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Sun's President Dreams of a Linux Future
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story analyzing the recent Sun-Microsoft deal. What's especially interesting is the ending. Sun recently promoted Jonathan Schwartz to President and Chief Operating Officer, recognizing the need for radical change if the company is to survive. According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!"
It's called 'keeping up to date':
.ttf's into ~/fonts/ and they were there.
:)
1. Find its fonts without having to edit the XF86Config file 189 times and install some half-working font server for the other three fonts.
Funny, I just dropped some
2. Upgrade Gnome and KDE applications without having to install yet ANOTHER version of glibc. That or statically link everything and quit pursuing dynamically-linked utopia. I think there's enough disk space now.
Windows dynamically links, and includes the dependancies in the download package. Systems like apt-get will get the deps, or if you get the packages from a physical media (I usually get stuff of a mags dvd), then the deps are usually there too.
3. Have a file manager that isn't linked to every single library on the system, so that if one library is upgraded/replaced, it doesn't make the file manager useless.
Opps, KDE and Gnome have very good file-managers with extra plugins for file previews. No problems there either
4. Make it so these problems can be fixed without changing distributions.
Done
Lets so if people can:
1. Stop whining and be more helpful.
puts ("Python r0cks\n");
RTFA! Schwartz wants Sun to become a software company and thus make money off software, not hardware. Thus he wants to sell his software on commodity hardware running a free OS, but a not-quite free office suite (Star Office.)
Fontconfig. 'Nuff said
Wrong. Stock install of just about any distribution with the 2.4 kernel. Gnome applications can't see all the necessary fonts. Most crash. Only way to fix it: edit the XF86Config file to have the correct font paths, then spend another 2-3 days debugging. With that, you might have 70% working fonts. It's worse if KDE is the default desktop.
You can't even install multiple versions of glibc.
My point exactly.
Which file manager are you talking about?
Nautilus, Konqueror, for starters.
Item 5: Stop making problems the user's fault. Let's just fix them. The reason Windows (and Mac) keeps eating Linux's lunch on the desktop is because these (very simple) problems never seem to get fixed.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Given that "Sun's Linux" is currently SuSE, and Sun gave up a previous attempt to create their own distro, I think you're a bit more worried than is really warranted. And who, besides Debian, distributes a completely free as in speech OS anyway? Not SuSE. I don't think RedHat. Who then?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Where have you been for the last 15 years? SPARC has always been an open, licensable processor architecture, which is why Fujitsu makes a competing SPARC implementation. Just because we don't want to give it away for free doesn't mean it's not licensable.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Fontconfig not working for you in KDE sure is strange I have been using it for over a year now in debian sid.
/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file there are NO fontpath entries and there have not been for over a year. Since its introduction and kde supporting it fontconfig has worked pretty much flawlessly for me. There where a few buggy packages in debian sid where the font cache did not get updated correctly and you had to run fc-cache but it has been months since that has been a problem.
In my
I compile almost nothing on my systems except for the code that I am working on. I use a debian system because it has just worked for me however I have also used knoppix and recent versions of Mandrake and I have NEVER seen the issues you are talking about. Actually I have not seen library issues of any kind on linux sine redhat 5.2 or so many years ago and I have used many versions.
I have not seen libc issues in a long time on redhat, mandrake, suse, debian, knoppix, etc.
Overall it seems to be cool to knock linux and while it does have issues it would be better if you stuck to real issues that existed. If you are compiling all this software yourself then you should probably stop until you learn how to compile software correctly.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
You, my friend, have given evidence by that statement that you do not have Clue 1
There are a lot of things that " huge, expensive Sun servers" can do that commodity Windows boxes couldn't dream about on the best day they ever had.
disk I/O, multi proc sclability, OS hardening (Trusted Solaris)
I could go on
There is a damn good reason why Sun boxes are still deployed, and will continue to be deployed, in critical environments.
They just work. All the time.
And I for one thank the Powers That Be that *my* bank is smart enough to realize this.
Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana.
"MS-SQL is a piece of shit, everyone knows that. If they use it in their filesystem they will kill performance and negate any stability increases they have had in the past 5 years."
I don't know that. I used to know that, until I spend some time working with MS-SQL2k, Oracle 8, 9, and 10, and PostgreSQL 7.3 and 7.4. I've done installation, admin, and same-hardware performance benchmarking on all of those platforms now, from a standing start in each case (I had a lot of networking and Unix experience, but no real DBA experience).
MS-SQL took a couple of days to install, patch and test, returning the best numbers of the entire set. PostgreSQL installed quickly, but it took a couple of weeks to learn how to tune it. After that two weeks of hard work, it was just as fast as MS-SQL in controlled conditions. However, it still has weird problems: sometimes it will refuse to use indexes on tables that have grown rapidly, and some nested condition queries can be created which completely choke its optimizer. One in particular took two and half minutes on MS, but was still looping after 14 hours on PG 7.4 when I gave up and killed the query.
All versions of Oracle took days to install, and I found tuning information to be very difficult to find and comprehend via free or paid-for resources (Google, O'Reilly and OTN in that order). 8i was unable to even complete my performance tests without dying due to fragmentation problems. 9i and 10g were able to complete the tests, but at half the speed of MS or PG. Perhaps if we'd hired a consultant they'd have been able to get better numbers, but no one was willing to pay to find out when we had two perfectly good platforms which cost much less.
Take a wild flier at which one of those three "supported platforms" gets recommended to customers who ask what to run the product on...
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I hired a DBA to do some similar tests and came to similar conclusions.
* MSSQL exceeded expectations, and if it only ran on a server we could easily ssh to, it would have been the best choice
* PostgreSQL good once the (at least well documented on the net) black magic of tuning shared memory, sort memory, 'free space' memory, and vacuum stuff was figured out
* Oracle - pain to set up (installation failed if you followed their docs to the letter - but DBA new the tricks) - Was dog-slow until tuned - but evntually after tuning slightly outperformed the others.
* MySQL's SQL syntax was a bit too nonstandard for us to port the test to.
Once tuned, they all performed similarly (not surprising, since they all can do merge joins, nested loops, etc; and they all can use as much memory as you tell them to).
But the surprise to me was the MSSQL was friendliest "out of the box".