Slashdot Mirror
Is Linux At the End of Its Life Cycle?
Glyn Moody writes "That's what Nikolai Pryanishnikov, president of Microsoft Russia, seems to think. Quoted in the context of continuing questions about Russia's plans to create its own national operating system based on GNU/Linux, Pryanishnikov said [via Google Translate]: 'We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is at the end of its life cycle.' An off-the-cuff comment, or something more?"
I have an earnest question:
What percentage of the original Linux codebase remains in place today as it was in 1991?
And what percentage of Windows 95 (a ground-up rewrite, from what I understand) remains now?
By your logic, marketshare % == hacking attempts %. You do realize that many servers run Linux right? According to Forrester Research 48% of businesses surveyed used OSS. If Linux represents even half of that then at least 24% of businesses use Linux. That would mean 24% of all exploits would have to be targetting Linux. Funny I don't see 24% of botnets being written for Linux. The vast, vast majority are written for Windows.
Also hackers do it for the glory or for money. If they are after money, then they would target financial institutions. Also they attack the weakest point. So far hackers target customers of these institution who use Windows, not the servers themselves that use Linux or Unix or whatever. Maybe because Linux servers are harder to compromise than Windows desktops?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Quite honestly, I don't have much experience with autotools. There are two reasons: what little I've seen looks, at first glance, as a nightmare, and, as a user, the experience is horrible. Specifically, autotools is slow . These days I spend more time ./configuring than I do actually compiling, especially with distcc (./configure not being parallelizable). Even worse, sometimes I need to rebuild all of the scripts due to some patch, and that adds even more time to an already ridiculously inefficient process. I mean, seriously, why do I need to check for a C compiler, determine the maximum length of commandline arguments, and figure out if I have 20 system headers and 30 libc functions every time I want to compile a package?
Meanwhile, CMake is a hell of a lot faster, uses a more modern language, and can integrate better with other build environments. I've used CMake for a couple of projects and, although the language does have its quirks, it's mostly been smooth sailing. Where I don't use/need CMake, I use simple Makefiles.
So no, I'm not in a position of familiarity with both systems to be able to do a detailed objective comparison as a developer, but as a user I can clearly say CMake is much superior (at least the way it is used by actual projects), and as a developer I can at least say CMake is nice. Several large projects have migrated from autotools to CMake, and I bet they had a good reason.
Meanwhile, most small projects using autotools only appear to be using them because "it's what everyone else uses" and don't really understand them. Maybe autotools is great if you're an autotools guru, but it's still slow, and most people aren't going to invest the time to properly learn a system based on arcane tools. As far as I'm concerned, it's the CVS of build systems - sure, it kind of works works, but honestly, I'd rather either use a modern DVCS or stick with tarballs and patches (bare Makefiles).
Why do you persist in lying about what socialism is?
Money is the 'product of your body?!?' You crap money? Amazing. Money is a social construct, meaningless without social agreement. The ability to amass and preserve a surplus is not an individual ability, it is an emergent phenomenon enabled by the agreement of a society to honor money. Without society, money is meaningless.
In a true socialist state, no one can force anyone to do anything, unlike a capitalist state, where those with capital control and dominate those without. If you are poor, and lack education (something capitalist overlords work to ensure, so you will be a more malleable slave) then you are a slave. Kiss masters ass or die of starvation, and master will work to ensure that any attempt by the peasants to band together to protect their interests and provide for themselves is derided as "socialism." Indeed, mutual benefit societies (A.K.A "The State") are inherently evil, and ruthless selfishness is a virtue.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Your writing makes very little sense.
First, about the Amish: you don't need to deal with money to be required to pay money to the government for taxes. Even if you use the barter system for everything, the IRS requires you to pay taxes based on the market value of the goods and services you trade. So, for instance, if you agree with your neighbor to fix his car in exchange for him mowing your lawn for a month, you and he both are required to determine the Dollar amount this transaction is worth, and count it as income on both your tax returns, and pay taxes on it. Of course, in reality, no one does that, but the law is the law. It's easy for people working normal jobs to get away with not reporting this stuff, since they already have tons of thousands of dollars in regular W-4 income, but if someone appears to be making a good living (like with a farm), but isn't reporting any income or paying any taxes, the IRS generally takes a dim view of that. How (or if) the Amish get away with not paying taxes, I have no idea.
Now for the rest of your argument, it makes no sense. You're talking about some kind of exchange for living in society; what exchange are you talking about? The previous poster was talking about the common criticism of Marxism which is that everyone seems to receive the same income (or at least some guaranteed minimum income), whether or not they feel like working, and that this system is unsustainable. What is your response to that charge?
And then of course you go off on some nonsensical rant about capitalism and fellatio. Sorry, but that's not capitalism at all; capitalism is when people are able to control capital and use it to invest in industry. Of course, in the most successful capitalist societies (which I would argue are the Western European nations), there's strong governmental controls over the market to make sure that things don't get out of control, and companies aren't allowed to grow too large and become too powerful. Capitalism and free-market economies work best when the playing field is level, so to speak, companies aren't allowed to grow too large and powerful, and the rules are tilted in favor of smaller competitors rather than larger incumbents.
The Soviet experiment showed why Marxism and planned centralized economies simply don't work, and North Korea is still trying to make it work, to no avail. China however gave up on it, and now that they have a free(r) market, they're quite successful, even though they never gave up the authoritarian government part.