" but you know what? a company would have to be certifiably INSANE to support Linux. With Windows just FOUR count 'em FOUR drivers gives you support for every version of Windows from 2000-2014 at the very least! 2K/XP XP X64/2K3 X64, Vista/7 32 bit, Vista /7 64 bit...tada! I'm done, stick a fork, my device will work now and keep working. and look what a company gets for bending over backwards to support linux? AMD not only opened the specs they hired developers to help the community write drivers, only for the drivers to constantly have to be rewritten (Linus Goatse) and the community to say in EVERY forum 'LOL Buy Nvidia". if i was AMD I'd tell the community to go fuck themselves.

Finally as for Android, lets break it down shall we? what IS Android? its the SAME DAMNED THING we retailers have been BEGGING the community to give us for X86/64. Its an ALL GUI no CLI OS where everything is "clicky clicky" and there are NO driver borkage because Google doesn't allow Linus "The Goatse" Torvalds to touch "their" kernel, that's why. Hell read his thoughts on the kernel and tell me if your ass wouldn't get a pink slip if you tried that! No roadmap, no plans, he scratches itches like its 1993 and he is still passing the kernel around over IRC.

Frankly I've given up. I've talked and written articles and begged until i'm blue in the face only to have the community throw shit and insults and say "Your a dirty poo poo head M$ Ninja!", I've tried every damned Linux there is and watched them shit themselves over tasks that frankly Windows could do a decade ago, hell they still don't even have a "Find drivers" or "roll back drivers" button and when i point this out I get a lecture on how my "duty" is to waste my time for free teaching my customers to do forum hunts and CLI tweaking copypasta that they have NO desire to learn or do, because they HAVE to "embrace the POWER of CLI" like its the God damned force!

Insanity friend, that's what it is, sheer mass insanity! To this very day they truly believe that the masses are all gonna abandon GUIs for terminals and go back to the 1970s! Frankly it shouldn't surprise me though, just look at their hero RMS. I swear to God the man still calls everyone "hackers" and acts like he is at a computer club meeting in 1978!

And there's no reason hardware would be left in an unrecoverable state. Most hardware can be entirely powered-off without power-cycling the entire machine.

Tell that to the e1000e users which intel didn't even put a lock bit on the card in regards to firmware so a bug in the driver bricks the card with the only method of recovery being manually flashing eeprom chips on the board.

And all the work needed to figure out how to gracefully recover has already been done in Linux, FreeBSD, etc., as it's required for S3/Suspend to work.

It doesn't really count as 'recovering' when you are putting it into a _known_ state before purposefully shutting it down. While I agree many drivers are capable of reinitializing hardware from an unknown state when it's seen to be acting funky, this is far from all hardware, and far from all drivers too.

They scientifically fix the most important issues.

really? since I'd say the most important issue with having a stable kernel is complexity.

Sure the individual components of a microkernel can be simple enough, but you are offloading the complexity to the interactions of the modules, which become exponentially more complex.

In the end you wind up with a more complex, more bug prone (because of said complexity) kernel, that takes an order of magnitude more development time for far less results.

How does this solve a damn thing?

The guiding line when implementing linux was: get it working fast.

Linux 0.01 was released into the Internet before 386BSD 0.0 (although you could get the sources out of DDJ).

From the 386BSD 0.0 Release:

This release was motivated by the fact that access to 386BSD has not been provided to all interested parties on a timely basis by the University or other sources, as we had originally intended.

I'd rather work with software than a university bureaucracy.

And yet again multiple sources ask for citation and all you can do is fling shit like a monkey. Tell me something, how does it feel to be in absolute last place with NO hope of ever getting better? Is it one of those sad stories, where with no friends you turn to something that is unpopular like you are in the hope you'll have something in common? is it that you simply have nothing better to do on weekends besides read man pages so knowing how to "kinda sorta" copypasta makes you have a warm fuzzy feeling? does using a loser in the market somehow justify your own loser state? please tell i bet its an interesting story, probably involves bullying and child abuse. BTW enjoy some failure, just to make you feel at home.

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.

So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?

As far as AST's assertion that Linux is "spaghetti" code, no no no, look at the code for yourself. The components in Linux are very well separated. Linux keeps them separated by coding discipline rather than by some technical enforcement (like different address spaces), but this discipline is kept up very well.

Here is a link to a good example of of such discipline. It contains excerpts from a discussion on the lkml over the use of "goto" in Linux kernel code. The kernel devs have found a situation where the judicious use of "goto" makes the code cleaner, clearer, and easier to maintain. The wisdom of this use is challenged by someone who dogmatically believes that all goto statements are evil. It is quite amusing (and a little sad).

Oh please, they are making money hand over fist, getting paid for the majority of Android handsets AND their own WinPhones, and the case will take YEARS which is years of check cashing. Meanwhile you still think half a sentence proves...you can't copypasta? It doesn't surprise me, living in CLI copypasta is probably all you do anymore and you fail at even that. Perhaps you'd like some links on Linux getting pwned and failing, yes? Just to brighten you day? Maybe you can use a Daemon to download the pages and read them in an email client, just like your beloved RMS does. How sad though that you HONESTLY believe your OS, which BTW you STILL can't fucking update without the damned thing breaking, has a shot. remember what your numbers are?

Get ready, here they come! Kinda makes that koolaid just a little bitter now, don't it? I believe in using the best tool for the job, but to say Linux is secure or better than any other complex OS is frankly bullshit. Hell I was talking to a 15 year Linux admin on one of the other sites that had gotten so sick of Linux desktop fuckups they were going to BSD and if THAT didn't "just work" they were gonna wash their hands of FLOSS on the desktop and just go Mac.

BTW if you'd like a little more food for thought, what OS was 3 of the 4 CAs running that were compromised? take a look and see. Maybe they just had bad configs? Surely someone with knowledge would be safe right? Guess again and its not a fluke by any means.

And of course on the retail side you have a decade old Windows beating the shit out of Linux on netbooks proving that your latest and greatest couldn't even compete with a decade old OS,ASUS has given up on your bullshit, remember them? The ones that actually STARTED the whole netbook thing with Linux? And you can't even keep them! Or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Linux isn't planned it grows like a virus!, yeah that would be an STD and explain why you are still a decade behind on the driver front. Oh and when you respond with your usual bullshit and lame excuses could you please go here so we can see which lameness you are gonna use? The current most popular are "use esoteric workarounds" which is ALWAYS popular in Linux land, and "It works for me!" because you neglect to mention the weekend you waste every 6 months to make that statement true.

Oh and in case anyone is curious about the half of the sentence that makes him wet himself in fear the complete sentence is as far as the user is concerned there is NO command line in windows which of course is 100% true, because their OS simply doesn't need it. Here is another sentence for him to fear BTW Linux IS Windows 98, no more, no less because what was

I'm using Windows XP SP3. The task manager's "Mem Usage" column appears to be the same as process explorer's "Working Set" column.

Here's another one from today: Firefox 7.0.1 after opening and closing many tabs, then closing everything except one window. Opening a new window, having about:memory, closing the other window.

I'm not too clear on what's "explicit" usage, heap-committed and heap-used numbers, and what shows up in Process Explorer. To me what actually counts is whatever that would make the computer start to swap- even if the rest are small/tiny. That's the main thing right? As far as I understand Private Bytes cannot be used by other apps, so if that keeps going up, the computer will start running out of memory.

Process explorer says:
Peak Private bytes = 674MB
Private bytes=239MB
Working Set = 247MB
Virtual Size =631MB

Task manager says:
Mem Usage: 247MB
VM Size= 239MB
Threads = 36

Mozilla says:

135.57 MB (100.0%) - explicit
+-67.89 MB (50.08%) - js
l +-38.87 MB (28.67%) - compartment([System Principal])
l l +-19.02 MB (14.03%) - gc-heap
l l l +-6.92 MB (05.10%) - arena-unused
l l l +-6.85 MB (05.05%) - objects
l l l +-4.18 MB (03.08%) - shapes
l l l +-0.94 MB (00.70%) - strings
l l l +-0.14 MB (00.10%) - (3 omitted)
l l +-11.21 MB (08.27%) - mjit-code
l l +-2.91 MB (02.15%) - scripts
l l +-2.02 MB (01.49%) - string-chars
l l +-1.87 MB (01.38%) - object-slots
l l +-1.59 MB (01.17%) - mjit-data
l l +-0.24 MB (00.18%) - (2 omitted)
l +-23.54 MB (17.36%) - gc-heap-chunk-unused
l +-3.50 MB (02.58%) - compartment(atoms)
l l +-2.10 MB (01.55%) - string-chars
l l +-1.40 MB (01.03%) - gc-heap
l l l +-1.18 MB (00.87%) - strings
l l l +-0.22 MB (00.16%) - (6 omitted)
l l +-0.00 MB (00.00%) - (6 omitted)
l +-0.89 MB (00.66%) - compartment(http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=1295.KL)
l l +-0.89 MB (00.66%) - (8 omitted)
l +-0.73 MB (00.54%) - gc-heap-chunk-admin
l +-0.36 MB (00.26%) - (4 omitted)
+-37.88 MB (27.94%) - heap-unclassified
+-28.04 MB (20.68%) - storage
l +-28.04 MB (20.68%) - sqlite
l +-22.68 MB (16.73%) - urlclassifier3.sqlite
l l +-22.59 MB (16.67%) - cache-used
l l +-0.08 MB (00.06%) - (2 omitted)
l +-2.37 MB (01.75%) - (11 omitted)
l +-2.02 MB (01.49%) - places.sqlite
l l +-1.73 MB (01.27%) - cache-used
l l +-0.30 MB (00.22%) - (2 omitted)
l +-0.96 MB (00.71%) - other
+-0.89 MB (00.66%) - (2 omitted)
+-0.87 MB (00.64%) - xpti-working-set

Other Measurements
616.33 MB - vsize
319.58 MB - heap-unused
239.49 MB - resident
231.73 MB - private
188.06 MB - heap-committed
123.42 MB - heap-used
  45.00 MB - js-gc-heap
    1.95 MB - heap-dirty
    0.68 MB - gfx-surface-win32
    0.37 MB - canvas-2d-pixel-bytes
    0.00 MB - gfx-d2d-surfacecache
    0.00 MB - gfx-d2d-surfacevram
    0.00 MB - gfx-surface-image

So Is it correct to say that Mozilla (even 7.0.1) often can't return some of the unused private bytes, and that can keep growing as the user opens and closes stuff?

There are many users who hardly ever shutdown their computers (just suspend/hibernate) and even their browsers. But over time they might still close and reopen some browser windows.

I suspect that's why despite Chrome being a fatter (and possibly leakier) browser, such users may think Firefox is worse in practice. From what I see, with Chrome opening and closing some windows/tabs usually frees up all the memory involved - the process just goes away returning the memory to the OS (and letting the geniuses in charge of the OS take care of fragmentation - not the browser's problem anymore ;) ). This appears to be true for IE as well (I haven't looked really closely - hardly ever use it :) ).

The current Firefox approach may require you all to also do what the OS bunch are doing or trying to do: e.g. http://kerneltrap.org/memory

Awww...is the poor wittle Lunix Luser getting butt hurt he is STILL in last place and getting beat down by JavaME which is a shitastic cell phone OS? NEWSFLASH STUPID: You don't give the people what they want? THEY WILL IGNORE YOU. And hey guess what? That is EXACTLY what they have done! Now lets let everyone enjoy your daily dose of fail, shall we fucknuts?

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.

So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?

Nice answer fucknuts, no proof, not even any experience with the product, just "nu uh!". And this is from an idiot that doesn't even know how to quote correctly so what should anyone expect?

Now let us see what he is AFRAID TO SHOW YOU because it is the TRUTH. The CORRECT quote is "As far as the user is concerned there is NO CLI in windows" and I DARE anyone to prove me wrong. walk up to 100 people in the street and ask them "How do you call up command line in Windows" and you know what you are gonna get? "Whats a command line" Because windows DON'T NEED A SHITTY TERMINAL just to do the tasks 99.995% of the population does. Linux? Puts the terminal on the desktop, why? Because YOU HAVE NO CHOICE. Its a SERVER OS that has been BADLY hacked to pretend to be a desktop OS, but in the end? Its ALL CLI. Here fucknuts, enjoy your fail...

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes. But here enjoy some of the wisdom of the great RMS and maybe you'll feel better

The parent post is from Alex Belits, a jobless Linux astroturfer. Last time he submitted his resume to anyone was when he tried to be Linus Torvalds bootlicker and was turned down for drool.

See how nicely that fits there loony tunes? Oh and I'm not working for anyone but myself, I am your worst nightmare...I'm a retailer. you see we have tried your product and found your bullshit and lies to be just that so maybe you'd like me to enlighten some of the masses, hmm?,

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses.

Meanwhile i'll go back to enjoying my nice new Asus EEE Windows 7 HP netbook, which I got myself as a little prezzie with some of the profits I made from NOT carrying an inferior product. If you don't like being last? Try putting out a product worth actually stocking. You know what you remind me of? A religious nutball. When someone points out a hole in your dogma you go "La la la, it can't be true! U must be a M$ Ninja!" while we all laugh at your batshit insanity. But hey friend here is a nice video of your hero RMS showing why he is the great one so that should cheer you up.

Nice try, Ballmer.

The parent post is from Alex Belits, a jobless Linux astroturfer. Last time he submitted his resume to anyone was when he tried to be Linus Torvalds bootlicker and was turned down for drool.

See how nicely that fits there loony tunes? Oh and I'm not working for anyone but myself, I am your worst nightmare...I'm a retailer. you see we have tried your product and found your bullshit and lies to be just that so maybe you'd like me to enlighten some of the masses, hmm?,

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses.

Meanwhile i'll go back to enjoying my nice new Asus EEE Windows 7 HP netbook, which I got myself as a little prezzie with some of the profits I made from NOT carrying an inferior product. If you don't like being last? Try putting out a product worth actually stocking. You know what you remind me of? A religious nutball. When someone points out a hole in your dogma you go "La la la, it can't be true! U must be a M$ Ninja!" while we all laugh at your batshit insanity. But hey friend here is a nice video of your hero RMS showing why he is the great one so that should cheer you up.

I like both features...Whatever. You must be a shill. No one can sustain this level of ignorance for this long.

BIOS just didn't cut it...What? Quit making shit up man. Intel makes the motherboards, Apple didn't choose EFI, they ALLOWED it, for ONE reason, secure boot for OSX.

connecting to the Internet (even over wireless) and installing an OS from the Internet. Had that since forever, thanks for playing. http://ipxe.org/ does that and a LOT more, and does it well.

it's only fast on select machines, that probably means the others were programmed by people like these bitching because they don't know how to properly implement UEFI. No, "select" meaning machines with fuck all for hardware. Every implementation everywhere is/was programmed by Intel (excluding screenshots and other irrelevent bullshit). NOT ANYONE ELSE. Do you understand this? This is not and never was about programming UEFI.

Done with Intel and with you, Intel employee #589001, I'll be off playing with AMD and Coreboot, which boots fast on all machines btw.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6884 \--Read.

All of the things you mentioned above are _positive_ things, in that you would have to be crazy to use the bios for anything other than loading the os and getting the hell out.

An interesting read if anyone cares for it.

All that is being done by making the boot process more complex is letting people add more bugs to firmware, do not want.

Oops, it seems I've woken up a delusional Linux zealot Sorry /.. At least he's very amusing. See how nicely that fits? Oh if I wanted I could smack your ass around with the truth all day long, you see that is the nice thing about reality, you have the truth on your side, how about a teeny tiny taste?

How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of the latest Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

Now right there is a ton of links showing WHAT I HAVE SAID IS TRUE now can YOU do the same? Why no, instead you'll go "La la la I can't hear you, CLI gives me gonad powers and copypasta into a 70s term makes me leet! You must be an M$ Ninja!"

Now accept you are WRONG AND FULL OF SHIT and move on kid. Nobody cares or uses CLI or start>run in Windows except guys that ran DOS and have a raging case of nostalgia. Your OS CANNOT RUN WITHOUT CLI and frankly wouldn't last even a day without one in most cases.

I repeat, do you know what the definition of insanity is? Because here it is, 2011, and as I politely gave you the link to your numbers are worse than a shitty Java phone OS and the numbers don't lie. How big of a damned clue bat does someone have to smack you with before you accept that NOBODY WANTS CLI BUT NECKBEARDS and that a good 99.999998% of the population is NOT NECKBEARDS.

Accept it, give the customer what they want, or watch as they ignore your CLI heavy fiddly little mess. You see, that is the nice thing about a free market, we are free to NOT TAKE YOUR OS if it sucks or doesn't behave the way we want it to. you hang onto your CLI like a Tux blankie and see where your OS is in 5 years, because I'll tell you EXACTLY where it'll be in 5 years if you don't change....less than the margin for error, just where it is now and has been FOR TWENTY DAMNED YEARS NOW.

I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than elitist douchebags like you that will happily take a broken worthless garbage as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.

You want to get users? look at the above post to see what is wrong, with its half a page of config crap you have to put in simply to send a "I'm here!" to the counter through Gmail. That is fricking nuts folks!

This simple phrase bears repeating...you know what the definition of insanity is? It is doing the same action over and over and expecting a different outcome and sadly that is Linux in a nutshell. the world has spoken and the word is CONSUMERS! in giant 50 foot flaming neon. They want clicky clicky simple, nothing more than 3 GUI clicks away for basic tasks, CLI is a giant DO NOT WANT, and Torvalds and his kernel Goatse team need to "pursue other interests" because it is this attitude of "we do what we want not matter what" which he brags about in this article that makes Linux drivers a bad joke!

The clock is ticking Linux guys, the biggest shot since Vista is about to pop up right in front of you. Will you rise to the challenge? in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP machines will be EOLed. Nearly all of which is more than powerful enough for basic web and office tasks (average 2.2GHz-3.2GHz P4, 512Mb -2Gb of RAM) and they are all gonna fall into the laps of shop owners like me. Will we be stripping them for parts, upgrading the ones that can take it to Win 7 and tossing the rest, or will we be putting Linux on them? That is up to you people.

The reason I don't offer Linux is because every 6 months your drivers break and that is just unacceptable. We aren't talking funky Chinese cap cards here, we are talking Realtek, ATI, Nvidia, Intel, bog standard basic stuff. When I go to one of the forums and get told "Yeah well it does that, what you need to do is" followed by a page and a half of CLI gobbledygook...gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. you think I'm supposed to make Joe and Sally consumer learn bash scripting?

You don't want a stable ABI, you think you can do better than the kernel teams for BSD, MSFT, Apple, hell everyone BUT Linux? Fine then FIX THE PROBLEM but do it fast. No more excuses, no more "if they would just give us perfect drivers" bullshit, because that is what it is. NOBODY gets perfect drivers, they ALL have problems, but the others manage to get them to work consistently. hell you've had the Realtek drivers for ages yet the still fuck up! The clock is ticking folks, Apr 2014 isn't far away. get on the ball, give the people what they want, or don't be surprised when the new counter says you're stuck at 1%, just like you were 3 years ago, and which is you continue to try to force people to do things YOUR way instead of giving them what THEY WANT is where you will be in 3 years. The 1970s are over and disco is dead folks, trying to bring back the term is about as pointless as trying to bring back the 8 track. Its as out of date as RMS and how he calls everyone "hackers" like he is at a computer club in 1977.

You sound pretty arrogent to me...

I there are a few C++ modules, but a very few, due to the terrible and bizarre attitude of the kernel developers, who seem to want to insult users of C++, then purposfully make life more difficult, then finally spread the entire issue 3 feet deep in FUD.

Woa, that was a fun read :) *scratches zinged eyebrows*

The Linux Kernel is mostly C, with a little ML on critical parts.

Surely you mean assembler, not ML.

I think some modules are written in C++ though,

You sound pretty arrogent to me...

I there are a few C++ modules, but a very few, due to the terrible and bizarre attitude of the kernel developers, who seem to want to insult users of C++, then purposfully make life more difficult, then finally spread the entire issue 3 feet deep in FUD.

Uhhhh...so you are saying having crappier graphics is a GOOD thing? Because if so I have a 4Mb Matrox card I'll be happy to sell to you for $100 that will give you the crappiest graphics EVAR! Jeez, of all the things to fricking brag about, to brag your OS doesn't support the latest graphical improvements surely has to be a new one. Do you brag that that your stuff loads quicker when the sound driver is borked as well?

As for TFA BSD has a hardware ABI, Linux don't, end of story. This means their drivers aren't constantly having to be rewritten when Torvalds, who BTW admits there is no planning or roadmap with the kernel and just continues to "scratch itches" and break shit like it is 1993, messes up yet again something critical for a driver and therefor their drivers are stable enough they have time to be optimized. Considering the frankly batshit insane 6 month release schedule Ubuntu has everyone on you're lucky any drivers work at all. I know that when I finally gave up on Linux around Ubuntu 11 I had dealt with broken sound, wireless, black screen o' death from the graphics drivers, oh and Ethernet died twice. Fun.

Is stability like a dirty word now? Have we really reached the point that it doesn't matter how broken and fucked something is as long as its "new product"? Hell everyone makes fun of Windows and their "forced upgrades" but they are slower than fricking Xmas compared to Linux now! Hell one copy every 7 years and you are done, stick a fork. Used to be Linux was the stable as a rock OS, remember that? Sure it didn't look all fancy with tons of bling bling crap, but it was solid as a rock. Now ever since Canonical got some press it has been like a race to see who can crank out "product" no matter how badly borked. Look at how many outstanding issues are on any bugtracker, its nuts!

Now go ahead and waste some mod points because I didn't say "Gee isn't Linux perfect? it sure is Biff, and RMS' beard smells like candy!" but if most of the guys here would be honest with themselves they would admit i'm right. Canonical threw a big ass monkey wrench in the slow and steady progress Linux was making and now its a bling bling clusterfuck. Nothing gets fixed, just new versions with three bugs for every one that gets retired. I don't get it, you're not selling the damned thing, what is the point with the constant "new product" bullshit? At least MSFT has an excuse for putting out a new version every 5 years, they are getting their asses kicked by Apple on one side and their own legacy OS on the other. What's the Linux excuse?

You're totally wrong about goto statements.

Did you even read what you posted to?

Of course, but did you read what you posted to elsewhere in this discussion? This link in particular. You try to make it come off as a thing _against_ the development style of linux, when if you actually read it it simply provides great insight into the evolution of successful software over time.

read it it is a RELIGIOUS TEXT with the writer going on about how basically they wouldn't be able to Goatse the kernel anymore! Well boo hoo, you can't Goatse the kernel if you actually had to support anything, my heart bleeds.

All I'm hearing is "I don't have anything solid against this so I'm going to call it like a religion and compare it to a man with a messed up anus." A bit childish don't you think? If you want to attack it come up with technical points against it.

And if you think he is right and I'm bullshit, riddle me this? if that approach would work WHY HASN'T IT BEEN DONE?

erm... it has been, or you wouldn't be bitching about it would you? lol

Look at the facts...Windows, BSD, Solaris, OSX, OS/2....what do they have in common? A Stable ABI.

What else do they also have in common? Crappy out of the box (and in the case of solaris, os x and os/2 just in general) support for hardware, nowhere near as much code re-use between similar drivers, the deprecation of fully functioning hardware because a vendor now says you need a new device even though the old still runs and suits your functions perfectly, ridiculously long release cycles. The list goes on.

The RMS camp says 'ZOMG If you had a stable ABI you'd lose the 4 freedoms ZOMG!"

The rms camp don't even come into this, this is 'we will not fuck over what is best for the kernel in the long run just to temporarily pander to some companies that don't want to play the game and make it better for all'. It is out of pragmatism and what will result in the technically best kernel.

And as you found out letting the kernel devs do it can easily end up with fucked and abandoned hardware

Still rocking those MFM hard disks I see? I'm sure since you're running late 70's hard drives that using a kernel a year or so old to still get support of them shouldn't be too much of an issue. I can forgive getting rid of support for 30+ year old devices that realistically are impossible to get, and that can simply use an older version to get support.

But don't take my word for it, mark this post and come back in a year and watch it come true! linux will gain NO SHARE in the next 12 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 24 months, they will gain NO SHARE in the next 36, in short Linux is a dead end in its current incarnation.

Linux is a kernel, and last I checked, Android/media centres(i.e. wdtv)/routers/servers etc etc are flourishing. But more to the point, from a kernel development perspective why should they care about those who don't use it?

The sole aim of linux is to be a useful, quality kernel. Who defines quality? Those using it. I think you will find it _very_ hard to argue that linux does not serve a whole range of people far better than any other kernel presently in existence. It scales from your mobile phone to top 500 machines. On any architecture that is powerful enough to run it (even some microcontrollers). With better in-built hardware support than any other os presently.

The masses simply won't deal with the fiddly driver breaking CLI heavy bullshit, like it or lump it. Give the people what they want, give the reatilers a product that is easy to support, watch your numbers rise. Don't? I hope you enjoy where you are at, because you sure as hell ain't going anywhere.

The masses already use linux. Whether it be on their phone, their router, or their pc. But again more importantly, so long as I can use it for the needs I (or those I choose to support) have, why should I give a shit what other people use?

For everyone else go to any Craigslist and you'll find plenty of dirt cheap machines with good XP CALs on them. Hell if you want Win 7 just contact any family or friends that are in college and you can get Win 7 pro for a whole $35. No friends in college? Chip in with a couple of buds on a $100 family pack, that is three installs of Win 7 HP, which comes to $33-$37 a piece depending on the sale price. Then you can enjoy the literally millions of programs out there in the vast ecosystem many of which have no Linux equivalent and most likely never will have, unless all you want are text editors or IDEs.

Look I like Linux, I really do. As a retailer I'd love the fuck out of a working Linux distro as I could undercut by competition by not having to pay for Windows. but as long as Linus Torvalds is in charge Linux is royally fucked as he has stated he will NEVER allow a stable hardware ABI, which means drivers will ALWAYS be fiddly bastards, with one thing being fixed while two break, for the life of the OS. I mean here,read for yourself what the man says and then be honest: How many of you if given an employee on a multibillion dollar project that said "Plans? We don't neeed no steenkin plans!" wouldn't fire his ass. Be honest.

What Linux needs is a Jobs or Gates to walk in there and lay the holy smack down on Torvalds and his itch scratchers and tell them "enough is enough". There is a simple list of hardware which SHOULD NEVER FAIL which I call the "80%", that is the hardware that is found on more than 80% of the bog standard machines out there. that is Intel, AMD/ATI, and Nvidia GPUs, Realtek HD and AC97 sound, Realtek , Nvidia and Intel Ethernet, Intel and Broadcom wireless. THESE SHOULD NEVER FAIL and if they do? YOU SUCK ASS AND SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO RELEASE BROKEN SHIT.

Yet every single time I try Linux, and I've tried a shitload of distros, Ubuntu/Mint, PCLOS, Mepis, Fedora, Puppy, hell if it was supposedly "user friendly" I tried it and not fucking once did the above hardware survrive a single upgrade unscathed. now since we are talking on average 6 month release schedules? Gentlemen that is simply unacceptable. And before someone says LTS! I'd just point out currently XP has longer support, and Windows 7 is supported until 2020 and that is if they don't release anymore service packs.

The clock is ticking hard Linux geeks, in 2014 hundreds of millions of XP boxes go EOL and if you can get retailers like me onboard? Then YOUR OS can have those machines. Imagine how quickly Linux adoption could jump if every mom&pop shop like mine had Linux laptops and desktops lining the shelves, all at affordable prices. it would be incredible. but gentlemen my time is $35 an hour, which means ALL IT TAKES is one of those 80% being borked on the 6 month deathmarch and my profits go right out the window. The simple fact is with the on average hour to two hours it takes to do the forum dance, find the CLI crap, load the CLI crap, find out I have to tweak the CLI crap, tweak the CLI crap, and then finally get the damned hardware working again? I've just blown the cost of Windows 7 HP right there.

ACCEPT THIS...the world is NOT LIKE YOU and they will NEVER adopt CLI, nor do forum dances or deal with borked drivers every 6 months. FIX THIS and you have a shot of gaining HUGE share in 2014. Continue on the current path of shitting on users and expecting them to jump on the neckbeard bandwagon? And then guys like me will simply strip or dump all those XP boxes and you won't gain shit. if the fact that an OS that has a $1000 barrier to entry gained when Vista hit and you didn't gain shit don't smack you with the clue bat I don't know what will.

It gets worse than mere poor performance. Couple NVidia chipsets with Silicon Image SATA and you get corruption.

I use chipset integrated controllers (Intel/AMD) exclusively for SATA and high quality discrete cards for SAS. Even Intel gets this stuff wrong, however. What I don't do is use third party SATA controllers, integrated or otherwise. They always suck. It's a given.

Wait for the standard you want to be integrated into the chipset or be disappointed. The chipset makers put a lot more R&D and validation into their work. That's just how it is.

Well, it's a kernel development tool, and not so many people develop driver/kernel code.
But if you look in the right places, you will see those people find it very useful:
http://kerneltrap.org/node/112

So lets see, your response is...suckup suckup suckup, bullshit bullshit bullshit and finally "Fight teh powerz!" am I right? Sum it up?

I don't give a shit if in 1979 he invented the fucking takeout pizza okay? WTF does what he did in the past matter now? does that give him a "be a douchebag free" card? I guess it does as far as you're concerned.

And what are you fucking smoking? What corp in their right mind would be running 16 bit apps nearly 15 YEARS after support ended? Security hole much? hell why not just put some Win98 machines on the network while you're at it. Anybody who actually needs code THAT old has these wonderful things called "VMs" maybe you've heard of them? because nobody in their right mind is gonna let a gaping security hole like 16 bit crapola run on a modern desktop. Oh and how does that 16bit code run on 64bit Linux? Oh that's right IT DON'T.

And I'm about as jealous of Linus dumbass Torvalds as I am of any other cult figure, that is NOT AT ALL. If anything all I feel is pity, pity that otherwise sane people (I assume you're sane, can't tell by your post) would bend over backwards to kiss his ass and take the big steaming turds he hands you and say "Please sir, can I sniff your asshole?". FACT-It has been TWENTY YEARS and Linux is NO FURTHER on the desktop than when it started 20 YEARS AGO. FACT- OSX, BSD, Windows, hell even OS/2 have an ABI and guess what? the DRIVERS WORK which is more than can be said for Linux. But why am I wasting my breath, maybe you'd enjoy some nice copypasta where I point out what a TOTAL FAILURE LINUX IS? As for why it pisses me off, it pisses me off because it COULD be good, if it weren't for assholes like Torvalds and suckups like you. Enjoy

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandw

Are you SERIOUSLY that fucking deluded Lintroll? Can you not read or understand anything written unless it is posted as 'I heart lunix and suck teh cocks LOL!"? because I just fucking said MSFT DESERVED TO BE BUSTED FOR ANTITRUST you stupid RMS blowing lintroll, can't you fucking read? oh well i guess you just love being bitchslapped by some large southern manmeat, so once again i'll show what an absolute failure your OS is Enjoy and try not to drool on Linus's balls when you blow him, I hear he hates that.

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.

Just going by screenshots huh? I'd agree with WinXP, the "Fisher price UI" wasn't any real improvement over Win2K it was just....blue. But Win 7 is leaps and bounds better than any other GUI MSFT has ever put out, and here is why: It lets the ones who can just barely get around a desktop like my dad get MUCH more functionality out of their computer.

For example he typed "mic" to find out how to set up his microphone and under related concepts it gave him a nice tutorial on speech recognition which he didn't even know Win 7 had. In just 6 months of using Win 7 he has found more features and gotten more use out of his OS than the whole previous 9 years on XP put together. At the same time it lets old hands like me get our work done MUCH quicker, thanks to breadcrumbs and libraries, instant search and jumplists. Having all the folders I have been using lately be as easy to get to as a single right click on the explorer icon? That is DAMN handy right there! My only fear is the sweaty monkey will go "oh oh oh...we don't look enough like teh Apple! And I love teh Apple! Make Win 8 more like teh Apple!" and cock things all up. Luckily for us Windows users and VARs Windows 7 is supported until 2020 so if there is a bad release like Vista? We can easily skip it.

As for TFA while I'm sure I'll get hate for daring to point out this emperor is kinda nekked I really lost any respect I had for the guy after reading this article with linus in his own words. His attitude when it comes to the kernel is "Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans! We gonna let it grow like a virus LOL!"...yeah Linus its called the clap! No damned wonder I could'nt ever get half my drivers to function past a single upgrade cycle and why Linux Linux is stuck at 1% with so many retailers like myself becoming frustrated and giving up on Linux. Can you imagine if you went to YOUR BOSS and told him "we don't need no steenkin plans!" on a multimillion dollar project? Yeah that would go over well.

I just don't understand why guys that are supposed to be good at math just can't seem to grasp that yes Linux only has 1% and this is even giving Linux the benefit of the doubt by using heavily nerdish sites like /. in the counting!

As a PC retailer who has tried Ubuntu/Mint, Mepis, and PCLOS on the stacks of off lease office PCs that go through the shop I'll be happy to tell you why Linux is stuck at 1%...your driver model sucks! I'd love to be able to offer Linux on my PCs, as most of what my customers do can easily be done on any Web accessing OS, but until you fix the driver model so that the 6 month upgrades don't make the drivers shit themselves? Well I just can't carry your product.

I have 8+ year old XP boxes in the field where the only thing I've had to do was the occasional hardware upgrade but out of all the office boxes I tried not a single one survived the 6 month deathmarch unscathed with all having at least 1 driver shit itself, usually more than 1, and it didn't matter if I used FOSS or non FOSS drivers it was the same. But what can you expect when the head of Linux, old Linus Torvalds himself says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans, it'll go like a virus LOL! yeah Linus its called the clap. That kind of attitude was fine when it was just him and his buds trading builds on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore and that kind of bullshit won't cut it in retail.

As a wise Linux user told me when I complained about the constant driver breaks "Yeah, it does that, you just have to get used to it" which is fine if your time is worthless and you think spending an evening in front of Bash while trawlling the forums for "fixes" is nice? Then I'm happy for you. But as a retailer I can tell you that kind of shit just won't fly if you want more than the 1% you currently have. if you want the public to embrace you then you have to give them what THEY want, not tell them they have to do things YOUR way. They will NOT "Open up Bash and type" and in fact see the term for what it is, a 70s throwback that doesn't belong on a modern OS, they will NOT trawl forums for "fixes", nor will they spend days looking up obsolete hardware lists in the hopes of finding something that they can buy that will actually work in Linux.

Fix this, make it so there is a stable ABI or hell sacrifice Linus to Cthulu if that is what it takes so drivers are "write once, use for years" and retailers like me will be happy to carry your product. think we like shelling out for Windows licenses? Hell no! But I can't sell a product where every 6 months something can be broken for a week or more because Linus got an itch and Goatse'd the kernel. It is simple math folks, you have X number of guys qualified to maintain drivers, you have Y times tens of thousands of drivers. Even if the driver devs never slept and spent 24/7 doing nothing but rewriting borked drivers you would ALWAYS be behind!

Oh wow, proof that from the very beginning /. had total whackjobs! And I noticed you are TOO SCARED to post anymore unless it has left the front page. Whats the matter Alex, karma starting to suck? I guess we "super sekret M$ ninjas" smack the shit out of little blankie huggers like you. But since you like being cock slapped by the truth so much, as a public service I show your failure yet again! Enjoy!

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?

Actually, unicode support IS hard to get right.

You want to know the sad part, the part that will have me modded to hell for daring to speak against their "chosen one" even though it is his own words I'm gonna link to? Linus Torvalds thinks its a big fucking joke and his attitude is Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!

Now of course this attitude was fine in 1993, when Linux was a hobby project being passed around on IRC, but it ain't 1993 anymore. If you want Linux on the literally hundred of millions of PCs that are gonna be EOLed by MSFT in Apr 2014 the driver problem needs fixed NOW and it needs done ASAP.

Because in the end there is gonna be literally tons of hardware sitting in front of fixit guys like me, hardware which COULD easily run Linux for years thus saving it from the dump, cutting down on eWaste, and making thrid and fourth PCs easily and cheaply available for all those grandmas out there. But as I said with these 4 1.6Ghz I'm looking at the Windows CAL will cost more than the box is worth and Linux simply won't continue running past the first 6 month update without taking a big steaming dump on the drivers. Does the community REALLY believe grandma is gonna learn how to do the forum dance, or how to tweak Bash (because you ALWAYS have to tweak, the commands listed are always for hardware c rev b and you have hardware f rev h) commands so the forum CLI gunk will work? Really?

Windows doesn't stomp Linux in adoption because of some secret sauce, nor killer app, it is because it is trivial for guys like me to setup with a good AV and basic software like Firefox or Dragon browser and just hand it to grandma and 3 years from now it is still surfing the web and letting her print her recipes. That's all. Most of what grandma does could easily be done on Linux if the driver sitch wasn't such a giant mess. Fix this and I'll be happy to carry your product. Hell I even wrote an article for Linux Insider pointing out what I needed to help sell Linux. If I didn't care or wanted MSFT to win would I have gone to the trouble to write it?

Actually Alex I'm starting to become convinced that IT IS YOU that is working for Microsoft ZOMG! After all you are doing more to make Linux users look like completely batshit basement dwelling loonie toons than anybody since Twitter and his "It is Bill Gates and the Illuminati in a world wide conspiracy to kill FLOSS!". But hey, since you seem to enjoy being cock slapped by the truth and even after 5 WEEKS of following me around have YET to answer a single link posted on the fatal Linux driver issue? Enjoy as I bitch slap you again! No begone or I shall taunt you some more!

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linux shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walmart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?