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Funny, that's not what OS News is reporting...

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15753
Vista: 'Not Yet Ready for Prime Time'
    Linked by Thom Holwerda on 2006-09-06 18:24:19 UTC

Two negative reviews of Vista RC1. First off, CRN says: "Microsoft is making its first Vista release candidate and pricing information more broadly available to partners and consumers this week. Solution providers who have seen it say it's not yet ready for prime time." Our favourite Microsoft Apple Microsoft zealot Paul Thurrot posted the 2nd part of his RC1 review: "Overall, Windows Vista is a stunning bit of work. But the devil is in the details, as they say, and Microsoft has never been very good at consistency and that final bit of polish that separates something competent from something wonderful." In the meantime, one of Vista's lead developers has left Microsoft.

> I'd like links to the benchmarks that show that C's io is as slow python's and also you to point out the processes that are only 5% faster in C.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page= 3

The 5% is what I found to be the difference when making system calls. The overhead of invoking python is pretty trivial when you're then executing a ten second external system check. But even beyond that easy comparison - many of the modules are very fast - traversing directories, etc, is very quick.

...unless it is a dupe, of course.

And since it is the same, here is my response in osnews:

"Real progress would be to get rid of the concept of processes/filesystems/etc and instead focus on 'information' and ways that information can be manipulated.

I imagine an operating system where the 4 foundamental actions are:

1) define a new type / input a new computation.
2) create a new value / apply a computation.
3) search for values.
4) delete one or more values.

Initially the user has the capability of doing one or more of the above, as well as creating new computations that consist of these actions.

The user interface presents the available values as the results of computations, as well as a set of actions/computations that can be done over the information.

Each action opens a new window/screen. The previous actions are available, of course, unless the user can't go back.

In this type of O/S, there is no concept of 'program' and 'filesystem'.

Information is stored internally without hierrarchy, in tables. The system builds association of information depending on the queries the user does. Information is persistent, but it is thrown out if the system detects that it is no longer referenced by any computation.

Computations can be arranged by the system to run in sequence or in parallel, depending on their dependencies.

The user interface is uniform, i.e. some part of the screen shows the information, and some part of the screen shows the available actions, including commands for visiting other parallely executing computations.

The system shall also offer a 'screen-builder', i.e. visual way to construct new screens, visualise information in different ways and arrange actions in other formats. The screen-builder data are also information handled in the same way.(i.e. typed, inserted into a table, queried etc).

Device drivers would be a series of computations/screens packaged together. Same goes for 'programs'.

The binary interface of all this shall be consistent from architecture to architecture, and pieces of code/data would be distributed as bytecode.

The kernel shall have the task of translating the bytecode to native code, store the native code and reuse it once the same computation is run.

The kernel shall also see the network as a potential target for distributing computations.

Under all this, a powerful lisp-like programming language shall be the medium where all this is realized.

I would have much more respect for big companies like Microsoft and Sun if they pursued something like this, instead of seeing the same old unix/C-based stuff over and over."

Link:

http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=15643

That comment was directly stolen from the KDE 4 snapshot topic today at OSNews. Unfortunately, they took it seriously over there.

The original comment is at: http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=15547&comm ent_id=153831

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446
ati^h^h^h AMD is sort of doing this too.

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446

there ya be

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=15446 Looks like they're at least considering it.

But now you appear to be talking about implementing a modified version of Flash Player itself such that it would be a stand-alone application capable of running on platforms that Flash (as distributed by Macrom^WAdobe) doesn't support (which doesn't make any sense to me). Which is it?

There are many good resources on the web. The standard resource is The Linux Documentation Project, or http://www.tldp.org/. Another site, which is much better than it used to be, is http://www.linux.com/. http://www.linuxjournal.com/ has many great articles to guide you through a wide variety of small projects. A great newer site with helpful articles is http://www.howtoforge.com/. For help on the desktop side, http://www.desktoplinux.com/ has many articles you may find of use. Documentation and information about KDE is, of course, available at http://www.kde.org/ and it's affiliated sites (linked from their homepage). IBM is always putting up new articles at http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/ that can provide usefull information for development work under Linux. You may also find the articles on http://www.debian.org/, http://www.gentoo.org/, and http://www.ubuntulinux.org/ usefull even though the articles were written for other distros.

If you can't find what you're looking for there, you can always head over to irc.freenode.net. The #suse and #opensuse channels will be of particular interest to you. You may find #kde helpful for KDE applications. ##linux is basically a catch-all channel; we'll generally be able to field just about any question you throw at us there. If we can't, we will point you in the right direction.

Keeping up with the FOSS news can also teach you quite a bit. You already know about Slashdot. http://osnews.com/ is another very nice resource. http://www.kerneltrap.org/ is a less frequently updated site which can provide you with more advanced information. Keeping an eye on http://www.freshmeat.net/ can help you get a better feel for the various software available for Linux. And of course, with gmail you can setup alerts for Linux, KDE, etc.

If you really want to learn more about Linux, there's no better way than distro hopping. Go to http://www.vmware.com/ and download their free VMWare Server 1.0 to allow you to try out various distros without having to wipe your hard drive. This does, however, require you have a decent amount of RAM (I'd recommend at least 1 GB). Go to http://www.distrowatch.com/ for a fairly complete list of the available Linux distros, sorted by popularity.

If all these links really don't solve your problems, take yourself over to your best local bookstore and buy a book or two. The drawback of doing this, however, is that most of them will be pretty much out of date by the time they hit the shelves. On the other hand, they will give you a great foundation upon which you can build (update yourself) easily by utilizing the online resources.

Also, never forget about http://www.google.com/linux!

Not even Amiga is spared their crap.

Though, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple switched to an L4 kernel

Actually there was a screenshot on OSNews a few days to a week ago of a full Gnome desktop utilising only 50MB of RAM (according to Gnome System Monitor). Here is the screenshot and the full review of Arch Linux it belongs to ...it's a little baffling.

Actually there was a screenshot on OSNews a few days to a week ago of a full Gnome desktop utilising only 50MB of RAM (according to Gnome System Monitor). Here is the screenshot and the full review of Arch Linux it belongs to ...it's a little baffling.

More speculation of MSFT hiring people who betray other companies for rewards here and here and here

"While FreeBSD's UFS developers were messing around with sync writes to avoid testing a fsck that would often crash..."

I can't recall fsck ever crashing, and I have been running FreeBSD systems since 2.1 (1995). "Kick ass" fsck sounds scary-- like it was designed for really fscked up drives. Wouldn't it be better to never, ever have really damaged file systems? For the vast majority of uses, stability should trump performance.

As far as what FreeBSD developers were messing around with, here is a good read from 2001:
Matt Dillon interview

You can read some good reviews here and here.

"Eugenia's Booby Paradise"...

Shudder....

I imagine manufacturers would be more inclined to make the effort delivering "drivers on CD" if they didn't have to worry about every different minor kernel revision breaking them.

Hopefully, that's being taken care of.

"Moho is a more well-rounded and complete package than Synfig is at this point. While Synfig has been used in production, the animators using it had the benefit of having the primary developer sitting behind them. That counts for a lot. In other words, Synfig still has a long way to go before v1.0."

The author of Synfig said the above: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13241

A site that is dedicated mostly towards issues concerning the open source and Linux community should at the very least support browsing via Lynx and Links.

I am sad to report, however, that neither browser renders the site in a fashion that is suitable for everyday reading. I don't blame the browsers themselves. A site like OSNews manages to render excellently with both, while offering a similar layout as here.

Anonymous Coward called Angel--Fr@gzill@

"OS NEWS" WebSite "Dictatorial" measures taken in the Kororaa-proprietary NVIDIA and ATI kernel modules controversy over violation of the General Public License (GPL)"

It is sad to say that a WebSite that some people think is related somehow to Open Source software could have, in my view, such an IRESPONSABLE, DICTATORIAL, and FASCIST behaviour towards the readers and towards the Open souce movement!

All this is the cause of "Thom Holwerda", one of the staff members of the "OS NEWS" Web Site. This guy has had already many angry disputes with the readers, as regular readers of the site know.

He shows regurlarly his views on the topics and threads and answser, and act in a very impolite, selfish, insulting and disgraceful way to many that do not agree with his views!

YES, he does all that despite being a member of the staff, and at the same time posting as a reader (whitout any shame for it!), while having the privileges of censuring, banning, not being moderated up or down by the readers, and acting in what I consider, a DICTATORIAL and FASCIST way, to impose his views and to gain notoriety.

His views in serveral ocassions hurt the Open Source movement, I think, but he takes advantage of his "GOD-like" privileges as a staff member, to impose them, and influence in this way other readers!

I obviously think that this is bad...

I posted a comment in the OS NEWS thread over the Kororaa-proprietary NVIDIA and ATI drivers, in wich I exposed this (in a moderate way) and asked "Thom Holwerda" to refrain from behaving in that way...

He answered me in a disgraceful way (as he usually does with other readers that don't see eye to eye with him), and finally, after another answer of mine, and some interventions of some readers he prohibited from posting! I have the next message when I enter a thread in OSNEWS :" Your account is currently prohibited from posting. Please contact osnews-crew@osnews.com if you have any questions comment"

Some readers posted some comments, more or less, agreeing with me, and what I said about this kind of behaviour. I am talking about the behaviour of "Thom Holwerda" and the "HARM" he does to the OPEN SOURCE software with his attitude, and to the FREEDOM in the internet while abusing and trying to influence whith his antidemocratic methods, taking advantage of his position. I am not talking of the differnen views that anyone cant maintain about Kororaa XGL, or anything...
One guy, though, said simply: "Ban this crackpot, Thom" ( a smart guy? a frind of him?...)

You can follow the thread ind the OSNews website. The main comments are at the end of the thread ( http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14605 ). Anyway, I will write another post here, just after this one, summarizing and 'Pasting" the posts about this attitude.

I do not say that you have to boycot OSNEWS. Anyone can do what he/she wants, but I, personally, will visit OSNews, much less than before, or hardly ever, until I have references of a change of attitude by this guy ("Thom Holwerda"), or until he has been dismissed...

After all there are great WebSites like this one, Slashdot, or Distrowatch etc!

Whatever is your opinion about the Kororaa controversy, if you are for LIBERTY, DEMOCRACY, FREEDOM of SPEECH, and RESPECT worldwide, and you care for LINUX and the OPEN SOURCE software, I would encourage YOU to send your views and comments about this behaviour of "Thom Holwerda" to the OSNEWS e-mail ( osnews-crew@osnews.com )or post them in the OSNews Site in a thread, or other sites related to Open source (Here in Slashdot, DistroWatch...) etc.

I am sorry about the kororaa XGL, that I actually love and have. I think is a "Catch 22" situation, as a couple of guys explain very well at the end of the OSNews thread ( There cant be free open drivers, PERIOD By TechGeek; and Very simple By sorpigal), or as some have exposed, also very well, here in this "Kororaa XGL" Slashdot thread.

they had a couple of cards that accelerated voxels, and they were damn fast too. And look at how good it looks:
http://www.osnews.com/img/10607/Voxel_world.jpg

One problem that FreeBSD developers have faced is that GNOME developers tend to be focused on Linux rather than considering other desktop operating systems.

That being said, my advice is to take this as a hint and forego dealing with Gnome. Besides, (here's the flamebait) Gnome pails in comparison in usability to KDE; never have I hated a software application as much as I have hated Windows, until I have had to use Evolution for my email client. It just does some of the stupidest things I can imagine.

Sub-Preface: Gnome, and its applications, have one saving grace: features not found it KDE applications; like proxy use for IM in GAIM and an Exchange plugin in Evolution. Come oooon KDE, get those features soon!

That said, if I choose a signiture from the drop down menu (which I have told the preferences multiple times to use a default sig but it doesn't care what I think - which is either a Fedora Core 4, Evolution, or Gnome problem), and if for some reason I wish to edit that signiture and happen to need to delete a letter, everything after the cursor gets deleted also. Ctrl-z fixes what delete should naturally do, but NOOOO Gnome can't make an application that works as expected.

GAIM is another nightmare. One of the worst things about is that if I 'signoff', which means from all IM channels, and 'signon' again it will only signon one channel and not all of them. What in the world kind of functionality is that? It sucks and I have come to believe Torvalds' "Use KDE" rant; it is sadly accurate.

Than to post an old story...

Thom Holwerda beat you to it :)

It's been rewritten as OpenBFS, and, although it's still in beta, it was the basis for the SkyOS filesystem, SkyFS. There's no reason not to use it, except that I think most would agree that the ZFS feature list is probably a superset of that of BFS.

You know sometimes I wish I could just goto Help -> Check for Updates in Firefox on Linux as easily as I can on MS Windows.

Other distros have similar things.

Thom at OSNews also posted his opinion on an editorial published yesterday: here

In that editorial he compares people killed for expressing their opinions to Apple suing "non-professional" journalists over exposing trade secrets. This is an absurd comparison. Apple has sued both professional and "non-professional" journalists for exposing trade secrets, they don't discriminate.

What these journalists are doing is illegal, individuals and corporations have the right to protect their own internal products and research and when these journalists get inside information and publish it without checking the source then they take the risk of getting sued. Don't want to get sued? Shoot off a message to Apple and verify that the information was obtained legally.

Comparing getting sued to getting killed is just absurd. This sort of grandstanding should be a big sign to all that this gentleman is NOT a serious journalist. Serious journalists adhere to The Journalism Code of Ethics

Thom at OSNews also posted his opinion on an editorial published yesterday:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14282

5. What do you think of the FreeBSD 5 kernel and WindowsXP's new features from a clearly technical point of view?

Linus Torvalds: I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others. And quite frankly, I don't see anythign very interesting on a technical level in either.

From http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=161

So Linus says, that he does not use them much, yet does not see anything technically interesting in them?

Hardly the person to be considered for an informed opinion if he doesn't "actually follow other operating systems much". Seems like much of the same shit to me.

At least OpenBSD does not compromise on source actually being OPEN in their system. As opposed to some other "open" source software projects like Linux and some BSD's which are just fine with abandoning open source when pressure is applied from hardware vendors. I'm talking about binary-only drivers and management software which expect to be able to communicate with the kernel and memory space as the hardware vendors see fit.

So what was the point of the open source movement then? Oh of course, it is to promote software development in a way that benefits everyone! Right?

Hmm, with the security (who knows what's in those binaries, they can't easily be audited), support (can be de-supported by vendors at any time, cannot be fixed or improved by OSS developers) and architecture binding (x86 only? How about my ppc and sparc64's?) implications of closed source, binary only software being used with open source software, it seems that these problems which were once areas of great pride for OSS, have been sold out to appease hardware vendors which really should just be providing programming documentation for their hardware. They are HARDWARE vendors are they not? Anyone would think their primary income was from closed source software. Meanwhile, Linux rolls over.

No thanks, I'll stick to OpenBSD as long as Theo remains uncompromising and thoughtful of the long-term open, free and secure future of OpenBSD.

http://wiki.duskglow.com/tiki-index.php?page=Open- Graphics
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13844

If you are talking about XGI, ATI just bought them and closed the code.

http://www.linuxgames.com/news/feedback.php?identi ferID=8255&action=flatview

I am glad to see that Slashdot does not show the same disrespect to its readers and to Fedora as OSnews does. What I am thinking about is this comment: http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=14024& comment_id=105792

I am done with OSNews

I've tried XGL on Kororaa and I found it to be really cool and functional. Is XGL or equivalent packaged along with FC5?

Short answer: If you have a supported video card, I believe you should be able to run

gconftool-2 --get /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager --type bool true

Long answer: AIGLX is built in, which is more or less equivalent to XGL. The main difference is that AIGLX is expected to be merged into Xorg soon, and that AIGLX is an incremental backwards-compatible upgrade to X instead of a replacement like GLX is.

The cool features and functionality you played with were probably compiz. Metacity has much of the same infrastructure as compiz (both are dual window & compositing managers, though the compositing side of metacity was considered broken before 2.14.0) and some of the same eye-candy. If I understand correctly, you can enable it on the fly after a default install via

gconftool-2 --get /apps/metacity/general/compositing_manager --type bool true

I code for this API and the sources end up being source compatible. But then there are library paths and stuff, which is why even something as homogenous as Linux is forced to create LSB standard. The API standard OTOH, is crystal clear - look at the API tables in terms of availability. And yeah, my project is called Portable.net, so I've put in my time writing portable code for various platforms (even BeOS and SkyOS). Wish the threading models worked the same, that's all :)

Results quoted by OSNews.
Short version: Nobody succeeded in breaking in.

I have read that 32-Bit applications typically run faster than 64-Bit applications (http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5768). As an owner of an Athlon64 3200 I am curious if you have verified that running the same code in 64-bit mode is faster. I was going to install 32-bit linux, but maybe this isn't the way to go.

Of today's gadgets I own a

• phone
• flash based mp3
• digital camera

The phone has an FM radio which is generally okay except when the train goes under a tunnel. :( My camera has more memory than the mp3 player!

A friend has an O2 XDA which according to an OSNews Review looks fairly fully featured. A couple of relatives, none of whom are particularly IT savvy, have started using skype. If such a device can communicate with them, over wifi, I might consider buying one for when I move interstate.

Still, the screen of the nokia 770 would be preferable for reading PDFs.

The interface of OSS and business is going to be a turbulent intersection for some time to come. It's like a guy and girl who are dating and attracted to each other for various reasons but both want the other one to change before getting married. How OSS has changed big business has been a big topic of discussion, but how business affects OSS is a topic that has not been widely researched or discussed. I take a shot at it in a research piece here: Business Factors in OSS Database Companies http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13823

Indeed it is. Amazing so more haven't spotted the flash vid yet. (Now taken down btw)

Another torrent http://tinyurl.com/nkw6f containing the PDF and sources, from the OSNews article a couple of days ago...

One T2000 server (T1/Niagara based) running at 1 GHz trounces a two-way Xeon server at 2.8 GHz for serving dynamic websites (PHP in this case). This was discussed at OSNews this week.

Sun really needs to get the message out about the T1 servers. I'd like to make some money off of my SUNW shares sometime this decade...

Gtk uses cairo to render everything (buttons, etc). Cairo is a vector graphics library. Thus, it is already all vectorized. Many Gnome and KDE themes are also vectorized, with SVG icons and window decorations.

As of Qt4, KDE will also have a vectorized toolkit.

And, really cool, Cairo has something called glitz, which uses GL to render. Therefore, all of these really cool scalable desktops will get measurably faster once the X server starts using GL in a big way. Check out the following links for more info on vector stuff:

• http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9609
• http://www.stellingwerff.com/

IT'S IN THE EULA. Wether you think it is legal or illegal it is in the EULA which you agree to when using the software. It may not technically be binding where you are from but it is still a written contact you agree to when installing osx. Thom pretty much covers what i mean http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13730

Thom's wright up here pretty much covers my view on this. He can put things in words better than i ever can :P http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13730

This article gives a lot of good points in a short amount of time.

The jist of it is that *nix IS more secure. There is no doubt about it. But Social Engineering and other things of the great modern email scams can still penetrate in and run.

But I guess that goes without saying. The chain is only as strong as your weakest link and the computer system is only as secure as its stupidest user.

This wasn't discussed. All the article talks about is a virus that comes into your /home directory and destroys your data. Unix still runs, no downtime, start again. Really only the recent Karma Sutra virus goes around and destroys data. Most act as zombie drones.

But imagine this. A computer virus comes in your system and runs in your /home(user done). It doesn't destroy your computer but installs as a .bashrc line to execute in some common User priveldged library. Now, to us we might see that the file was modified or that there is a file that we didn't install hidden in our home directory. But really, who here knows whats in .firefox/default/aso8zx9mawmSOI/ ? I sure as hell don't. And there has to be some GUI linux programs that run background command lines so you know .bashrc will be executed. So the .css files that are in .firefox/default/aso8zx9mawmSOI/, name your virus chrome_main.css. When was the last time you checked that folder for executables?

Especially in an OSX enviroment where the users are tricked to believe that the system is secure. As a unix system it might never get any worms or other propigating viruses embedded deep into the system but there are still a ton of stupid users.

You can even imagine it being smart enough to update itself IF a OSX vulnerablility is known and then elevate itself to root and install deeper into the OS. I have no clue whats in /Library and I normally don't fool around with it. Or even /bin/gnuc and if you execute it without the proper switch it just prints out 'The program cannot be executed in the terminal, It must be called from another program'.

Either case good short read.( i think my comments are almost longer) No matter how good we think we are at knowing our systems there is someone who knows we don't look in /random/directory that is known to have write access to all users. This is where a virus can lay around and execute.

PalmSource also open sourced today their Binder technology, now called OpenBinder. This futuristic architecture technology is described by engineer Dianne Hackborn in her interview.

Well, it seems that it will be just the same...

According to these pages: http://www.osnews.com/user.php?uid=2668 , http://jenett.org/ageless/1990s/ Dylan Knight Rogers is 16 years old. That would explain many of the criticisms in this thread. Both his site and his "blog" are now giving 404 errors so I can't even read the article myself.

That's pretty damn good for a 15 year old. Atta boy!