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NetBSD gets New sysctl Infrastructure
jschauma writes "NetBSD's Andrew Brown has committed a complete rewrite of the kernel's sysctl infrastructure. To test these changes, he cross compiled 150 kernels for 30 architecures to see where some problems might come up. Additional information can be found in Andrew's email to current-users."
That's dedication. Kudos.
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
FIRST POST!!!!!!!!! Mua ha ha ha ha.
Get yours now! Only $11.50!
Linux is desitned to fail because it's created by a team of chinese hac... oh wait. Wrong thread.
*ahem*
BSD is dying!
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
I was going to say "Slashdot: ripping off Advogato content since 2002", but then I realised "jschauma" was credited to the Slashdot story, so he can hardly be accused of ripping off himself.
Slashdot lets subscribers have first dibs on stories, but it seems you can get to them from the "old stories" link anyway...
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
The Year of Our Lord 2003 has been a particularly bad year for the "B"s,
- Bob Hope
- Buddy Ebsen
- Buddy Hackett
- Barry White
- BSD
This honored list of dead is but a small token of adieu from the many fans of the deceased.These dead were truly some American Icons. They will be missed.
Thanks for shedding more light on the *BSD jauggernaut. Very informative.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Thanks for moderating this up.. Very good info on that trash OS BSD.
Part I: Adoration of the Earth
- Introduction
- Auguries of Spring (Dances of the Young Girls)
- Mock Abduction
- Spring Khorovod (Round Dance)
- Games of the Rival Clans
- Procession of the Wise Elder
- Adoration of the Earth (the Wise Elder)
- Dance of the Earth
Part II: The SacrificeI must make it clear that:
1) *BSD is associated with the Devil (see mascot).
2) *BSD promotes anti-social behaviour.
3) *BSD encourages a homosexual lifestyle.
4) *BSD stands for destruction of the economy.
5) *BSD attacks the average man in the street.
6) *BSD allows no critisms of its mission.
7) *BSD harbours terrorists and other state enemies.
8) *BSD collects weapons of mass destruction.
9) *BSD believes in the enprisionment of mankind.
10) *BSD is dying.
I am sure the OpenBSD developers will check it out and add it if it makes sense to them, without affecting security. I recall they had to add sysctl variables for pf, which is what makes thing brittle to change.
Kudus, that is a lot of dedication!
Comment
This guy should be a spokesman for BSD. He has all the attributes. He is a whiner. He blames others for his own failures. He is deluded. He is ugly. This chump should receive the "BSD Lifetime Achievement" award. He is a loser. Mister BSD.
Feeling my balls full and being incredibly horny, I posted a message this morning in a Yahoo group looking for a hookup:
Horny MWM looking to give oral to a lady, with no reciprocity required. I am alone today through tomorrow night, so if you need some attention write me privately and we can hook up.
I had never had any success meeting anyone, so I had no expectations of meeting someone. But, the idea I might kept me extra horny throughout the morning. I checked my email at lunch, and I found a reply. It was short, giving her name (Terry) and suggesting I call her cell phone.
I dialed the number anxiously, feeling like the number was familiar. Terry answered, and asked if I was serious about the no-reciprocity thing. Feeling even more anxious (but sporting a boner), I told her I was. I offered to let her bring a friend if that would make her feel safer, but she just chuckled. She also told me that we had to be done by 5:00, since her husband would return then.
After talking about expectations, we arranged to meet at a Taco Bell not far from my house. I didn't spare the horses to get there by the arranged time. In fact, I arrived 10 minutes early. I bought myself a soda water, and settled down to wait. I wanted to observe Terry when she arrived.
My town has 75,000 people in it, but it never fails that I meet someone I know. Five minutes before I was to meet Terry, the team mom from my son's soccer team came in. Brenda was always standoffish (I wasn't in her clique), but after some visible decision-making, she came over to say hi.
Besides her aloof manner, I found Brenda attractive. She was 40-ish, like me, but was toned. She ran a couple miles every day and played indoor soccer on a co-ed team. Her face was pretty enough, with the start of tiny life-lines. Her eyes were her best feature. They were a pale blue color, nicely shaped and sparkly.
When she walked over, she looked particularly good. I had never seen her wear makeup, but she was doing so today. Her shoulder-length blonde hair was arranged with a variety of trendy flips, which stroked my fetish-y hot button (I loved her center part and heavy bangs). She was wearing a tennis outfit.
"Hi Brenda," I said as she walked over. "Howya doing?" I tried not to act suspiciously, but I was obviously in the wrong place for a man who should be at work.
"Hi Clem," she said, crossing her arms. I expected her next words to be questioning what I was doing, or where Perra (my wife) was. Instead, we talked about the blizzard in Denver, and how that was affecting the soccer team. She had reminded us last night that we had a scrimmage on the weekend, and I told her my son wouldn't be there. Now she told me several other team mates were also stuck in the blizzard.
It was interesting, but I couldn't help looking at my watch several times. Terry would be arriving soon. Finally, Brenda picked up on my attention to the time.
"Meeting someone?" she asked.
"Yeah, I am supposed to meet, uh," my mind raced, looking for an excuse, "a lady from my church." Then, I hoped to divert her attention by going on the offensive. "So, you meeting someone too?"
She suddenly looked alarmed. I got the impression that my "innocent" question was to be answered with a lie. "Yeah, Dennis and I are thinking about redecorating, and I am interviewing a painter in a safe place."
"Why doesn't Dennis interview him with you?" I asked. Dennis was her husband, and a pompous jerk.
"He took the kids to A&M for a baseball game," she told me.
What are the benefits to having this new sysctl infrastructure?
Listen. That gurgling sound you hear? That is the death rattle in *BSD's throat.
Boy, that looks like moderation is working for me. But, perhaps there was some lag in this effect. Also, I give a -1 Anonymous modifier. You might try it. (Granted, it would be valuable if modifiers and thresholds could be made per section or dependent on the number of comments, but beggars can't be choosers.)
The issue, I believe, is that troll patrol is done in large amounts by the slashdot admins who have infinite moderator points. As was shown in the early days of Slashdot, one admin with infinite mod points per 100 users spread across 10 articles is sufficient. The same works for the small sections like Developer and BSD. It just takes more lag time for admin to notice these things in small sections because they're concentrating on more highly commented stories. Once more, as you noted, there are less people with mod points reading. So, as near as I can tell, the system works, albeit maybe a little more slowly than you like.
Now, then there's your reaction. To be honest, the grandparent post was mildly humorous. Since I don't see many troll posts, I don't know if these is a unique post, or just another unoriginal copy and paste. The reason it was made, however, in either case, is because of people -- well -- like you. You're reacting strongly to a stupid post of relatively little significance which most people won't see. The post offends you and raises your ire. But consider the lack of talent required to make such a post and how little effect it truly has. It's a dying joke that anyone who reads Slashdot has seen before in some form or another.
If that doesn't help you, consider this strategy: give anonymous posters -6. Give foes -6. Foe logged in trolls. You won't see trolls. But, as always, please don't feed the trolls.
You really want to be paranoid? For EVERY time someone metamods you as unfair, even if everyone else mods you as fair, you lose karma. Don't believe me? Check out metamod.pl in the CVS. Now if that makes you uncomfortable, I think you lack perspective. If you're not a troll yourself and have useful things to say, your karma will recover. And that second part isn't wholly necessary.
Trolls exist because some guys just plain don't have the right chemical balance in their brains, and they will always be that way. They can destroy a community if not properly regulated because to be a troll is to simply not see value in that community. But it looks to me that they are being properly regulated on Slashdot. Consider that it only takes one active non-troll moderator on average to cancel the effects of an active troll moderator. How many active troll moderators do you think there are? How about non-trolls like you and me? The bad thing is that in individual cases, someone might be poorly treated by the system, but I don't see any reason for your prediction of chaos. System works fine for me, on average.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
Somewhere, in a lonely hospital room,
*BSD is dying
Bored with mindless groupthink?
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Join the jihad today!YHBT!
- deal with the inevitable.
- grieve for your loss.
- move on.
Never let your emotions get mixed up with something as silly as a computer operating system. It isn't healthy. So BSD fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on.Hope this helps.
Elegy For *BSD
I am a *BSD user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
*BSD's foot is in the grave.
I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a happy tune
but keeping happy's so hard,
*BSD died so soon.
Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but *BSD is dying.
If you read his message he compiled but he didn't test them.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
It is practically universal knowledge that *BSD is dying. Indeed *BSD is hopelessly mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimize doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.