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Linux Turns 10
An AC sent in: "The IBM PC may be 20 years old, but they're not the only ones with a birthday coming up. Check out www.linux10.org for an invitation to a birthday party on August 25 for the Linux kernel. The big bash is in Sunnyvale, just down the peninsula from the San Francisco LinuxWorld Expo, but there are also links to local parties around the globe (or if there are none near you, plan your own and add it to the list)."
I think you're missing one of the major ones impacts. Just five years ago e-mail viruses were virtually unheard of. Without Visual Basic, tech support people would still be telling people "No, that's not an e-mail virus, it's just a hoax." Now, with the recent innovations by Microsoft and embedded visual basic scripts, 9 chances out of 10 it IS an actual e-mail virus. Without Microsoft's passion to innovate new and exciting technologies like these many people would be out of a job... instead the security and anti-virus industry is absolutely booming! Thanks Microsoft. Happy 10th Birthday Visual Basic! May you keep infecting emerging technologies with new and innovative viruses as you have for the past 10 years well into the next decade!
Suitcase contents:
:-)
Stake
Holy Water
Crossbow
Sig-Sauer with carbon fibre bullets (Ultraviolet has much better weapons!!)
Ancient volumes on Vampires, Demons and other creatures of the night..
Oh, damn thats Sunnydale not SunnyVale.
Anyway, why did a vampire who gets sunburn very easily, decide to live in California ? Maine or Seattle whould be much better for his complexion.Ah, that explains Microsoft!!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
www.linu x10 .org
I know I almost did. Those damn cameras are going to ruin this world...
Regards,
KGraci
If ever having left someone's prescence, you feel as if you lost a quart of plasma, AVOID that prescence -W.H.Burroughs
A usable interface? :)
I get dips on spanking the kernel!
Is that the new euphemism for what we do when pictures of a naked Tux get us far more excited than we should be? Just pick up a linux magazine at the local computer store and ask to use their bathroom for a few minutes. I can see it now...
Eew, that's dirty.
Is it really worth celebrating that two things that were originally intended as quick backwards compatibility HACKS has stayed around this long, spending huge amounts of energy on maintaining backwards compatibility?
The IBM PC never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X. Still, both technologies keep their life force because they've already become standards.
The IBM PC was designed to make porting easy for already existing x86 CP/M software. Check the documented CP/M backwards compatibility interrupts if you don't believe me. It used commodity parts because time-to-market was the most important issue. CP/M itself wasn't used because of a legal fight between IBM and Digital. (I believe this was mentioned in a documentary film labeled "Triumph of the Nerds".)
The reason that Linus got so much help with creating Linux, was because they wanted it to run already existing UN*X software, quickly.
As any low level coder can attest, the IBM PC as it is today is a kluge on a kludge on a hack. Just the process of making it boot is a tedious job with pitfalls around every corner. It's got an entire 16-bit computer inside that's only used during the first couple of seconds after you turn it on. The CPU is full of instructions that are never ever used by the programs that 99.9% of PC users use.
I'm almost amazed it still works.
Linux on the other hand has been totally redesigned since its hack days. There are still a major limitations with the way it's designed, though. It's a monolithic kernel, an ancient design principle, where everything is running in the same place, intermixed like crazy. The increased modularity of the recent kernels help with some things, letting you add drivers during runtime, but doesn't help much with larger upgrades, or making it easy to develop for. A more modern kernel design such as the Hurd can let a regular user develop and try out larger kernel parts during runtime, whereas with linux a reboot is still required for upgrading most nonessential parts of the kernel. And since it's just one big heap of code, a mistake in one place can make the whole thing crap out. It's a stroke of fortune that Linus has the inhuman ability to maintain such a beast.
And that's just Linux. For UNIX, the main word is Inconsistency. The inconsistencies of the API are quite hair raising, and many of the calls are practically hacks that remained, and never got implemented proper. The security model is laughable, a philosophy that you either are God (root), or you are not. The commandset is just as intuitive as you'd expect, where practically every program has a different way of recieving command line arguments. The X Window System is an add on that is also full of kludges. It eats more and more memory and can never release it. It is optimized for a situation that is hardly ever the case, namely that the applications are running on a remote computer, making every tiny little bit that's going to appear on your screen pass through a bunch of network abstraction layers. That's one of the reasons X on a monster workstation often feels slower than the actually hundreds of times slower machines we were using in the 80's...
Excuse me for hardly even touching the surface on that one, but I started feeling nauseous.
All the while we were focusing our efforts on what was already there, smart new designs came and went, because they weren't backwards compatible.
Great new designs have been researched, which would help the totally different demands of computing today. But still people cling to what they know, and prefer to hang on to what they have no matter how much extra work it'll take in the long run.
Why is this? So we can run software from the 80's? Modern versions of Windows won't. Linux will, but what is the use, seeing that practically everything has been rewritten since anyhow?
The reason not for switching to something new is not to rewrite the software, but that's happening continuously anyhow, so why would that be a problem?
What's holding us back then? To put it in Slashdot terms I think it's FUD. Not the technique, but the feelings themself. Human nature.
We pretty much like it better the older it gets, no matter how many wrinkles and scars it accumulates.
Happy Birthday, PC and Linux.
We love you more each year.
Sunnyvale? Isn't that sitting directly on top of a fat hunking Hellmouth...?
A word can paint a thousand pictures
I can imagine thousands of dot-com 3733T 4AK3RZ trying to network to find jobs!
Geeks go fucking crazy when surrounded by even a dozen people. How the hell do you think they'll react when surrounded by a DOZEN THOUSAND at a LINUX RAVE? Good god, at least let them hang out in the cool-down room. There aren't *too* many people in those.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
what's wrong with read, write, and ioctl?
er, OK forget ioctl, what's wrong with read/write?
Linux is just more proof shit does not sell.
Well, actually...
I get dips on spanking the kernel!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
What do you get for the kernel that already has everything?
Lotsa birthdays coming up! Be sure you don't miss these high-tech celebrations:
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