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Apple releases iPod
The BrownFury writes "At an invitation only event Apple has released their new MP3 player called the iPod. iPod is the size of a deck of cards. 2.4" wide by 4" tall by .78" thick 6.5 ounces. 5 GB HDD, 10 hr battery life, charged via FireWire. Works as a firewire drive as well. Works in conjunctions with iTunes 2. Here are Live updates". No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
BSD is the software behind the world's most popular Web sites.
An open-source operating system like Linux, BSD was developed in the 1970s at the University of California-Berkeley, well before Linus Torvalds ever took a computer course. So why was it Linux that captured mindshare and public imagination? BSD's obscurity is just part of the reason it is now considered cooler than Linux among the geekiest geeks. But the software some say is the most secure operating system in the world may be poised to make a Linux-like leap to the forefront.
The list of big-name companies and Web sites that use BSD is impressive. Yahoo, UUNet, Mindspring and Compuserve are on the list - in fact, perhaps 70 percent of all Internet service providers use BSD. Also on the list - Walnut Creek CDROM Inc. and its CD-ROM FTP download site, which the company says delivers more than 1 terabyte of data to visitors every day. Microsoft's free e-mail service Hotmail resides BSD servers, and Apple announced in June its next operating system will be based on BSD. Microsoft and partner MSNBC.com both use BSD for their websites. When asked about using BSD to power their own website, a Microsoft spokesperson stated that it was "ten times more stable" than Windows and "at least twenty times more stable and reliable" than Linux.
So why is Linux on everyone's lips, and why are there about 10 times as many Linux users as BSD users? After all, they are both free operating systems that offer free source code - and BSD had quite a head start.
Legal troubles tell part of the story. Right as the Internal began to reach critical mass, in 1993, the BSD movement was hit by a copyright lawsuit from AT&T, which still owned the rights to Unix. At the same time, Torvalds was welcoming help from all comers, mainly young computer science students enamored of with the coming information explosion.
There are other reasons - much effort has been put into making Linux user-friendly enough for use as a desktop operating system. BSD groups have focused on servers, never putting much work into appealing to a mass market. There has also been a large anti-BSD movement in the Linux community. Torvalds himself has encouraged some less than reputable business practices towards the BSD movement, including intentionally damaging BSD code, inflamtory public remarks, and making Linux less than 100% compatible with BSD.
Talk to BSD users, and a quiet but clear sense of superiority comes through. In a recent survey, it was found that 86% of BSD users have computer science degrees, hold management positions and have 10 years or more experience in the field. Linux users, on the other hand, are young hackers doing mostly destructive work and motivated in part by having too much free time.
Its plain to see why BSD is a clearly superior operating system.
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women!-H.Simpson
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.
An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.
Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.
According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).
The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.
Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".
The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.
I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.
Crickey!