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Thompson Critical of Linux
Shuga-Buga writes "Ken Thompson, father of Unix,
has some critical things to say about Linux. Otherwise an interesting article. "
(CT:Sorry about the unsteady posting. Hemos is on vacation,
and I'm moving so things are really crazy right now)
No offense folks, but is this comment about Linux a real surprise. The guy is good, but he IS WORKING on another operating system. So it would not be to his advantage to say that Linux is the next and greatest thing.
Yes he is right that Linux is riding on the "not Microsoft" trend. But that does that really matter? Linux is Linux because it meets the needs of the masses. DOS was not the greatest thing on this planet and look where it is.
The point of software development is not to be the greatest or purest or etc. It is to meet the needs of their users. And it would seem X million people have decided that it does!!!
Sounds like Ken's got some sour grape issues because Plan 9 hasn't taken off like Linux, Inferno sucks, and he doesn't have his hands all over the source lining up for another award no one wants. Get outta the way Ken, yer time is over!
His company (Lucent) makes Inferno. They compete directly with Linux in a number of areas and have a lot to gain by using their leverage to apply ample amount of FUD to the Linux phenomenon.
I think Linux needs to move to a microkernel model - make the divisions of code explicit. The code base is getting too large to manage.
If you put Linux on vanilla hardware, it works really great. If you start putting in Adaptec SCSI controllers, oddball video cards, etc., Linux' vaunted reliability goes down the toilet. Linux is only as reliable as its device drivers.
Maybe peripheral manufacturers will soon start explicitly supporting Linux (yes, I know some are already). When that happens, Linux will have the possibility of becoming truly reliable.
some people like a minimal system and building it up with make. some people like having 6 cd's full of kitchen sinks. a personal preference thing i think.
So, you are saying that the converse is not true?
done a better job with Thompson's own idea
I read the article a while ago so I may be misrembering but I thought Thompson said that most of the ideas he lifted from other places. Why would he have an emotional investment in other people's ideas?
While I greatly admire what he has accomplished,
I think his comments are due to bitterness. UNIX has been losing sales to Linux and his current projects haven't gotten that much attention.
He said he read the source and he claimed the OS was unreliable. However, he didn't point out even a single example of why it was unreliable or where the problems lie.
This type of lame attack can only blemish his once great reputation.
It's that unreliable. I didn't believe it either, but it's true: Linux did kill my dog.
Let's see.. it's an interview with a creator of Unix. and Linux is mentioned about.. twice?
No, Ken wrote Unix. MS wrote their own version of Unix and called it Xenix.
He doesn't work for a commercial UNIX vendor, and I don't think he cares about sales. I can't believe I see posts screaming "FUD! FUD!".
I agree, we've had many problems with 2.0.x NFS client machines doing strange things and crashing under heavy loads. NFS is definitely not one of linux's strongpoints.
Look, the guy can't spell "create" properly; he's allowed to get a few things wrong now and then. I'd get a little fuzzy headed working in New Jersey too.
If AT&T had any clue about the software market way back when, there would have been no MS monopoly as the target of a backlash. If they had made an affordable desktop UNIX, we would not be discussing this because there would be no Linux.
14 days is *nothing*. My server has been up for 195 days, without a problem.. and that's also *nothing*. It doesn't matter. Everybody is going on and on about end user stuff.. I highly doubt Thompson is interested in that. He writes operating systems.. he thinks in a very low level way. Don't bother saying that "Linux has support for XYZ".. it doesn't matter. He's not talking about that at all.
The guy is trying to question the stability of Linux relative to Windows of all things. Of course many of us find that rather 'irregular'. He's also trying to question Linux as a non-PC solution when it is actually proving itself in serious computation.
He may be 'the progenitor' but, everyone else seems to be successfull doing real work with this OS that he's discounting.
Sounds like a classic case of sour grapes.
C'mon, who's ever used Plan 9 other than a handfull of academics?
Critical mass, people.
That's what it's all about.
BeOS is much cooler than Linux, also far from mature... but the underlying design is really more modern (not mentionning it is really cool to use :-) . X-Window is especially a piece of crap compared to the BeOS graphic system. (do I smell flames ? sorry but if you have ever tried to play 8 quicktime movies at the same time on both X-windows and BeOS you know what I mean).
Then why don't you *wait* until it is stable enough for *your* use? The fact is that not everybody needs a rock stable kernel. They are willing to live with something less and thus help find the bugs which eventually results is a more stable kernel like 2.0.36.
This was certainly a strange comment for him to make.
He sounds like my aging grandpa.
"These kids these days!"
Has he ever used Windows before?
Are we living on the same planet?
How the f@#$ could you score the post -1 ??? Because it hurt? I was f$#@ing heart-broken when I read the quote; but it happened. Don't try to bury it! We need to get guys like Ken on board; we can't do it by censoring unpopular remarks.
damm can't believe I am wasting my bandwidth replying to this.
Have you heard the term 'eye of the beholder'
Otherwise I agree the article was v.interesting
You're right. stagnant, crufty, fragmented, and too expensive, but definitely NOT dying.
pfft. Microsoft? Try Al Gore, Father of Unix.
Get it straight!
Ken hasn't contributed to free software.
He owes his livlihood to Bell Labs and is still very paternalistic over UNIX.
Despite what he's invented in the past, this does not give him the right to trivialize a software revolution just because he's not a part of it (this time).
. . . you'd understand that without having to ask.
Next?
Isn't that the name of some *joke* film from the 60's or something?
Damn, that's what I LIKED about UNIX!
Ken said that Linux was "worse" than Windows. Come on guys, that rather sticks out as a sore thumb.
The rest of his interview was rather interesting though.
There are many things I'd like to be different (like real protection between tasks, much like a user having more than one - really useful for untrusted binaires (typo on purpose) ). So I plan on doing it on top of Linux and then move it to a real OS kernel.
Intel has fooled you into believing that PC is equivalent to intel inside. No, PC means Personal Computer.
I believe Ken is saying that Linux belongs on the desktop just as much as Windows does, and that it is not suitable for server, embedded, etc use.
What the heck, this is an insightful comment! Everybody forgets Microsoft's Xenix (back from the start of the 80's)! The time I found out about it was while reading /etc/magic for the file command (it has some Xenix bits there, and the comment said more about it).
Please moderate him _up_.
There was an older version of glibc2.1 (I believe) that didn't upgrade properly (ld-linux.so hung onto a reference to something in the root partition).
The net result was that if you upgraded glibc via RPM, you couldn't umount the root partition at shutdown. Maybe this is what he is talking about.
Then again, seeing as on Slashdot he has been a source of anti-linux FUD, I would be inclined to ignore what he says unless he bothers explaining these so called problems enough for anyone to repeat them or get them fixed.
Then I suppose quoting real-life uptime statements for mission critical NT systems can influence your opinion. But I have the feeling it won't.
You must practice what you preach.
Don't you understand? The patch goes out even _before_ the bug hits you! It happened to me at least five times (with exploits and the occasional random bug): I saw in the patches fixes to bugs that could have wedged my machine, if they had enough time to hit! It's a simple matter of probability!!!
BTW, we _really_ need that damn hairy on-place kernel update. Making all your procs pause for 2 secs is nothing; it will look like the net got overflowed. But killing all procs _and_ having to reboot (loose uptime? Nah - I need no stinking uptime figures!) is irritating - like a squid pausing for 35secs because of the reboot, and that's just one of the minor hassles.
This is the general 'hard upgrade problem' : zero-downtime in-place upgrade.
Fine 0.5.0 has been stable for well over a year, that is to say, it works and it works well. Buddy boy. uClinux is fine too, check it out at http://ryeham.ee.ryerson.ca/uClinux uCsimm is a work in progress, and doing quite well. Buddy boy.
But you did'nt intend to offend, did you, buddy boy.
Jeff.
OK, it only exercised the bug-free 75%-of-the-time 2%-of-the-code part. Try to make it do something unusual. Like doing a scandisk and opening a DOS prompt while it is fixing a problem.
Don't laugh - I clobbered a friend's HD doing that - my Linux bad habit of doing everything at the same time because it's so stable made me forgot under Windoze you have to wait.
Sorry, not my intention. I posted the original
article, I titled the thing. I did this because
it seemed to me that this is what most slashdot
readers would glom onto in the article. So, if
I had said something like, "Thompson speaks on
Development", discriminating readers would have
read the thing, latched onto the very small
section where Thompson vents on Linux, and
escalated it into the main topic. I just saved
Slashdot the time and tailored my post to my
expectations of slashdot reader interest.
> I rarely see a Linux uptime greater than a month whereas with the systems listed above, it is just expected.
:) Actually, the idea behind a lot of the GNU utilities is that bigger memory footprints are worth simpler code and increased speed, something which I entirely agree with.
:)
here's one for you, then:
[root@wwwlinux root]# uptime
6:43pm up 381 days, 20:45, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.02, 0.00
WWW server / DNS master / mailing list server.
Running Linux 2.0.32 + nestea patch.
(I'm mostly surprised that there haven't been any power outages during the last year that the UPS couldn't handle!)
> Linux, specifically GNU, utilities redefine bloat.
They are, however, almost entirely POSIX compliant- something you can't say about the stuff that comes with BSD
> I have never seen a Linux distribution that came with full source that could be rebuilt with one command, something all the BSDs support.
Yggdrasil. http://www.yggdrasil.com/
Nevertheless, I prefer binary packages.
> On my Linux 2.2.x systems, it fails to properly unmount its drives.
Have you asked the kernel-list or any other mailing lists for advice? Could you point us to your newsgroup postings where you described the problem so it could be fixed?
> I also enjoy it when it simply quits responding to IP packets for a while.
Did you pull out the ethernet cable, or are you using a polled SCSI controller from the 1980s?
> I never see BSD systems broken into.
There are fewer BSD machines out there and fewer people bother to write exploits for BSD. Stuff like the stupid IMAP server bugs existed in every OS they ran on, BSD, Linux, or whatever.
There are simply more vulnerable Linux machines running due to the popularity of x86 Linux. (there are plenty of old vulnerable versions of FreeBSD in use, too, but the script kiddies are too lazy to go after them)
> And why do so many of the Linux commands ship without documentation or manpages?
Linux distributions contain more software than BSD systems, and the documentation exists in various forms. (not all of it is in man format)
I agree that a few more man pages should be written for Linux, though.
Yeah right, linux is to unix what formula 1 cars are to Model T. Linux is more like whatever-car-ford-made-after-model-t compared to the original unix. Go and read an good book about operating systems before you make a fool of your self, kid.
J.
I like Linux, but I hate the Linux community....
420 is one semi-secret way for potheads to identify other potheads.
You see it a lot in places like in movies, for example the clock will happen to be set to 4:20, there are other similar references here and there.
One of those self-feeding things; the more people know about it, the more often it shows up.
PAC is another perceptual compression alg, not that much better than MP3, what is better is AC3 which rolls the best parts of PAC and MP3 into a tight little bundle...
Linux had a great begining. It was promising. But then (around 93) Linus & co. started to think themselves as the best thing on earth after Jesus.
1) Tanenbaum was right in that email battle 1.2.x linux CDs used to get (ironically they presented it as poor old Tanenbaum)
2) Source code is REALLY ugly. compilers should be linux wise, and not the other way (as it should)
3) the only great thing linux has now is wide driver base.
4) GNU is really more important gcc, userland, etc.
5) BSD was an will be more important too. networking, internals, etc.
6) the code really needs a LOT of change to compile & run on other plataform.
The anti-microsoft concept is not true at face value in my case. I work on IRIX, HPUX, SunOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and Win32 (Win95, Win98, WinNT) daily (well, not daily, usualy one OS per day). The software I work on runs on all of these. On Win32 days I get a splitting headache. It is like for every design decision microsoft took the suboptimal choice (if UNIX took the optimal) so that they may be able to dominate and control with something they could differentiate. Our Win32 code is basicly one giant swath of workarounds to get Win32 to do things simple clean and optimal.
HOW CAN HE BE A TROLL HE IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT OPEN SOURCE/FREE SOFTWARE EVANGELISTS!!!
*BSD is much more code-clean than linux.
This is a fact. Believe it or not - look at the
code if you don't.
NetBSD's motto is "We don't ship software until it's ready." (Well, something like that.)
Yes, but has *he* looked at the sources?
It's already been done, it's called VSTa.
It's like plan9 + qnx (microkernel).
It' been around for quite a few years, but develops very slowly because not many open-sourcers are interested in it. It's the same windows vs. linux thing: there's a lot more software for unix, it's usable now. Unix has plenty of ugly annoying features, but works well enough right now to do useful stuff. Hopefully X will be replaced eventually, but it's amazing how long it's hung on.
So new OSes like plan9 and VSTa have a lot of trouble "breaking in." It seems to have very little to do with age, it's not like distributed systems and microkernels are a new idea, but just that operating systems become very entrenched with all the weight of the software on top of them.
I'm more interested in higher-level languages and abstractions that make all the software more independent of the operating system, which is what Inferno + Limbo is sort of like.
It's referenced fairly heavily in Rushdie's Satanic Verses. In Indian slang, con men are sometimes known as 420s after the Indian penal code section they get charged under. A very popular Indian movie was called Sri 420, or "Mr. 420". In the novel, there's a plane which is blown up (a reference to the real Air India bombing some years ago), and Rushdie gives his doomed plane the flight number AI420.
And y'all thought arts majors were useless....
rcousine@sfu.ca
> 3) the only great thing linux has now is wide driver base.
Wich doesn't mean, that linux supports every device wich *BSD supports. And in many cases the *BSD drivers are better than their Linux-counterparts. I know some examples of that...
And: You should buy hardware to fit your needs so this doesn't really matter for most cases. Support for some exotic soundcards is not a very big win IMHO...
> 6) the code really needs a LOT of change to compile & run on other plataform.
Linux was not designed to be portable. You can't see any good seperation of MI/MD parts in the source. That's why portmasters often have to "reinvent the wheel" and non-i386 ports are not nearly as good or supported as i386 ones.
Thank you for thinking different. Now watch the Linux armed forces marching in lockstep trying to discredit you. You've been a true eye-opener to me.
I think this is similar to the famous argument (or should I say discusion) between Tanebaum and Torvalds about the relitive merits of Linux and Minix. Minix is ment more as a teaching tool and a theoretical statement of the merits of micro kernel operating system design, whereas Linux is ment to work. Thompson has far too much of a theoretical point of veiw.
But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
Last time I checked, Linux was being used in a lot more firewalls, gateways, embedded system, and so on, then any other unix variant... what gives? WatchGuard Technologies has much worse problems with the HARDWARE failing than with their embedded Linux! (And the hardware is fairly reliable.)
Could you please post a link here to the Mark Russinovich article?
I agree with you on the other points. Slashdot should become a place for all people interested in computers, not just Linux fanatics. The platform bias exhibited by Rob and most of the moderators is getting very annoying.
Well yeah.. all that and he writes intelligent, thoughtful, and generally informative posts. Those are all good enough reasons for me..
A movement that has somebody like Linus at it's healm is lame per definition. I've never seen a less awe-inspiring personality. Even Bill Gates has more charisma and wit.
I'll second that with gusto. I did my undergraduate in biochem at an Ivy League school and was constantly amazed by the complete lack of opportunity and compensation in the field. Growing bacteria for a living is not good work. Thank God for Linux and the exponential growth of computing power!
No, I think Ken Thompson needs to try to be sane here.
*NEVER* will I defer to anyone on the basis of credentials.
Neither should readers and posters at this forum be intimidated
by tactics like "how dare you disagree with this great man".
Some individuals may be blessed with talents to discover things,
but knowledge does not belong to anyone. It belongs to and
derives from God or something universal, and not to individuals
who may have been instrumental in bring certain knowledge or
techniques into focus through specific accomplishments. The
process *IS* evolutionary in that one person builds on the
past discoveries of others. Especially in software engineering.
None of this stuff comes out of thin air, and very little of it
came out of Ken Thompson's head or Dennis Ritchie's head.
Likewise, talented and creative people will build on thier
accomplishments and discoveries.
Further, Ken Thompson's statements in this interview about
Linux were clearly not motivated by rationality. Clearly the man
has some bitterness and some emotional issues to deal with.
He will regret those statements.
yours is "clearly rational", i assume?
criticism can be helpful - why so touchy? anyone saying something negative about linux is devil himself, eh?!
you deduce that the man has a mental problem because he says something lousy about linux?
boink.
If you're going to quote an excerpt, make it clear which words are yours and which aren't, fer chrissakes!
FreeBSD runs q3test under Linux emulation (not technically emulation since most of the code is ran as is)
What percentage of Linux users are losing work twice or more per month? Or per year, for that matter?
We did. Well, not actually lost data, but valuable time, because a Linux driven firewall kept crashing when subsidiaries sent us their monthly reports.
Obviously, the dataflow was too much for our firewall's network-card-driver (I love that word) and instead of dropping, it crashed.
Nice "black screen" though.
Using the same hardware, but now FreeBSD driven, everything works fine.
OK, it isn't UNIX. It is not unrelated though,
and I'm sure he'd like to see the same sort of
success for his new OS.
Being father of UNIX and saying that Linux is reliable than MS crap are two different things. In other word Ken is not god.
Well, compared to NT, Linux is worse. It's just Windows 9x that it's better than.
He may have wrote Unix but he didn't write Linux.
He "looked at the code" and saw that some was good and some was bad and implying that because a lot of people had a hand in it that it isn't so good.
I would like to know the definition of "bad" in this case. Is he saying that the "bad" code doesn't work or does he know of a more efficient way to write it. Maybe it just was formatted poorly for all we know.
If the code _works_ but isn't as efficient as it could be does that make linux poor? Hardly.
All modern operating systems are written by many people. Some of those coders are better than others so I don't see the distinction with linux.
The proof is in the pudding. Linux works well for me, it works well for many 10s/100s of thousands of machines that he says linux is no good for.
Hmmm. Did his version of unix never crash and not have _any_ poor code in it? Did he write it *all* and did he write it alone? I have no idea but to just spout "He WROTE unix" is as vague as his comments.
Steven.
I am so depressed; Programmer God Unix Creator Ken getting down on the New Big Thing. Man!
Don't forget that Slashdot is a commercial site. Taco and Hemos make money selling those banner ads, you know. Getting high hit counts brings in the $$$. And nothing gets the Linux crowd more rialed up than someone saying something negative about their baby. Almost as good is spreading yet-another Microsoft-is-evil conspiracy theory.
Therefore I don't think we'll see any journalistic integrity popping up around here anytime soon. The folks that run slashdot never even claimed to have any, much less show any, unless you take the "news for nerds" at face value.
The real question is how long before the linux community wakes up and realizes they're just being jerked around like puppets on a string for these guys commercial gain? And don't forget Jon Katz, who used slashdot as a soapbox to plug his latest book - and then had the gall to crow about it. I gave up expecting to find any real or objective news coverage here a long time ago. Now I just drop by when I need a laugh and check out all the cluelessness.
That's funny. I've had just the opposite experience. The Win32 code is clean, and it's the Unix code that is a big kludgy work-around. I suspect it call comes down to what you originally wrote the code for and which you later ported it to.
s/Linux/slashdot/
Linux is worse than Microsoft stuff. Take off your biasing blinders once is while.
Yea right, and I have a really good idea of using square tires for my car. Those round tires are sooo out of style!
Change for change sake is _bad_! Programming is not a fashion statement. I have used Linux for the past 7 years because it did the job with little fuss.
Linux is better because universities are using it as a stable base to allow graduate students to write their thesis on advanced computer topics.
We are faster on less hardware because we threw out most of the way things were done in the past and started fresh. We didn't have to worry about backwards compatiblity.
Any systems designer will tell you to start with a simple system that works and add to it.
Linux will run on a $100 used computer system and be more powerful than all the computers that we used to put a man on the moon.
Go check out the price tag on one of these "distributed everything" computer systems and then build yourself a Beowolf supercomputer that gives you ten times the performance at half the price.
I can understand an *unqualified* rating of ``unreliable'', but when you say that it's worse than Microsoft, that is plain out to lunch, credentials or not. Linux is orders of magnitude more reliable than Microsoft's flagship operating system
This is simply not true. NT's reliability is on par with Linux. What's never ceases to amaze me is how quickly the Linux crowd is to scream "FUD" whenever someone says something even slightly negative about Linux, but they're perfectly willing to make all sorts of unsubstantiated attacks against Microsoft. Doesn't anyone in the Linux camp have a shread of personal integrity?
by Mark Russinovich
http://it.ucg.ie/~micheal/ct861/nt-vs -unix.html
The biggest issue among Unix programmers a few years back was how much they hated the prospect of the shops they worked at switching to NT, and how sad it was that they'd have to go along with that. I don't hear much of that talk any longer.
No, and the reason you don't hear that any longer is because NT is now so much better than staying with Unix, people are happy to switch. The smart ones anyway.
It's not when anyone "unfavorably compares Linux", it's when someone says something so incredible and so amazingly provably FALSE, that it makes ones blood boil.
:I)
These sorts of comments from people like YOU, are exactly the kind of thing you're complaining about. Intense exaggeration. We've seen times when someone lays down some hard CONSTRUCTIVE criticism, and people discuss it. Yeah, some folks get their feathers ruffled, but when it's TRUE or at least provable to some extent, you'll find less fanaticism. (And of course, you just watch -- someone will prove me wrong.
Linux has an uphill battle to fight, and people invest lots of time and love into it. When we see things like "Linux has rarely an uptime of more than a week", which is a KNOWN PROVABLE FLASEHOOD, and coming from someone who carries a *LOT* of weight in the CS field, you can get an idea of how angry some folks can get.
Read Peter Salus' "A Quarter Century of UNIX"
Filesystem security in BeOS is NEI (Not Enabled Yet), but present indeed and will be enabled.
also, user and system files *are* partitioned.
Smart people at 30, once they turn 40+ have past their used by date and should stick to rearing up their kids
in 10 years, linux will be everywhere more,
in 10 years, people will say, Plan9? whats that? wasnt that the dead OS 3 year ago?
I agree that Ken Thompson's comments are valuable and that paying attention to the issues he makes assertions about is useful.
I would say "speak for yourself, asshole" but I agree with you...
> No, and the reason you don't hear that any
> longer is because NT is now so much better
> than staying with Unix, people are happy to
> switch. The smart ones anyway.
The smart UNIX programmers wanting to switch to NT? Now THAT'S a very interesting statement.
One thing I bet is Ken hasn't dug into linux very much at all. I have used both linux and winblows NT as a firewall. And I can tell you the linux box is faster, more stable, and has MUCH better firewalls rules than anything winblows NT firewalling options I has seen.
Of course considering linux is competing with the general flavors of unix, he will probably want to put linux down as much as he can..... Please but my stuff!!!!
Actually, he's right. Linux is pretty stable, but it's not as stable as "Fault-Tolerant" Unix systems or some other operating systems (like VMS or Guardian) which are designed to stay up 24 hours a day, 365 days a year INDEFINITELY, even if a crowbar scrapes against the backplane or a CPU bursts into flame (I kid thee not). Linux doesn't fall into this category at all -- but then, neither does Solaris, HPUX, or IRIX. I have confidence that Linux will eventually become a suitable replacement for Solaris, HPUX, and IRIX (soon even), but it will never be a suitable replacement for VMS, Guardian, or FTBSD.
-
-- Guges --
-
Every computer I own (except for my TI-85 calculator) is capable of running Angband...
...has it been ported to Plan 9 or VSTa?
but fake.
And I didn't put my name on it!
Ooops, Kernighan&Ritchie give _their_ points of view on linux. ;-)
Now I know my country government learn from who.
Even the people criticise the government with valid facts, our government always blame the people for politicalise the issue.
It seem that my country government learn too much Microsoft FUD tactics.
It wasn't Linux that relieved the fears of thousands of UNIX programmers having to write software for NT, it was Java.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"
Congratulations Linus.
Linux is a response to NO FREE unix being available in 1990. Aka $900 MINIX, gee where are they now, hahah
(btw i did use a 'copy' of minix in 1991 on an amiga)
If Suns cost $9000+ in 1990, then why wouldnt someone make linux for free to run on 900$ machines.
It had nothing to do with MICROSOFT, OS/2 was the alternative in 1992 to Windows.
XYZZY workstation 8:28pm up 0 days, 6:07, 8 users
XYZZYalf workstation 8:25pm up 0 days, 6:13, 1 user
XYZZYpc test-system 8:26pm up 1 day, 7:15, 7 users new 8-port serial card
XYZZYer test-system 8:22pm up 0 days, 11:45, 3 users
XYZZY workstation 7:35pm up 4 days, 0:29, 8 users linux-2.2.7-ac1
XYZZY workstation 7:37pm up 4 days, 1:45, 9 users linux-2.2.7-ac1
XYZZYcat workstation 7:36pm up 4 days, 2:16, 7 users linux-2.2.7-ac1
XYZZY workstation 7:21pm up 5 days, 3:13, 16 users linux-2.2.7
XYZZY workstation 8:24pm up 11 days, 3:07, 13 users
XYZZYe workstation 7:36pm up 14 days, 1:56, 12 users on vacation, swiped his sdram
XYZZYeo workstation 7:32pm up 26 days, 4:12, 1 user
XYZZYc workstation 7:10pm up 34 days, 1:01, 2 users
XYZZY workstation 7:11pm up 34 days, 5:18, 9 users
XYZZY workstation 7:29pm up 35 days, 2:16, 2 users
XYZZYin workstation 7:15pm up 43 days, 4:26, 2 users
XYZZYj workstation 8:12pm up 50 days, 9:21, 3 users
XYZZYr Server 7:14pm up 51 days 21:04, 1 user Power Supply fan failed
XYZZYsh Server 7:14pm up 72 days, 5:34, 1 user Moved CD writer
XYZZYat lab-pc 7:30pm up 96 days, 14:06, 2 users
XYZZYanthemum workstation 7:34pm up 118 days, 9:11, 7 users
XYZZYs workstation 7:12pm up 139 days, 3:01, 1 user
XYZZY workstation 7:15pm up 222 days, 10:46, 21 users
XYZZY workstation 7:31pm up 372 days, 5:38, 11 users
XYZZYidge 10/100-bridge 7:18pm up 472 days, 7:21, 1 users
From personal I an tell you that NT is a great database os for large loads of data. I have over 2,500 users connecting to 2 2 way alpha based sql servers. Sorry but NT is relaible enough for me. My friend who works with exchange hates NT. I persoanlly believe its exchange server. WIndows 2000 will kill linux and bring better stability to NT according to pc magazine.
Keep that in mind, it was an interview w/ Ken Thompson, not supposed to be about Linux, it supposed to be about Ken Thompson and HIS work. The interviewer ask him his opinion of Linux, and he gave a SHORT description of this opinion. I'm sure he COULD write an in depth analysis of the faults of Linux specifically versus other UNIX versions, but that was not the purpose of the interview. So it is not bashing by any means.
Of course! After all, isn't Linus the new Messiah? That's certainly the feeling I get from all the press and postings from the fawning masses lately. Get real, people!
First of all, I'd like to say, I don't use linux, so I doubt you could call me a die hard linux bigot (In case you wonder, I use FreeBSD).
/dev/3dfx could crash the system by sending garbage). However, have you actually played quake or quakeII? I've played quakeworld under FreeBSD and have had no problems, and so have thousands of linuxers, with no problems, so it CAN run games.
But using q3test as an argument against linux? That is pretty damn stupid. Remember, it's quake 3 TEST, I say again quake 3 TEST. It's being tested for linux, and the 3d hardware for Free unices are just beginning to have good support, so drivers for 3d cards are probably faulty too (there was something about how any user w/ access to
And you also ask a "non-biased person" that claims linux is the best. I got news for your so obviously ignorant ass, there is no such thing as a non-biased person. Everything and everyone is biased, we can only strive asymtotically toward neutrality. Another thing, root access to check your email? Stupid! at least privileges to check email? By design, the permissions system. And about the Kirch Paper to which you refer, it is the only paper that I have seen that makes a good argument and BACKS IT UP! There is no counterpart that pushes NT, why is that? The kirch paper makes a good argument, and has evidence from various sources, and plenty of 3rd party tests other than the mindcraft one has shown all unices to beat NT. I think you read zdnet way too much and put way too much stock in zdnet. I will again use the often quoted example: even microsoft doesn't use windows NT. Hotmail uses FreeBSD and Solaris. egg.microsoft.com is running linux (check netcraft).
Stop listening to zdnet and judge for yourself, check other sources, and actually READ the kirch paper.
I am the guy who posted that I am thinking about leaving linux. If freebsd can run linuxs apps faster then linux itslef and has great framrates then I am in. Well. Is it faster?
Oh I have a vodoo card. Will that be a problem wiht freebsd. I would love some new speed on this old p166.
This is a very good point. Linux evolves fast. Make he and his friends used it a few years ago and got burned. The fact is this was just a dang interview, no in depth analysis. The mention of linux only lasted a few lines. Linux was not the focus, so he didn't go into detail on the basis for his opinion. So why do people attack him?
I believe Plan 9/Inferno is a great improvement over Unix, but I thought it is only meant to be used as an embedded OS. What are the features that set it apart? Is the microkernel based HURD close to Plan 9/Inferno in design?
I hope a great mind like K.Thompson can understand and endorse the Linux movement. They're working on fun projects at the Bell Lab, but OSS brings fun to all the engineers over the world.
Probably depends on the application, but in generally linux apps run in the same speed range as they do on linux (some faster, some slower). Voodoo won't be a problem, there are ports of linux_mesa and linux_glide in the ports collection, and people have reported q3test working w/ full hardware acceleration.
Th4e reason you don't hear many complaints is that instead of NT many shops went with Linux or *BSD.
Hey, microkernel model is a good idea, in fact that's what GNU Hurd is (though it sees development is going at a snails pace because of the popular of linux). The Hurd sees to have a model similar to the BeOS: a microkernel + a set of servers on top to handle stuff traditional in a unix kernel (networking server for example). And microkernel models do work, I don't know how much better (or worse) they are, but according to the gnu hurd homepage Hurd design is supposed to scaler better on multiple processors (and such a model has worked with BeOS on multiple processors). Also, it's interesting to point out that MacOS X is also microkernel based (mach microkernel, like the Hurd) with a BSD enviroment and a Mac interface to it all, kinda cool on paper, but i've never used it.
First off. I AM NOT A TROLL! I am not trying to flame against linux but rather give Thompson some credibility.
IF he says it sucks then it sucks. End of discusion. IF the wright brothers think your plane sucks then they are probably right or if Micheal Angelo says that your art sucks then he is right. He wouldn't accuse Micheal Angelo of not knowing art would you? No student is greater then his master or teacher. IF a high school math teacher just walked right on into the Harvard campus and walked into the math department and called the professor of mathmatics their an idiot, would you side with the teacher or the professor. My point is that you would think the professor is right because he knows math and has probably founded alot of what the math teachers are teaching today. Likewise Thompson is the father of unix and linux is based on unix. Linus based his os on work by Thompson. TO Thompsons credit linus just tried to recreate the OS that Thompson originally made. Linus was founded on unix and all of the code in unix was based on THompsons ideas even thouggh he didnt write all of it. He did write 75-85% of it. IF linus can't get his seal of approval from him the creator of what linux is based on then linux is not ready for primetime. I am not saying that linux will amount to nothing like all the trools here have said but it just shows that he said its great on some areas but poor on others. Linux has great sound support compared to other unix's and gcc, bash ad xwindows are done and even networking is done as well but async i/o is not nor is smp or large ram support. I know their is some code available on this but its pretty earlier and not mature yet. Since THompson is technical, I bet the very first thing he looked for was the smp code and was dissapointed. He probably looked at that and didn't give a rats ass about anything else because he only does high end unix's and this is what he was looking for. Linux is a low end to midrange one. Linux competes with sco and qnx rather then solaris or plan9. don't debate with the man. He knows what he is talking about. I consider him more of the father of linux then linus because of his ideas.THe man knows what he talks about so dont go around hoping mad.
On a more positive note he did sya that linux had some good code in it. Lets hop[e its fixed and then maybe 3 years latter Thompson will praise linux and perhaps develop for it. Untill then, hwat he says goes.
I agree that we must keep our minds open, but I mind the whole 3x faster hard to believe. I've heard other reports that FreeBSD is faster, and some other people say their tests show linux is faster, so 3x thing seems unrealistic to me. about ipfilter, (as in Darren Reed's ipfilter), that is an OPTION, you can either use the traditional ipfw or the ipfilter package, and I doubt linux security enhancements even compare to OpenBSD.
You forget the most /.ers are quite or voice their opinon when they are mad about something. I have seen hell of alot more comments on ms fud then a story like this. I htink the majority of /.ers love Thompson including myslef, even though my knowledge in computers is lot less then any of yours. Even though I am mostly a computer hobbyist and enthusiast, I allready knew that linux wasn't the answer for every problem. I would trade linux for loaris anyday for a huge database server but I know who thompson is and have ggreat respect for him. You can blame zdnet for posting a link for this page on linux resources on their main home page. I found slashdot.org late laster summer/ early fall and I do miss the old days. Remember when 80 to 100 comments were considered alot :-)
I saw the first fud from ms here and it aproached 100 comments and Rob posted a message saying he didnt know how to deal with it.:-)
Now you see braindead comments left and right and they are almost always over 100 for every article. Don't give up. Since most of these linux fanatics were from zdnet, then you can imagine the misinformation over their and they will learn form slashdot. I learned more about computing here then anywhere else (even with the obnoxious comments).
Remember that us linux users have been oppressed and insulted by microsoft and this gets us angry. I remember what happend to the macintosh comunity when ms spread fud and they took their pride in their machines fanatically. I do not like to be pushed around and then pay ms a reward for doing it by like uh spreading fud about linux to my boss so I have to use NT. Slashdot will set them straight after they get some facts.
Perhaps, you should actually try Linux for yourself instead of reading zdnet or listening to some CS wannabe.
I'd like to see the link too. I know this comment is so off-topic it will probably get a -1, but at least Zico would still read it.
Even Jordan K Hubbard said something about how FreeBSD/alpha -current is far better than the -stable release in the announcement of the BSD toolkit CD set. So it seems alpha port is just coming out of infancy. Stay tuned! 21264 Alpha is coming around too, hhhhhmmmmmmm
If you want to talk about a system that threw out backward compatibility, it would be BeOS. You need a Pentium to run (for x86 platfrom, I dunno for powerpc). BeOS also is truly modern and specialized for multimedia applications (so don't tell me about BeOS as a server or crappy security, it's not what it's meant for. Even Be uses FreeBSD to webserve). BeOS also implements a microkernel model that is similar to the HURD (though I don't know which came first), has 64 bit filesystem, and a bunch of other interesting features. About using linux as a "stable base" to write theses on? I would really call the whole OS a stable base, though the kernel probably could be considered.
Someone said that Bell Labs had a history of
developing great stuff and not releasing it.
Well there was a really good reason for this.
Bell Labs = Ma Bell = Monopoly
They weren't allowed to get into new things, which was probably a good thing, since theymight have been in microsofts position by now. Which may or may not have been an improvement.
One other thing I don't think Thompson realizes
or which noone else has commented on much anyway
is that even if what he says is true about linux
having certain faults. These things can be fixed
and he is very dismisive about Linux for whatever
reason.
Yes, I agree, crazy amount of comments hear, over 370 comments, many of which outright insult Thompson. I think it's a mob mentality. I see too many insults on here, and not enough thoughful discussion.
Linux is a great and powerfull toy. I want something more stable and pwoerfull like freebsd. I am not a troll. I just am a huge fan of Thompson.
He also writes:
"So it was very beneficial to a lot of people, especially at universities, because it was very hard to teach computing from an IBM end-user point of view."
Seems like they were riding the anti-IBM wave just as much as linux is riding the anti-Microsoft wave. And with "openness" as the token word. How ironic.
I noticed that the freebsd homepage doesnt have an ftp and the one at walnut creek doesn't have the actual kernel image. DO any of you know where I can find it. I cant use the freebsd source because I can't compile it without freebsd. A contradiction in terms.
Linux is mixed. The early stuff is great and very well written (xwindows support, gcc, bash networking)but smp, large ram and video is not. HE is right. NT server works out of the box even though its net stable enough for huge amounts of time but it works very well for non mission critical enviroments. Same is true for linux. Linux is more stable but it is well behind plan9. Linux will be their and when plan9 fails Thompson will be part of the huge linux camp by then and also be very anti windows2000 which is going to hurt plan9 sales.
As a matter of fact, they do. You can get the Windows 2000 Professional beta 3 right off of Microsoft's web site for (I think) $59.95. It's not only more stable, open, flexible and comfortable than Linux, but nobody ever lost their job buying windows!
By the way, I saw an online interview with Dijkstra (or was it Knuth?) where he said that if he were starting out, then he'd do biology, although he meant computational biology--algorithms for molecular biologists' tools. And Danny Hillis said biology is the future, but he meant still something else, like artificial evolution.
At any rate, I think both you guys are right. Bio is more interesting these days (but see below) but it's also a pain-in-the-ass career.
Computer Science may be a little spent. People work on very specialized stuff in compilers or graphics or operating systems, and it passes their time nicely and leads to incremental advances, but lacks the intellectual excitement of working on something really new. This weekend I read the new history of PARC, Dealers of Lightning, and couldn't suppress a twinge of yearning to be back in the '60s Project MAC and 70's Xerox PARC days when all this stuff was new and being invented. Now (it seems) we're just filling in the pieces of their original vision bit by little bit.
On the other hand in biology there's all kinds of great new stuff to discover. Interested in negative feedback but can't justify diddling around with analog electronics? (Like Thompson says, electronics you just grind out these days, right?) Well, cellular biochemistry has negative feedback loops in spades--and there are new ones being discovered all the time! It's nice that we're still in that phase when almost every new discovery leads to new questions, which lead to new discoveries, and so on.
But the problem is that biology is a pain in the ass. It ought to be fun, especially if you can stick to the fundamental exciting stuff like developmental bio. But it seems like every few weeks Nature publishes another opinion or letter about how bright students are scared off fundamental biology research because of the insane amount of time it takes to get a PhD--the getting of which privileges you to chronic career anxiety as you hop from low-paid postdoc position to low-paid postdoc position, trying to get a permanent research position.
And that's not the worst of it. The worst part is that it's so much like work. If you want to find out a result, you have to plan an experiment (which ought to be fun) but then you have to set it up and do it--which takes a lot of boring scutwork and cookery; and at the end you may find that you're found out nothing at all, or a confusing result which privileges you to vary the experiment just a little bit, and then repeat it (repeating at least half the scutwork as well). I think that's totally unlike CS research, which is more like hacking or like math research--the hours may be as long and success may be just as uncertain, but the process of doing the work involves lots of interesting smaller tasks like programming or posing and solving math problems.
There was an article in Wired of all places ( here) which summed up the difference between the computing culture and the bio culture, and the difference is partly a result of the above-mentioned stuff. Bio people must be, or at least act, very sober and cautious and professional. To do anything in biology is very hard and usually expensive (in an environment with tight budgets). So you plan things out in advance. You justify everything to funding agencies. If you can make a product, then it's probably medical or else it's likely agricultural--either way, you have to go through years of regulatory hassle with a Very Serious government agency in order to make money. So bio people can't just hack and fool around in the way Thompson describes his group as working. Sounds almost like being a programmer in the mainframe days, in fact.
At any rate, thinking about this stuff sure made me consider throwing in the towel and becoming a vagabond and travel writer. But I think there's a way out for both computer people and bio people. For bio people, there's lots of interesting work being done these days on new analysis technologies, like DNA microarrays and membrane chips. From what I've heard, working on these technologies can be a lot more like (hardware) hacking. The downside, to hear (the famous biotechnologist) Lee Hood tell it, is that this work generally only gets done in the same working environment as regular bio--ie, in the standard biology lab setup of a prime investigator dependent on the government teat to pay for a few starving postdocs and several more starving grad students. Young investigators don't have quite the same freedom to go off on a tangent and set their own research project as CS people get.
As for computer science types, well, the PARC book inspired me to pick up When Things Start to Think and was I ever bowled over. I always thought the Media Lab was a bunch of high-tech goofs--you know, hackers doing newly possible but utterly useless stuff like shoe computers and photomosaics. (And books about 'being digital'.) Well, this is worthy of another post, maybe a book review, but I have to say that after reading When Things Start to Think I'm convinced that once the Media Lab started their Things that Think group in '95, they finally put together an amazing bunch of competencies that will pay off in totally new and useful uses of technology. E-Ink (I think) will just be the start. But you have to learn to get down with physics and hardware if you want to play. And you gotta read When Things Start to Think. (If you read it and dismissed it, I guarantee you missed the point--read it again.)
But like I said, that's another post.
Rich Klancer
rpk@pobox.com
(Can you tell I've thought about this before??)
Right on Brother!!!
First I'm posting using the AC name because I'm still waiting for my account. Please forgive...
... My god ... He just figured it a nice try
Now I don't give a damn about which OS is beter than an other, I use several and they are all beter in some specific fields.
But claiming :
"It was made to discredit microsoft"
have you ever read anything about Linux or Linus?
The guy doesn't care whether there are users of
Linux or not
Also, may I remind you that the people who
developed Linux didn't do so because it was 'free'
(for most Windows 2.0/3.1/etc. was just as 'free')
and neither because they figured it was an
alternative to Windows because at the time is
certainly was not, but simply because it is fun.
Kind regards,
Niels Hilbrink
ok. i agree with ken thompson and some
ppl here. but linus torvalds being un-
charasmatic?
i would be one of the first ppl to say
that linux code, and implementation and
design are _terrible_.
but as for linus himself, the guy has got
charm. his speech at linuxworld in san
jose was really good. linux has the same
power that microsoft has: a good market
and some key people to make it happen.
and that is why linux is so big. thompson
is right. it's a backlash against microsoft.
nothing else.
"Linux is something for Windows haters, BSD is something for Unix lovers" (Heike S., Febr. 98)
"Beneath revolution (Linux) there's also an evolution (*BSD)" (Andre Oppermann, Apr. 98)
Personally, I typed in rm -rf to punish the friggin thing because he wouldn't fetch. He won't misbehave where he's at now...
Horseshit.
I run a company where running any MS product without express authorisation from the board is a disciplinary offence.
Call me strange, but I like my servers and desktops to work without crashing.
We run Linux, xxxBSD, Solaris, AIX, IRIX and others, but there is a grand total of 0 MS operating systems in the company. And that's the way it's gonna stay.
Linux code is terrible?
And what have you done today besides jerking off?
Just out of curoisity, how well do they all "Work together".
Then again, most Unices speak basically the same language, so its not that big of an issue.
TeX has been around for years and years and is still the best solution for numerous tasks.
Sure, I have no argument with that. Furthermore, all things considered, Linux is currently the best solution for a lot of tasks. One of its fine qualities is the fact that Apache runs on it. Inferno or Plan 9 might be better as an OS, but it's not much of a web server until it's got the necessary software. Blah blah blah, you know the drill.
What I was getting at was not that we should ditch everything old, but rather that we should be willing to ditch old things when the time comes. We've ditched windows, but the day will come to ditch Linux as well. Of course, Linus himself says that so it's not real controversial, nor much of an insight, but it's all I've got
And to be sure, Plan 9 is a failure. I have followed its development for years. It has met with no success. Plan 9 was supposed to run cable TV decoders and cellular phones, but QNX, WindowsCE, and various other RTOS have captured the market. Plan 9 was not designed for the real world, but for an imaginary world that does not exist. The truth of Plan 9's failure is a bitter herb which Ken must suckle.
In many respects he is like Bill Gates. Thompson is a one-tune Johnny. Almost by accident he met with some success in a field for which he had no training or formal qualifications. And because of this, others attributed to him qualities of intellect which he does not possess. The real and inadequate Ken Thompson must wake every day and live the myth of the imaginary Ken Thompson, a Ken Thompson created out of net-lore, and tales around the campfire.
A new generation of computer scientists is upon us. This new generation has better training, a broader vision, and loftier aspirations than to reach retirement age after a career of working for the phone company. It is time for Thompson to check out, and take up his rocking chair at Century Village. Perhaps members of the net community can take up a collection and buy him a Rascal Scooter with which to enjoy his twilight years.
True. From my experience anyway. I've used and supported NT for 5 years. I have seldom had Linux running on my system as easily as NT does. And it isn't just one system either. I've tried on many different boxes. The latest is an Alpha clone. NT installed without a hitch. Linux keeps locking up while reading from my CD-ROM. It's a 40x Toshiba SCSI. Linux is Red Hat 5.2. Before you start thinking that there is something wrong with my drive, I've had the same problem on my 8x SCSI NEC CD-ROM about a year ago. Meanwhile BeOS, NT, W95, and Solaris 2.6 installs on the same hardware without a single hint of problem. Go figure. As far as I'm concerned, Linux has a LONG LONG way to go before it's ready for anything outside the geek community.
Ken must have been talking about the GNU tools when he mentioned good code in Linux. Without the GNU tools Linux would be close to worthless. RMS may be a nutcase, but he shure knows how to code.
can you say 'kernel panic'
'random lockup'
About the passing fad thing - agreed. Some people just dont understand. I had a college prof tell me that HTML was a waste of time. Hell, Bill Gate$ even said the Internet was a fad.
PS. Im only posting as Anonymous Coward because this God Damn thing wont email me my registration password!
Help admin guy!
Someone mail me.
sledpilot@yahoo.com
Yeah, Al Gore is the father of Unix, but he was working at Microsoft when he wrote it. Duh!
go away
"Open"??? I'm not sure that we share the same definition of open.
working in a place with alotta magazines (library)
exposes me to alot of glossy garbage designed
only to make $. Time, newsweek, cosmopolitan,
entertainment weekly, forbes, new york, etc etc etc.
newspapers are the same (worse?). Its a load of
'jackie harvey' ism, www.theonion.com, archives.
i think upside.com pointed out this 'harveyism' problem a month or so ago.
anyways, newspapers in the early 1900s had the same problems, hell they were actually worse.
peoples printing presses got destroyed quite often for trying to be 'objective' when
what the people wanted was 'subjective' points of view supporting their vices. oh well.
Scsi probs in the kernel are the results of clashing egos.
y ees/joerg.schilling/private/linuxscsi.html
See it here...
http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/emplo
The current SG (general scsi) module has some serious problems, everyone using CDRecord knows it and has seen it (I have). It seems like Lt Cox and Lt Douglas have some explaining to do.
Joe Robertson
jmrober1@ingr.com
I think this quote is somewhat to the point:
Ken Thompson's perspective is from a gigantic budget, do whatever you want laboratory. He has no perspective that most Linux users don't have access to big $$$$ unix workstations and high quality commercial operating systems.
Linux users are mostly coming from an x86 background, using dos and windows. I doubt that Ken has spent many frustrating hours trying to use a wintel machine, therefore he doesn't understand why there could be some depth to an anti-microsoft movement. He also claims that ms can't be beaten. In that respect, Linux may exist only because a monopoly is stifling the advancement of technology, but that doesn't mean that Linux is relevent only as an anti-ms product.
I don't think he lives in the same world as we do, so his opinions on what we do holds little releveance.
I am also sure that he saw some things in the Linux source that he felt could be improved, but if he is just going to gripe about those things and not suggest what could be improved, then he is completely irrelevent to what we in the open-source community are trying to accomplish.
Perhaps the father is ever so slightly
jealous the child far surpassed his
own achievements.
Linux has brought Unix to the masses.
I also fail to see how he could say the quality of coding in the Linux kernel was worse then Windows, has he seen it?
Thank goodness that FreeBSD is on the verge of bankruptcy and collapse. Ruin and failure, the BSD legacy continues.
Actually, I think that Thompson is saying that Linux has no future because it's nothing but a clone of something 25 years old. Also, I would interpret his criticism as a veiled attack on "open source" methods. And he has a point there. The BSDs are more reliable and consistent because they're developed by artisans similar to the way a 'Cathedral' is built. Linux is developed by a mob of peasants at a big bazzar. I like to turn that whole Cathedra/Bazzar arguement on it's head sometimes. I'm surprised how few people ask themselves if 'design by committee' is necessarily the best route. (or, lack of design, and evolution by whatever-people-feel-like-working-on codeing)
I wouldn't be without Linux, NetBSD, the BeOS, NT, or Windows 95 on my home network. But personally the software package I am most excited about right now is a commercial "sheet music" package I'm buying which will let me write music on staff paper (you know, notes and clefs and suchlike). It's exciting because it's gonna help get me out of the OS-geek doldrums and get me doing something that actually MATTERS with my computer (composing music). I'm also meaning to get back down to the bench in the basement and do some more embedded coding (assembly language on little 8-bit micros, where 2K of RAM is more than enough) for some neat projects I have in mind.
Each OS platform has it's frothing zealots. But I've been involved with computers for a long time and have little patience anymore for people whose main goal in life seems to be flaming. This whole thread seems to be motivated by adolescent hotheadedness. Surely we can be better than that.
There's quite a bit of NIH in Thompson's article, I think. Boy, Bell Labs has Plan9 (better than NT and Linux), Limbo (better than Java), PAC compression (better than MP3).... the list seems to go on and on. Does it seem more likely that Bell Labs is _THE_ True Center of the Computing Universe, or that there is just a wee bit of over-competitiveness here?
This sounds somewhat illegal according to what I have read regarding the NDA one must sign before viewing the NT source code; something along the lines of not being allowed to contribute to another OS for a year or two after..
The Internet might still be a fad.
Remember CB Radio and BBSes? I do. They were big business at one point.
Well if that's all it's about how come you're not in the MS camp? Isn't it about engineering superiority? If that's the case, then if the author of fork() and listen() wants to critique the design of his own work compared to later iterations, then who are you who's obviously never programmed a line of server code in his life ('It's critical mass, Mannnnn!!!!') to even whimper?
If all you're going to do is reverse engineer, you'd better be careful. You'll soon enough bump the back of your head into the wall!
try and run NT on a compaq presario 2412ES
series..Linux runs fine (yes! even with X)..NT doesnt even *run*. All OS's cant handle strange hardware. By that same conclusion i could say NT was *really* crappy and linux was great.
(2412ES series are built and come with preinstalled whine98 BTW. NT is unsupported on those platforms by compaq.)
Have any of you losers actually written any server code, or read 'The Design of the Unix operating system'? You're free to your malformed opinion, how can you people even have one when you don't have the facts regarding plan9 et al on the table? I tell you ... because you are raving unbalanced fanatics. The guy has written and rewritten Unix long before most of us were out of diapers... he's iteratively developed OSes his entire life.. if someone could critique the implementation of malloc I assume it would be him, considering he's probably only done it a few dozen times himself.
this is depressing, you'd think it was a Mac forum... even if his criticism is inaccurate or unwarranted, it's only comment... he describes his user's scathing criticism (e.g. Ritchies) in the article... this is the normal process of healthy software development. Corrupt development is when honest criticism, good or bad, purely or corruptly motivated, won't and can't be received because people are too egotistical to surrender to the collective and diverse intelligence that exists, even in your youngest graduate programmer... reactions like these are the signs of people that have never participated in software development in a truly collective manner with very much success. People that are so insecure in their meagre development talents that all criticism must be marginalised within their small little minds as 'personally' or 'profit' or 'jealousy' motivated...
Get a clue Linux bigots.
Oh please, I do see a ton of insults here, and most people don't even realize it was just an interview, and Ken Thompson COULD give an in depth analysis of his probs w/ linux, but that's not what the interview was about. And I an not sorting by score, I'll read what I (yes, what I) think is worthwhile, not let somebody else do it. Ken Thompson isn't out to destroy linux, and we don't even know the basis for his opinion, so don't insult the guy.
Examples of the insults I see in on this article only:
"Ken needs viagra"
"limp unit"
(do people alwasy have to go after the penis?)
People also make assumptions about Thompson without good argument, like the whole thing about Thompson spreading FUD because linux will compete w/ his work. That's really doubtful. He's a researcher, and most likely doesn't care about marketshare and the business work. There are similar, nonsense assumptions about Thompson (just made than Plan 9 didn't catch on? oh please). It was just an interview, and not supposed to be about linux. I'm sure if someone really asked him to give an in depth analysis of linux and his problems with it, he could tell everyone what they are, but in the context of that interview, that wasn't the time/place.
Insults aren't limited to this article either, I was referring to slashdot as a whole. In most of the articles, there is a couple of people hurling insults (especially true when there's a bad thing about linux mentioned, probably because there are more linux users reading than any other group). I also see alot of *BSD is dead stuff anytime *BSD is mentioned. There is absolutely no basis for this. And there's always OS wars, an people insisting their OS is the be all and end all for everything. So much flame bait I see, and it annoys me. Don't tell me to sort by score either, cause then I'd be influenced by a moderator's bias.
BTW, I post anonymous cuz I don't want other online place to have info about me, and I don't want immature idiots to mail bomb because of something on slashdot. So anybody telling me to put my name behind what I say, i just give you a NO.
from : http://www.ssc.com/LJ/issue54/2907.html
i quote :
Cisco runs a redundant system of 50 print servers using Linux, Samba and Netatalk. It prints to approximately 1,600 printers worldwide, serving 10,000 UNIX and Windows 95
users, some of whom are in mission-critical environments.
and more choice quotes :
Until now, they have used local NT servers (with their associated problems) to manage their
printers. Although the branch offices only have 5% of our printers, they account for about 50% of our calls. We have (as of February 1998) deployed 30 Linux servers to these
branch offices, with many more on the way--there are currently about 200 branch offices in all
This reminds me of the dark days of the Soviet Union, when the Communists would write off the dissidents by classifying them as insane.
Tacky, tacky, tacky.
Nested nihilism is still just nihilism.
The only reason the GPL license makes Linux popular in wider circles is that poor college boys can't afford anything else.
Many programmers shudder at the thought that their lifes work would ever be flayed open and left for the buzzards to eat by the GPL.
Both are not "linux code". Xfree86 isn't even distributed under the same licence...
boy sounds like he needs to do some sabtical or something. just to get in touch with planet earth and all the need for normal people.
I got the feeling if this sort of attitude persist, I need to dump Lucent stock.
Linux 3x faster? /mount_point.
Answer is no. You used tar. You can 'speed up'
BSD box by mount -u -o async
Check this and compare with Linux.
I presume you use SCSI disks ,
in the case of brain dead IDE drives tuning
must be added.
fuckin Idiots!!! i thought i heard ken said:
.......
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft--a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically.
My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
READ: firewalls,gateways,embedded systems, non-PC environment, etc,etc.
DOES THAT SOUND LIKE YOUR ORDINARY,DAY-TO-DAY CLUNKY PC????
Yes!!! HE thinks linux runs fine in a PC environment...So all you guys talking about PC problems with linux better shut up!!
ITS "GOD" talking....So if he says linux sucks..linux sucks...
you're all fuckin' idiots!!!....first, LINUS SUCKS!!!...don't ever compare Linus to Ken, OR LINUX to UNIX..Without UNIX and C, there is no Linux. Linus copied UNIX and made a new clone out of it. WHY? coz UNIX is easy to code, the kernel code is easy to understand, its efficient, and its a great OS all in all.There are lots of books that can help him write LINUX...marice bach's, andy tanenbaum's..etc etc.. What are the accomplishments of linus? LINUX? yes. what are the accomplishments and credentials of Ken Thompson? can you count them?
Actually, I just found out from one of the student
sysadmins that the firewall at my school's (Brown
University) CS department runs on Linux, and it's
pretty damned stable -- more stable than the old
Solaris-based solution running sketchy unsupported
firewalling software.
I used NT once for about 3 months and got to reinstall it a few times: it was very non-trivial. But give me any free unix and I can get it to work quite easily.
Hmm I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that I *only* use unix based OSes and I am very familiar with them.
If you don't have the time to invest in learning just pay the money to stick with NT and shut up about it. You've already spent 5 years "learning NT" what on earth are you even playing with Linux for?
During the 1860's War Between the States, the yankee unionist forces were commanded by General George McClellan. A weak man, he was strategically paralyzed by his quest for the perfect moment, by his quest for perfection. He was incapable of command or leadership because he could not act unless all circumstances were aligned in his favor. Consequently he did not act. President Lincoln eventually relieved McClellan of his duties as supreme commander of the unionist forces because of McClellan's chronic indecisiveness. McClellan was a failure.
Many years later, there was another war, and another general. During the Second World War, General George Patton commanded the American Third Army. Patton was brash and daring. He was imbued with a "can do" attitude. He was a man of action who made do with what was at his disposal. Patton shaped events, rather than let events shape him. He did the impossible, and inspired his soldiers to do the impossible. After General Lee, Patton is probably the greatest commander to come out of America.
Today we hear Ken Thompson belly ache because he finds that Linux has not yet attained perfection. But in eight years, Linux has become the most important operating system of the decade. These have been eight fruitful years where we find Linux deployed in the role of everyday hero: sorting the U.S. mail, running Boeing test-beds for next generation aircraft, analyzing the heavens, insuring reliable delivery of power, bringing the thrill of Titanic to untold millions, and aiding cancer hospitals in treatment of the patients. These tasks may have well remained undone or underdone, had Linus waited for the perfect moment, for the perfect release.
Linus is Patton to Thompson's McClellan. Linus is blessed with a streak of daring, a streak of boldness which not only is alien to Thompson, but in all probability is incomprehensible to Thompson. History has crushed the anal retentive. The McClellan's and the Thompson's are history's chaff. They never can understand that there is never a perfect moment. We only have today, and the raw material of the day. History belongs to those who forge their swords with the materials at hand, rather than postpone the task in wait of some unlikely metallurgical breakthrough.
Why do you assume everyone thinks god exist or is a logic proposition?
----------------------------------------------
Reality is like a game captured through our biological sensors and computed by our bio-CPU.
Undergraduates are the main ones that are so insecure and keen to impress that they can't take criticism in a balanced manner. The rest are just kooks.
Critical Mass? huh?
If that's the case then what the hell does Micro$haft have?
Are you stating that the S with the most users is the best?
http://linuxtoday.com/stories/5722.html
Eric S. Raymond -- Ken Thompson clarifies matters
May 7th, 21:43:42
by Eric S. Raymond
In a recent interview http://computer.org/computer/thompson.htm, Ken Thompson (the inventor of Unix)
said some unkind things about Linux. Like many other people, I found this a rather shocking development.
I wrote him a note requesting clarification, and Ken has graciously given me permission to quote the things
he wrote in our subsequent exchange of views.
The best news, I guess, is that Ken says he didn't intend to write off Linux itself as simply an
anti-Microsoft backlash; what he was trying to say was that he believes the recent popularity of Linux in
the press is an anything-but-Microsoft phenomenon. He adds ``i very much appreciate the chance to look
at available code when i am faced with the task of interfacing to some nightmare piece of hardware'' and
that ``i think the open software movement (and linux in particular) is laudable.''
Ken further adds ``i dont see eye-to-eye with microsoft's business practices.'' His original language was
rather stronger and more entertaining, but he asked me not to quote that in order to avoid giving Lucent's
lawyers heart failure.
The bad news is that Ken still thinks Linux is flaky. I offered to have VA Linux Labs ship him a machine
so he could see what a properly tuned modern Linux looks like, but he said he couldn't accept. He adds
``i do believe that in a race, it is naive to think linux has a hope of making a dent against microsoft starting
from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (i feel the same about unix.)''
I cited all the case studies and trend curves and statistics you'd expect me to. He didn't respond directly to
those, but I hope I at least gave him some things to think about.
Ken did finish by saying ``i must say the linux community is a lot nicer than the unix community. a negative
comment on unix would warrent death threats. with linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies.'' (Hm.
Butterfly T-shirts, anyone?)
Overall, Ken didn't seem hostile or bitter to me, as some people charged after the interview. He sounded
more like somebody who's had high hopes for his children dashed so many times that he won't let himself
believe that this time might be the charm.
It's up to us to prove him wrong -- and by so doing to prove him right.
Ken Thompson is working on Plan 9 these days, right?
Well, compared to Plan 9, Linux is a joke. So I think he's right to criticize. Can we rise to the challenge and show him the power of Open Source (tm)?
Microsoft is really unreliable, but Linux is worse.
Ken Thompson father of Unix
i haveta agree with him, linux is in such a rapid and chaotic state of development that new bugs are introduced before old ones are fixed, and the distributors fixation with ease of installation and bloatware tendencies have threatened to kill much of the early promise.
Dont get me wrong, I personally use linux at home and as a desktop OS, the variety of good software from the bandwaggon jumpers and hardware support is great. I still boot into 95 to play games.
However when it comes down to setting up a server, the only real choices available are one of the *bsd's or solaris because they are clean, tidy and stable
Slide
Is this possible? Is the Plan 9 API fully documented? Would one want to?
Would POSIX compliant applications run on top of Plan 9?
Sorry for this public display of ignorance, I'm just wondering what the fuss about Plan 9 is.
Actually I think it'd be more correct to say that Linux was a response to UNIX -- as I recall Linus wrote it in the first place cause he couldn't get some sort of UNIX to run on his 386 (I believe it was too expensive, however i could be mistaken). Now the recent popularity of Linux is at least in part a response to Microsoft, however Linux itself wasn't.
Er. Where was I?
Oh yes...
If Microsoft came up with something tomorrow that was more stable, open, flexible and comfortable as Linux, hell yes I would use it. But they won't. They can't. It's just not in their corporate mind space. It would be like asking a dog to grow an opposable thumb.
Yes, Linux can be improved. More importantly, it is being improved. Maybe one day something better will come along. I'm betting that when it does, it comes from the open source community and it will blow everything else out of the water.
Bzzzzt, that's not what the article is about. I'd put money on most of the ppl posting here not even reading the article.
Slashdot is _not_ news for nerds, for that to be the case, it would need to be unbiased. He does in fact say that. So what? 1 comment out of many, many others. It is very interesting reading and there are far more important things in there than his personal opinion (can you blame him?) about Linux.
Can we please have some unbiased properly checked articles here? How about an option for users to choose "Show stuff that is inflamatory and may not be true" so I can turn it off and not waste my time?
D. Jeff Dionne.
it's true: Linux did kill my dog.
Jesus, I didn't know there were so many of us! We should form a support group. Slashdog. Or something.
Did it like eat the remains, or just absorb them with a horrible, vile schlupppping sound, like the Prince of Austria's fallen piles getting wrapped around the rear axle of his Hispano-Suiza? OOOOg, creepy, I hate when that happens. Remember The Thing with Kurt Russell? IIRC there was an earlier movie of that back in the fifties . . . cool flick . . . Linux is just like that, what it did to my dog and all, and then my neighbors. It's from a short novel by John W. Campbell, called Who Goes There? Cool book if you can find it. Most of what Cambpell wrote was tripe but that was a winner. Oh, God, my poor dog! ABSORBED!
I suspect that if you asked him, he was not referring to the odds of crashing, but perhaps the opportunities for failure that exist in the basic underlying design.
For example, if a module kernel driver gets hung up, things are pretty much awol until reboot, even though you didn't fully crash.
Meanwhile, NT may have shoddy code, but on paper, NT might not necessarily suffer such things.
His comments were theoretical.
Why are _all_ Bruce Perens' posts +5 or +4? Just because he is a famous demigod, the moderator between the constant ESR vs RMS dogfights, and the (not yet really famous) second-in-command Open Source and Free Software evangelist?
Just wondering.
First, to keep on topic, I agree that it is time to cut the unix cord.
Linux ain't unix, though it learned a lot from unix. The goal of
commercial companies which have been behind unix is now a kind
total control of systems at all levels using Java which is
opposed to free software and diversity in the strongest possible
way. This will stifle creativity and innovation at all levels.
Linux and free software offer some hope that computing will
remain in some way "personal" and thrive in a networked
environment in which diversity is rewarded - and in which
integration is achieved through open standards and data formats
rather than brokered and rented "objects" whether they be
Corba, ActiveX, or Java Beans. Not that these technologies
are not useful in some ways, but corporations with an interest in
mandating them are the common enemy of Linux and free
software.
However, it will not be possible to cut the cord until a certain
critical mass is reached, where Linux has more non-sysadmin
users than sysadmin-users. So long as most Linux users work
as a living as sysadmins (which they now do) they will want to
keep Linux as much like unix as possible for their job security.
Non-sysadmin users aren't stupid, and sysadmin users often
don't have the best interest of Linux in mind, only their careers.
Regarding Ken Thompson, remember Ezra Pound, a great man
who, motivated by envy and other personal issues made some
statements he later came to regret during WWII. I think it's
time for Ken to get some counseling because obviously he is
not stupid, but such statements as he makes puiblicly about
Linux are, to put it bluntly, insane. Plan 9 will go nowhere.
I think Ken is a little out of touch with reality in some ways.
All of us might be at times but he may later regret making these
statements which will embarrass him as a respected public figure
in academic and computing circles. People without such statue
making such statements are excused more readily.
Still, a very interesting and worthwhile interview.
Why does this Linux crowd become so defensive when someone unfavorably compares Linux to Microsoft? Take my advice people: cast aside religion and use whatever is best for the task at hand. For years I was heavily anti-mac and pro-PC. I would praise the achievements of PCs while downplaying those of the mac. These days, however, I have learnt how to see and appreciate the best of both worlds. Just about everything has its niche in the world.
As for the article itself, why aren't you looking at the useful insights he gives? Study and analyse his general philosophies (esp in regards to language/OS). Ignore what you disagree with and use to your own advantage what you do agree with. Its far more constructive than hooting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo about how he doesn't like the same OS that you like.
Linux and the Enterprise
by Mark Russinovich
http://www.winntmag.com/M agazine/Article.cfm?ArticleID=5048
Taken from the Linux-kernel mailing list :
---
Yup. I would hate to see SplashSnotters running amok and filling Ken's
mailbox with (ahem) indignant (ahem) replies.
---
This guys is right if condescendant. Raise a bit our status as a community and don't do the obvious *Bad Thing*.
You just can't compare Ken Thompson with Linus Torvald, nor should we compare him with RMS.
Their philosophy is totally different.
The only thing that relate between linux and Ken Thompson, are C language, nothing more.
To Ken Thompson, Open source just an unimaginative beast to Ken Thompson. Ken Thompson is from the old corporate computer world, it take time for him to catch up the open source phenomena.
It is not suprise human being use their own perception for something they don't know. I bet Ken Thompson have try linux development kernel few "computing decade" ago. Maybe a 1.1.x kernel or older.
I bet Ken Thompson will drop his jaws when he see kernel 2.2
Compare to Unix, Linux evolution evolve beyond any Unix evolution rate. I think Linux evolve 2 to 4 times faster than commercial Unix system. The rapid evolve of Linux partly due to open source, and partly due to Internet.
Remember, Ken Thompson doesn't have Internet when he invent C.
Anyway, I just can't wait Kernighan Ritchie give his point of view on linux.
Sorry, but we're not talking about ease of installation. Linux boxes don't give any unpleasant "blue screens" after they're installed.
They just run.
Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse.
I'm wondering when he tested Linux.
I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not.
Of course, but has he ever looked at the NT sources?
concerning his recomendation for his children to go into biotech LOL.
careers in biotech are for masochists. Just left a phD program in molecular toxicolgy to be a programmer, and a huge weight was lifted of my shoulders. 10 years plus graduate education and people still scramble to get a job. Unless you enjoy constantly justifying your existence to funding agenies/corporations etc avoid biological research as a career. does anyone here no any biotech consultants that make 100 dollars an hour. I know plenty of exrtremely talented people who had to spend 3-5 years in post doctoral positions making 27000 dollars a year in places like boston and newyork before that got their big break. in case anyones noticed that wont cut it in an expensive metro area. he should stick to commenting on unix.
Or Inferno, or whatever. No biggie.
A lot of people (okay, some people) like to think that operating systems reached perfection with UNIX, as in "those who don't know UNIX are doomed to repeat it" and all that. But that's probably a crock, and these people probably are basing their view on having used Windows, DOS, Linux/UNIX, and probably a Mac or the BeOS. BFD! That's not "all operating systems". So UNIX is really cool, and Linux is a good implementation of it. Does that mean we have to stop here? Why?
If Linux clobbers Microsoft, it'll be nice that we've finally clawed our way back up to the 1970's, but wouldn't you like to start moving ahead for a change? If UNIX is not "obsolete", that's because there's been very little progress in commercial operating systems in the last 25 years.
UNIX was a freak. It did a whole lot of things right on the first try. What other software has has such a long useful life?[1] So okay, it's great. I like it too. It's not the whole world, though. How depressing if we have to pick some arbitrary point and sneer at further development. I'm not old enough to stop thinking and devote the rest of my life to reverse-engineering the classics.
[1] COBOL has been around longer than UNIX, but note that I said "useful" and "life". COBOL is doubly disqualified.
Look at BSD/OS and FreeBSD. Look at OpenVMS. Look at Digital UNIX. /proc system. The stackgaurd compiler. BSD had process accounting big deal, so does Linux. :}
Okay, sure lets look at those. I'm getting really sick of hearing the BSD vs Linux debate. Talk about sour grapes. I agree that BSD is more "pure" than Linux is. However, we're not comparing pedagrees at a dog show here, we're talking about functionality. BSD bigots think that somehow "make buildworld" makes the whole damn OS superior. I don't think so. It only has advantages on "stock" servers like mail, or dns servers. Have you ever tested the I/O throughput of BSD, Solaris x86, or BSDi against Linux? I have. I used the same Dell workstation to compile "ssh" and also to untar a 400mb file. In both tuned and untuned configurations on a PII 266Mhz, I found that in all cases Linux was faster; much faster (sometimes by 3x). Also 10 years of experiance with Unix machines and many platforms has lead me to believe that Linux not only has a better philosophy but also better performance. I still have some respect for *BSD because they have some very dedicated developers who do an excellent job, in some cases better than Linux (like NFS, or package management). However, overall I believe that Linux is superior.
I rarely see a Linux uptime greater than a month
Really? Maybe you don't know how to run a stable Linux box then. I've got machines with more than a year of uptime. My Samba fileserver has been up for 1 year 11 months today. Perhaps you should use better hardware.
On my Linux 2.2.x systems, it fails to properly unmount its drives.
Again maybe you don't know what you are doing. I've got more than 10 2.2 systems running and they ALL unmount their drives properly. On both the command line via umount and during shutdown.
I also enjoy it when it simply quits responding to IP packets for a while.
Really? when does it do this. I don't ever have this problem and we run some fairly high traffic servers. Can you describe a way to reproduce the buggy behavior? I didn't think so.
I never see BSD systems broken into. Really? Do you read BugTraq. There have been a whole slew of root exploits for NetBSD lately. I've seen one recently for OpenBSD too. Yesterday there were two separate remote lockup bugs in FreeBSD 3.1. I agree that BSD is generally stable and secure, however it isn't the end-all-be-all in compsec as the bigots would have everyone believe. Linux has it's share of security holes, but so does BSD. Linux also has some very nice security enhancements that BSD doesn't have. Non-executable stack patch for 2.0 kernels. Restricted links in temp directories. Restricted
BTW, ever notice that all the freely available BSD's use the ipfilter package? Compared to linux, ipfilter is very feature poor. Linux does everything ipfilter does (except 1:1 NAT without a patch) plus QoS, policy based routing, hardware switching, and premptive packet assembly (defragmenting during NAT). The BSD ipfilter package does none of those and even if it did; it's available on Linux too! So I don't see what the big deal is with BSD. It's a good OS but nothing to get bigoted on. Neither is Linux. I just try to keep my mind open to the best solution to a given problem. Sometimes it's BSD, but most of the time it's Linux. If something else comes along then I'll whore around with that too
BTW, why doesn't anyone mention Dennis Ritchy? He has said some good things about Linux. Also, he did a hell of a lot more work on AT&T Unix than Thompson did. He wrote the C compiler and put together most of the kernel. Thompson wrote the filesystem and text formatters.
Ken Thompson probably looks at Unix the same way many of us look at our old school projects...good for it's day, but only slightly more impressive than our first "Hello World."
I'm not up on my Plan9, but I wouldn't doubt it's superior in many ways to _any_ Unix variant (at least with respect to elegance, stability, etc.). As such, it's not surprising that he isn't very familiar with the current state of the linux kernel.
Notice that, earlier in the article, he detailed some shortcomings of the Unix model. _That_ is what he's basing his opions on...they're certainly not representative of a thorough understanding of either WindowsXYZ or Linux.
As I recall, DOS _was_ pretty stable (if hopelessly wanting of basic OS functionality) when nobody had heard of Windows. Mr. Thompson's perspective regarding Linux may have been on target back in those days.
He's moved on and he may well come up with the next great OS concept. But it is a shame that someone with enough talent to identify problems in the linux kernel wouldn't offer their insight into it's shortcomings.
I still appreciate his contribution.
After readin fud from zdnet, NT amgazine, and now the father of unix myself I regret ever being fanatical aobut linux. I have a very smart freind who went to MIT and he is a huge computer nerd and a hacker. He read the source code and came to the same conclusion the father of unix had and said it sucked and its popular because its free and popular demand. I called him a heretic who didn't know what6 he was talking about. I now relize that I was brainwashed by abunch of zealots who are related to mac users. I hear mac users complain and yell and be obnoxious and I relise that I am becomingg alot like them. I tried q3test and it screwed my system to the point were I HAD TO REINSTALL linux. Source after source after source claim that linux sucks and its development model which limits its success will eventual bring it down after it catches up to other unixs adn NT. After the father of unix admitted this I now relize that NT magazine and the guy who produced the visual effects for the movie Matrix are right. I also remember about a guy who worked for an isp or a company who wanted to remain unidentified, claimed that linux really sucks and that all linux users are fanatical zealots and that is the only reason it even exists in the enterprise enviroment and he is quite right. I am switching to freebsd. I am sorry guys but if non biased sources in large numbers begin to critize linux and have nothing good to say about it other then growth potential and the so called hype then I believe that maybe not all /.ers are right. Linux mayber be bettter then NT in some areas but their is no proof or hard core facts that state or show linux competing head to to head with unix or NT that shows linux wining. Submitt an url and I might reconsider but linux is just another NT. Its hype.
Good bye linux. It was nice knowing you.
From someone who has already done UNIX once. I don't think it is sour grapes (completely), or jealousy of any sort (well, maybe a little). Let's just stand back a bit and try to see this from Ken's shoes (if that's possible):
Over twenty years ago, you developed an operating system that wasn't about politics, or ethics or morals or beating any big corporation; it was about building a better operating system. The reason it was open for all to modify? Because the company that payed you to do it was under a lot of anti-trust lawsuit pressure and had to do something to look good. Heck, you weren't fighting the big corportation, you were working for them!
So, here you are twenty years later, working on radically advanced systems with distributed everything (cpu, storage, etc) and trying to create another operating system that is better. Someone else comes along and basically reinvents what you did, only with more political motivations. Do you care? Are you jealous? Do you look at him and laugh?
Perhaps Thompson is being too critical and claiming that "it's all been done before". But maybe there's a good reason for that. The ideas are over twenty years old! They are damn good ideas, but maybe it's time to come up with some better ones of our own.
I know that a lot of this has already happened in Linux, and keeps happening everyday. But there is still that attachment that Linux has to the old UNIXes. I'm not talking about user interface, or even name. I'm talking about the principles that the system itself was built upon, and are continued to be developed under.
I like Linux. I like it a lot. Right now it's perfect for me because it is more secure, more reliable, and more flexible than any other OS I can get my hands on. But for how long? Nothing lasts forever, and every operating system has it's limits. All I'm saying is, maybe it's time Linux stopped standing in other OS'es shadows. Maybe it's time we ignored the hype and the media and start doing our own thing. Maybe it's time that Linux wasn't summarized as "a free UNIX clone for PC compatibles and . . . "
Or maybe it's time I got another OS . . .
Linus isn't out to make Linux perfect; he's trying to make it reasonably good. Given two ways of doing something, he is more likely to choose a simple, "obviously correct" way than he is to choose a more complex solution. Sounds a little like what my professors tell the classes--"make it work, then make it fast".
Thompson is trying for perfection. Perhaps he'll get closer to it than Linus, but he's obviously more likely to fail.
Linux is "behind" in terms of hardware support, application support, etc. because it is a redesign at least as much as it is a new design. Naturally it's quite boring to Ken Thompson, who participated in the original design. On the other hand, it's interesting to many free software developers since this is a chance to "do it the right way" instead of being chained to complex, overengineered implementations (not that we don't have any, but we're not chained to them).
BTW, (Free|Net|Open)BSD are much different, as they share the BSD 4.4-Lite codebase. I wonder how much original UNIX code was left in 4.4-Lite.
As for reliability, Linux's big reliability problems fall into three categories:
Also, this article was pretty despressing in one respect: through AT&T, Ken Thompson has, in effect, tied up his entire life in the big red ribbon of intellectual property. I wonder what other amazing things he has produced that never saw the light of day.
Interestingly enough, Ken Thompson is critizizing
his own way of doing things when he critizices
Linux. He says he likes to build things from
bottom up, to tinker with it. Just how Linux came
to be. Then he goes on saying how things are
proven: Somebody is told he is wrong and should
go to hell, and then the person goes on and just
_does_ the thing.
Well, I guess Linux told Ken Thompson already he
is wrong and should go to hell. Now its up to him
to prove he is right...
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Bruce, this is not true. It's users who fit between some threshold of posting enough, yet not too much, who have lower user numbers, and positive alignment (average score of postings).
---
Thompson: Operating systems, in particular, have to carry so much baggage. Today, if you're going to do something that will have any impact, you have to compete with Microsoft, and to do that you have to carry the weight of all the browsers, Word, Office, and everything else. Even if you write a better operating system, nobody who actually uses computers today knows what an operating system interface is; their interface is the browser or Office.
You can have the best and most beautiful interface in the world and the most extensible operating system that ports to anything and then you have to port on top of it a thousand staff-years worth of applications that you can't obtain the source for. You have two choices: Go to Microsoft and ask for the source to Office to port to your operating system and they'll laugh at you; or get a user's manual and re-engineer the code and they'll sue you anyway. Basically, it'll never happen because the entry fee is too high.
Anything new will have to come along with the type of revolution that came along with Unix. Nothing was going to topple IBM until something came along that made them irrelevant. I'm sure they have the mainframe market locked up, but that's just irrelevant. And the same thing with Microsoft: Until something comes along that makes them irrelevant, the entry fee is too difficult and they won't be displaced.
In other words, he simply does not believe that anything short of completely new paradigm will replace Microsoft and Office. I can only interpret it as acknowledgement of Unix defeat at the market, so he definitely will see Linux as fighting the lost battle -- in his opinion it should be his battle, and it doesn't look nice for him that someone is still fighting it after he quit.
Yet it's a different battle. Plan9 and Inferno, while based on nice ideas, never were intended to be widely used -- it's the same elitism that managed to hurt *BSD developers recently. Regardless of what Ken Thompson thinks, Unix can compete in the area where Windows "won", and this direction is ortogonal to the development of plan9/inferno/...
Unix fathers can continue pure-research-oriented development and even switch to Windows for their everyday work, however I don't feel that it gives them right to dismiss the continuation of Unixlike OS development at the extent of denying its viability. Especially in the case when it is not true, and I believe that Ken Thompson bases his opinion on something other than facts.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Funny you should mention Edison. I was thinking about how much KT sounded like TAE with regard to implementations he didn't think of. Edisons original concept for movie viewing was a nickelodeon style machine. When it was suggested that the images be projected on a screen TAE thought it was a bad idea because it would reduce potential for license fees on individual copies. I owe KT a debt of gratitude for what he's done, but his time is over.
They make cool hardware, but some of their software leaves a lot to be desired. I know, I have to use it. I'm not going into details as my job may depend on it.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Saying that moderators have a bias is foolish. I'm a moderator and I have no idea why I was selected (beyond posting alot and reading Slashdot for a long time). I'm not a friend of Rob's, I have no obvious bias in my posting, etc. and I assume the same is true with a majority of the other moderators. There 400 some moderators, not all can be Linux-biased since I don't think Rob hand chooses everyone. The moderator guidelines provide for sending in posts that are seemingly mis-moderated. If you have a problem, email somebody in charge with the article. Don't just rant on without trying to do something about it.
Well, compared to Plan 9, Linux *is* quite pathetic in terms of stability.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
For all he knows or claims to know about Unix
Just noticed this little bit. "claims to know"? He wrote the damn thing, so I'm quite confident of his familiarity with it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
So, Ken, how is that better than MP3? Isn't MP3 also 10:1?
No, MP3 is anything from 1:1 (really really high bitrates) to 160:1 (8kbps) and more.
The point is that PAC has better sound quality at the same compression ratio - i.e. PAC compressed at a 10:1 ratio will sound better than MP3 compressed at a 10:1 ratio (which would make it superior, since you'd have to use 256kbps or so mp3s to make up for the quality difference, which would only give you 5:1 or so compression ratio).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Anyway, the real question is what does Thompson know about Linux? So he and a few friends have tried it and found it to be unreliable. Whatever that means. Without references to specific issues, it's impossible to argue with that. In many people's experiences, Linux is as reliable as the hardware allows---which may not be much if the hardware is a PC.
Well, you'll notice that he specifically mentioned non-PC hardware. He didn't seem too worried about stability on PC hardware, but the lack thereof on non-PC hardware. I personally don't have enough familiarity with the Alpha, PPC, Sparc, etc., ports of Linux to say anything about them myself.
I can understand an *unqualified* rating of ``unreliable'', but when you say that it's worse than Microsoft, that is plain out to lunch, credentials or not. Linux is orders of magnitude more reliable than Microsoft's flagship operating system.
Well, again, I'd need more info before making a judgement. Perhaps in his experience NT Alpha is more stable then Linux on an Alpha, with whatever setup he happens to be using. I have no idea.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
C'mon, who's ever used Plan 9 other than a handfull of academics?
The same could be said of Linux, around five years ago.
I thought the Linux community was supposed to be about technical quality, not "critical mass" and marketshare and whatnot.
Critical mass, people.
In that case, based on my 1993 statistics, I'll continue using Windows forever, since this OS that has only a handful of college users could never possibly become a serious competitor.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
He may have wrote Unix but he didn't write Linux.
Linux is based on UNIX, and Thompson nearly single-handedly defined the basics of a UNIX system. Therefore, Linux is an OS that follows the design philosophy of Thompson, and as such, I'd consider him an excellent judge of implementations of his ideas.
He "looked at the code" and saw that some was good and some was bad and implying that because a lot of people had a hand in it that it isn't so good.
I would like to know the definition of "bad" in this case. Is he saying that the "bad" code doesn't work or does he know of a more efficient way to write it. Maybe it just was formatted poorly for all we know.
If the code _works_ but isn't as efficient as it could be does that make linux poor? Hardly.
Less efficient is definitely bad. It doesn't make it useless, it just makes it poorer than a solution that is more efficient. Plus, Thompson had problems with the stability of Linux, not just its efficiency. I know I personally have gotten it to crash at least six or seven times, and I've had to reset another 10-15 times when I accidentally cat a binary file to stdout and can't get the damn console fixed (even MS-DOS 1.0 can handle this properly - why can't Linux?).
All modern operating systems are written by many people. Some of those coders are better than others so I don't see the distinction with linux.
The proof is in the pudding. Linux works well for me, it works well for many 10s/100s of thousands of machines that he says linux is no good for.
Well, Windows works fine for millions of people, too, but that doesn't make it technically advanced. DOS worked fine for millions of people too.
Hmmm. Did his version of unix never crash and not have _any_ poor code in it? Did he write it *all* and did he write it alone? I have no idea but to just spout "He WROTE unix" is as vague as his comments.
He pretty much wrote it alone. I'm sure he had some help, and K&R (the C inventors), IIRC, ported it to C, but Thompson wrote an extremely large portion of it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Why would talanted programmers give away their work?
Glory? Emotional satisfaction? Practice?
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
Whoops, I better tell that to our mail and web servers, which have been up for over six months straight...
Methinks the large number of testimonials of extensive Linux uptime means that xBSD advocates saying that Linux is "unreliable" are acting from jealousy over the popularity of Linux, rather than from a technical standpoint.
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
The biggest "X" flaw is not related to the core protocol, which is okay, but, rather, with the add-on libraries and such, most of which are terrible and very difficult to use. The core "X" protocol itself is a reasonably good network-transparent device driver interface. But anybody who thinks that "C" and Motif are a competitor to Visual C++ and MFC from an ease-of-use, ease of programming, or pure power standpoint is smoking crack.
Of course GTK and QT are a reasonable response to that, and as GTK matures and QT becomes more politically acceptable, expect things to change rapidly...
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
You can try. I couldn't get NT to stay up more than 7 days in a row. Thats 7 days of hard work BTW, not just sitting there idle. On the other hand, I've been doing development, file servering, firewall, for months on Linux without rebooting. The whole NT way of thinking does not lend itself very well to prolonged uptimes.
Oh, install this new notepad replacement? You must reboot. Come on...
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
yeah _right_. I have seen both in action. YOu must be using the world's worse linux dist on a machine with half of its ram fried, and a vanilla nt box. give me a break. nt is a piece of shit with a capital s.
anyway, the fact that the source is open makes such an incredible fucking difference that they can't be compared solely on that basis. sometimes linux does stupid things- like one time it was allocating a shitload of dma class memory for apps that didn't need it, while I needed a good 2 megs to shovel data out to a high speed adc. the solution?- I simply allocated the buffers on kernel boot and locked them in place. obviously if I'd wanted more flexibility it would have been easy to do better than this. if this had occured in nt, forget about it. it would have been buy more ram, and pray to the gods of nt.
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
I mean after all, can you be certain that you will be able to remember that you tied your shoe-laces up that morning when tour as old as he is?
Ken Thomson is one of the "tribal elders" of the *nix community. He might not be exatly with it these days, but that's just the way it is ok?
The next time he starts ranting and raving, just smile and nod your head and say "yes grandpa, you tell em grandpa" and refrain from snide and personal remarks, ok. Just remember - some day you'll be old as well.
Posted by Nick The Nerd:
There are obviously too many features if you can do something that many ways-and they are more or less equivalent.
--Ken Thompson, father of Unix
There's more than one way to do it.
--The Perl Motto
that the new automount daemon stuff in kernel 2.2.x misbehaves with floppy drives on my system. Some other flakiness happens with mount points not being recognized as well.
Disclaimer: I *really* mess with my system. The problems I am seeing are probably very unique.
-Tim
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
There was a press release earlier this year about EPAC (the current version of PAC) being made G2-compatible, i.e. you could play a PAC file on a RealPlayer just as you can an MP3, and apparently also stream it. I don't know if it's a reality now, since I'd be hard-pressed to find, download, or stream a PAC file. I think there's also some Liquid Audio sort of PAC clients out there, but I can't remember any of the relevant URLs.
--
--
=8^
The problem I've had with Red Hat and Slackware is they would not detect SCSI CDROMs. I am not sure why that has been such a problem. I've seen this with NEC, Phillips, Sony and Mitsumi CDROM drives in combination with an Adaptec 1542 card, a Future Domain TMC850 and a Media Vision PAS-16 card. To install Linux on these systems, I had to copy it to a DOS partition, then install from there. On systems with IDE CDROMs, it installs with very smoothly. Clearly, this is a major installation issue worthy of attention.
However, this IS an installation problem rather than a reliability problem. Once it's running, Linux is rock solid. NT installs fine on most systems but it's reliability is poor. Take your pick. I'm more interested in the long haul.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Thompson *should* be criticized for making such an uninformed comment, no matter what his great accomplishments of the past.
Yes, Linux is not perfect; but it's not crap, either.
Most of the comments here have been fairly on the mark. I would ask the other poster if he is sorting by score; it makes reading Slashdot more enjoyable.
--
Get your fresh, hot kernels right here!
This may sound idealogical, but it's not. What I'm really asking myself is this: Do I want to spend the rest of my life as an MS application programmer, waiting for the Next Big Thing from Redmond to see which way my career is going to go, or do I stick with Linux and be a participant in the field of computer science as Ken has been.
The answer should be obvious.
TedC
Here's some info from '98
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I think we're just seeing someone who isn't informed, that's the only explanation I can come up with... I think it's likely that if he's seen Linux in action, it was a friend struggling with an *old* version of it...
:)
I've seen Linux perform better than Solaris as a desktop, for a third the price. If Linux isn't better than Microsoft's offerings, then UNIX isn't either, and I'd be amazed if Ken said that.
I love UNIX, when I found SunOS I knew I found something far better than DOS. Linus knew the same thing, and modeled early versions of Linux after SunOS. In this respect, it was a backlash against Microsoft, because they made a crappy OS for the PC, that Linus didn't want to use.
However, it was more a backlash against commercial UNIX vendors, because Linus wanted a good, free, x86 UNIX (not Minix), and at the time he couldn't find one.
However, IMO Linux has now far surpassed the commercial UNIXes, *and* it is free. It certainly isn't suitable for every job, but just from what an average distribution ships with these days, it is a far better value than a commercial UNIX, or anything that Microsoft has to offer.
(gcc, g++, egcs, netscape, KDE, Gnome, Enlightenment, The Gimp. They're all free, too. Need I say more?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
...well, maybe it sounds better than regular .mp3, but a bit more digging makes it sound like AAC does better.
:)
That's okay, I have no respect for people who invent cutting-edge technology years before it's time, and forget to release or market it. That's not what I pay my phone bill for...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I recall that AT&T filed suit about a year ago to keep access to NT5's source, but MS said Win2k was a different beast than the NT5 was planned to be and kept the source from them. AT&T and MS settled out-of-court.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
Based on the context, it appears as though Ken is using the term PC to mean "Personal Computer" i.e., a workstation a person is using, not the x86-based platform. The originator of this thread was referring to the stability of his *firewall* running Linux.
As an aside, my Alphastation running Debian has been just as stable as the x86's - no crashes barring hardware/power failure
You don't understand. It's the great Bell Labs tradition to invent great technology and bury it. AT&T pretty much did that with Unix, except universities using it for research got it over the hump, as it were, to the next level of development, and companies like Sun went and ran with it.
One of the great reasons for Linux's success is that it implied that Unix was more than a server OS to be kept in a rackmount somewhere. It could be used by at first sophisticated users, and then maybe even consumers. It went out and put the technology into the hands of people.
If Lucent follows the previous patterns regarding PAC, universities may be able to see the algorithm or source, but they won't allow open source implementations of either, and they won't try to market it.
Today, of course, Microsoft is around and aggressively trying to compete; it's not like it'll work in spite of a lack of dedicated marketing by commercial firms, or advocacy by free software advocates and programmers.
What this means about Thomson's Linux comments, I don't know.
Phil Fraering "Humans. Go Fig." - Rita
(currently testing something about signatures here)
Just because this fellow has done a great thing in the past doesn't mean his words today should be diefied. He's a human, full of twisted human agendas, motives and hormones.
Also, his words show that he doesn't recognize the true impact and merit of Linux - not as an operating system, but as a social movement in freedom of speech, freedom of technology and freedom from coorporate tyranny.
is that they often fail to see the merit of non-optimal solutions.
Anyone with much experience has seen first hand how Linux is not worse than Microsoft products, but in fact is generally superior at everything Ken mentioned in his interview.
My college advisor (and a person I know and respect as a very bright person) once told me, "Dan, why are you wasting all this effort on web stuff, its just a passing fad?" This was in '93.
Sometimes smart people just don't get it. It was really hard for me to ignore this 'smart person', but its been growing steadily easier over the years.
Using your analogy, that means Henry Ford would have the best qualifications to comment about formula 1 racers or robotic car manufacturing technologies, just because he founded Ford and sold the Model T.
The fact is that technology is EVOLUTIONARY and if you don't keep up and specially ADAPT, then you become extinct, even if you where the origin of life!
I think he has to update his Brain BIOS to current standards.
Technology is evolutionary. If you do not evolve with it you will lag behind and eventually get extinct.
Ken is acting exactly like Tanembaun did with Linus when Linux was being born; and like that he is also wrong.
Ken is in the process of becomming extinct. Some body please upgrade his brain BIOS; oh no thats right he does not have flashrom we will have to do surgery! Sorry, but I just think he may be old and senile and probably does not enjoy the entusiasm that Linux gives to engineers all over the World.
The fact is that no matter what is wrong with Linux today, it will move forward asymptotically reaching perfection because Linux does not represent an OS, but a whole new playground for engineers to interact freely, Again!
I have been at Bell Labs. They do a lot of sharing and cooperation, which works wery much like in the free software community. Except that they don't care about the world outside the lab. They don't believe interesting ideas can start outside the lab, and they don't care whether their own ideas escape the lab.
There are no "sour grapes". KT simply doesn't care. He did exactly what he told, no more, and no less. Saw some practical deficiencies with a specific Linux version on some specific hardware, and saw that some of the code was ugly. Neither are the least bit unrealistic. Since this fits his general worldview about everything origining outside the labs, he made the conclusions stated in the article.
OK you got me curious?
What kernel version and card?
I have throughly abused linux networking code and blasted terabytes of data through fast ether cards with only marginal support (at the time), never crashing a box.
The only times I have ever crashed linux has been either my fault (kernel stack smashing et al) or broken/ill supported hardware like my el cheapo PV-BT848 framegrabber.
> The problem is that Linux is indeed inferior to
:-).
/source)
;-)
;-)
> most operating systems. Look at BSD/OS and
> FreeBSD. Look at OpenVMS. Look at Digital UNIX.
Digital Unix, don't make me laugh! Open VMS, yeah OK, I'll give you that, the facist OS is much more mature than unix. xBSDs, well I have used lots of unices, and the xBSDs aren't that much different, Linux performs better that all the BSDs I have tried.
> I rarely see a Linux uptime greater than a month
> whereas with the systems listed above, it is
> just expected
Where are you looking? YMMV, but I think that is complete garbage or figures for workstations that are turned of every night
> Linux, specifically GNU, utilities redefine
> bloat.
Yeah they are a bit heavy on memory, but they sure work well compared to the xBSD ones. GNU have the wrong ideas about many things (eg. man pages) but they supply great high performance software that tries hard to be POSIX complient and useful to everyone.
> I have never seen a Linux distribution that came
> with full source that could be rebuilt with one
> command
Slackware: SlackBuild (on every CD in
Not many people need this, but I have used it just for fun a few times (takes a _long_ time). I am sure there are others. It seems to me that your experence of Linux is limited to RedHat et al.
Besides, linux is just a kernel.
> my Linux 2.2.x systems, it fails to properly
> unmount its drives.
Running the old glibc? There is a known issue with the ld-linux.so for oldish versions of libc6. Not a kernel issue, RTFM (well Changes) next time.
There are many other userspace reasons why this may happen also; if you are keeping the fs busy it obviously can't umount it.
> simply quits responding to IP packets for a
> while
Never seen it happen, sounds like the _old_ SCSI bug, or broken/cheap and nasty hardware. More info please, we can help to correct your issue?
> I never see BSD systems broken into
I have, Solaris, Linux, and even VMS too.
It is a userspace problem in almost all cases. The famous broken IMAPd was the same code used on most unices, this is not Linux specific.
> ship without documentation or manpages
Yeah I have to agree here, lazy programmers. Many GNU morons (sorry) seem to think that man pages are old hat, well I think they are better than the info system (yuck). Many interactive commands are self documenting though and come with other format documentation.
All in all, not a great issue, you can always email the guy or ask a friend if you are completely lost. strace comes in handy too
> makes for a great research system
Being open source is great for students, tinkers, and sysadmins alike. I wouldn't limit its usefullness to just research though, I personally use it in mission critial serving for my ISP business, as my desktop OS, for realtime hacking that I do for fun and profit, and as a system to develop portable network apps on.
Hell I use linux for everything I do with computers. If it can't do something I want, I just add the functionality and get on with business, something I can't do in many other unices.
When Linux has a 25+ year history, and spawned an industry, *then* it's surpassed Unix effort...
Thompson wrote early versions of UNIX. Today's UNIX is a different beast.
Anyway, the real question is what does Thompson know about Linux? So he and a few friends have tried it and found it to be unreliable. Whatever that means. Without references to specific issues, it's impossible to argue with that. In many people's experiences, Linux is as reliable as the hardware allows---which may not be much if the hardware is a PC.
I can understand an *unqualified* rating of ``unreliable'', but when you say that it's worse than Microsoft, that is plain out to lunch, credentials or not. Linux is orders of magnitude more reliable than Microsoft's flagship operating system.
I would personally like to get more information regarding his findings..
Exactly HOW did they find it unreliable?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I can see where he's coming from in ONE respect. Embedded systems. It really hasn't been proven to be as rock solid as some ES systems..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I don't see any articles bearing this as of yet, unfortionatly..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I'm sorry to say I've never encountered what your saying.. I DO use an Adaptech SCSI controller, using a no name brand 1 Meg video card. No problems here..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Please give more information regarding not unmounting drives correctly.. I've never seen this happen. Feel free to use my email address if you'd like..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
He hardly 'Wrote Unix'. No more then Linus has 'written Linux'. He was there in the beginning, and helped write it, just as Linus was for Linux.. Granted, his opinions matter, but please don't go on like the guy is a saint and everything we do is based on him.. Shesh..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The only time I've ever had trouble umounting / was if a kernel module barfed and (in my best explanation) left open files around. The only time. I'd better mention that this was on a 2.1.12x kernel or you'll come back with that
My company's web/news/mail server sits on a 10mb uunet feed, chews through just short of 10k emails/mo, virtual hosts for a dozen web sites and handles our knowedgebase. the only reason it has 60 days uptime is because we moved it to a different location on the other end of town so we could get another couple T1s for dialup.
Oh yes -- it also receives about a dozen attacks of various sorts per day on this server. We've yet to have an intrusion. Your statement that "*BSD boxen never get broken into" is false. There was that bug in the *BSD-style TCP/IP stack a number of months back if I'm not mistaken. And there's always poor configuration, in all OS camps.
The server in the office to the left of me runs samba for file/printer sharing for this branch and has 180 days of uptime. The little P75 beside it protects us from the nasties of the 'net and has 40 days (I keep upgrading the kernel here).
I've only run into instability if I run the devel kernels or do something stupid like kick the case and cause the RAID controller to sound off 'cause the power connector for one of the drives was loose.
Please don't tell me Linux is unstable or insecure. The NT box beside the previously mentioned two Linux boxen needs a weekly reboot because Exchange Server craps out. Or the printer connected to it takes it down becuase the printer drivers are buggy. Or because I look at the server funny. Or because the moon is at odds with Jupiter.
I can't wait to get rid of that box.
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /9905.0/0000.html
/mill
mingo's stab at "refuting" it..
As for the previous post I fail to see the value of it. Posting quotes from the article is a waste of bandwidth if one doesn't add something more.
I also wonder how you can call something pathetic and laughable when you don't even know it exists.
"Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft...don't think it will be very successful in the long run...My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse."
Well, I don't know if it's just me, but I really feel like I read this whole thing before, about 2-3 months ago? And, If I haven't, I sure know I have heard it before from others.
The thing is, Linux is very new (speaking from the time of origin of UNIX), and developing very rapidly. This is an "Old Party Line" about Free UNIX's, and not something I am shocked by at all.
I consider myself "new" to the UNIX community, starting out in IRIX in about 1994. I remember clearly the days that people were saying many things like this, and in my mind it seems pretty far back. But in the mind of the guy who invented UNIX, I am sure it's just like yesterday. I recall "Yea, Linux is unstable, insecure, and just wacked, if you absolutely have to run a networked box to do any server stuff on a Free Unix, run FreeBSD. Linux is only a toy for workstations. You can get more fun toy applications for Linux that FreeBSD, but it's not as stable or secure for a server." I remember MANY people held that opinion. "Don't ever consider a free unix for something mission critical, and Linux is the dead last choice if you do." Not my word, just stuff I remember hearing.
So, of course, being the "fly in the face of danger" kind of guy I am, when I went to stick UNIX on my home PC, I picked Linux... and that was only about 2-3 years ago now. And I'll tell you, Linux has changed DRASTICALLY in the short time I have used it. So, IMHO, it doesn't sound shocking to me, it just sounds like Thompson is way out of touch with what has happened in the UNIX world in the last 18 months.
I guess I should have read the article first. I apologize for this pointless rant.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
I must admit that I was a little shocked when I initially read the interview. Thompson stated that linux is unreliable and worse than Miscrosoft. I went as far as going to freebsd's homepage, and wondering if I should install FreeBSD at home, or Solaris 7 personal edition. Then I realized a couple of things. First of all, Thompson said "I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically." Wow, that's a pretty brutal statement when you look at it; but, if you think about it - how much Windows98 source code has Thompson seen, and how much of it would he approve of? The second decision that made me think I shouldn't switch over is Quake3. I know it's a feeble reason, but q3 came out for linux the other week, and just today I saw a howto for the freebsd linux emulator, and when is quake going to show up for Solaris - never. So, if id thinks that linux is good enough to develop for, maybe it's just good enough to use.
I don't know. Maybe I should be running Windows98 at home. What do you guys think?
"If Linux clobbers Microsoft, it'll be nice that we've finally clawed our way back up to the 1970's, but wouldn't you like to start moving ahead for a change? If UNIX is not "obsolete","
:)"
I for one would like to get back some of the funcationality we had under TOPS-20, and that OS traces its roots into the 1960's. I never used Multics myself, but I am told that it had many useful features that have never been duplicated. The utter lack of a sense of history in 98% of the software world today has its good points, but its bad points as well.
"[1] COBOL has been around longer than UNIX, but note that I said "useful" and "life". COBOL is doubly disqualified.
Here I would have to respectfully disagree. I don't do COBOL myself, and I would guess most slashdotters don't either. But if you enjoy certain activities such as cashing paychecks, turning on your electric appliances, and making telephone calls, I would have to say that COBOL is not only useful but absolutely essential to modern life. And it's not going away, either.
sPh
> For all he knows or claims to know about Unix,
Hold it right there. The man wrote UNIX; end of story. He didn't just come along and hack out yet another clone, which is really all Linus has done; without Ken there would be no such thing as UNIX. Whether you agree with him or not, there is no room for skepticism about his credentials. He knows what he is talking about, and his criticism generally is not to be taken lightly.
>Don't you think it would be difficult for Thompson to accept that a 21-year-old kid had come along and done a better job with Thompson's own idea than Thompson could do with all of the power of ATT behind him?
This is hubris, Bruce. The truly enduring thing about UNIX isn't any particular implementation, but the generality of the API. The design that Ken and Dennis set forth has survived the introduction of networks, graphics devices, multiprocessors, etc. Linus stood on the shoulders of giants, and Ken Thompson is one of those giants.
Coming from one of the fathers of Unix, that hurts quite a bit. However, I'd like to point out that Thompson is pretty much into OS research. Unix was cutting edge when he built it, but now it is somewhat mundane. I'm not surprised that he isn't interested in Linux.
He is working on Plan9 and other stuff. Somehow, I don't think that Plan9 will ever have the impact that Unix had (or that Linux is *having*). Many people here think that his statement amounts to sour grapes since his more recent work isn't getting any awards. I expect he has some real, technical reasons for his statements, and I'd like to hear them.
Another point to remember is that Linux is perhaps more a political movement than a technical one, and Thompson isn't into politics. As for the long term impact of Linux, I think that he is off, but only time will tell.
--Lenny
//"You can't prove anything about a program written in C or FORTRAN.
It's really just Peek and Poke with some syntactic sugar."
IF linux is a clone of his work and the autrhor says it sucks then its the end of discusion. He didnt critize the opensource model. He said the code sucked and the media seems to support this. Untill linux matures years altter, I will avoid it. I plan to switch to freebsd. He did say some parts were cool. BUt linux can't handle scsi properly and the threads suck it doesn't support aync i/o's or non reemptive points. Linux=unix 85.
Sorry guys. If you wrote a better os and a programming language then c then I would acutally believe you. I trust him and independt magazines liek windows NT magazine and Dr Dobbs journal.
"Never stick an electrical appliance down your pants." -Tim Allen
IF an app takes down a whole os it means that the os has some serious bugs or it just plainly sucks. Q3test crashed my machine. THis means that the graphics modules aren't designed properly. THe drivers shouldn't crash an os if they are run in user space instead of kernel space. THis shows that the linux graphics drivers and kernel modules were poorly written. I know its a little faster in kernel mode but this is the main cause of NT server crahses. All the bsod's always mention a video card access problem. IT shouldnt happen and I will try to take linux off my web server at work because I now fear that a system crash is inevitable like NT and Thompson is just the tip of the iceberg. I plan to use freebsd or solaris x86.
"Never stick an electrical appliance down your pants." -Tim Allen
Some topics, like GNOME/KDE, MS/Linux, and this interview, can be discussed rationally also attract knee-jerk flaming that drowns out the worthwhile discussion. For example, the question "Is computer science coming to an end?" in this topic is an interesting one, but not much attention is being paid to it.
The fix is probably to add a subtopic to Slashdot for such advanced discussion, as I've proposed in the past. Or, someone else should start a new discussion forum focusing on such topics.
I loved this posting!! I enjoyed a good gut-wrenching guffaw for a good ten minutes when I read it. I can picture the tweaking in my mind, just like some Monty Python skit. Very well said, very insightful, and very hilarious. I wish this were moderated up a few spots.
This makes it sould like Thompson will pick the "complex but perfect" choice. That appears to be very much not the case. Look at windowing systems for a moment, Linux seems to have chosen X11 as it's windowing system. A good choice, the code was available, many applications allready use it, while it has huge flaws it is gennerally beleved to be usable. Inferno's windowing system is 100% new. If you look at X's drawing primitaves there are tons of them, there are dozens of ways to manuplate a "Graphics Context", diffrent ways to draw text made of 8bit charactors or 16 bit charactors, a call to draw a line, a call to draw multiple lines at once, maybe as many as 150 diffrent X calls to "draw stuff". Then there are liberies built on top of X. Inferno's windowing system has exactly one drawing primitave "take rectangle A from this pixel source, and scale/rotate it to size B in that pixel sink". (In Inferno pixel sources/sinks all have alpha masks) Then liberies are built on top of that.
Which is better depeneds on how you judge. If I were making an OS and wanted to see 3rd party applications on within five years I would never make a new windowing system, not matter how cool. I would use X11, or Display PostScript (or both).
Supports more hardware then what? Linux definitly supports more PC hardware then Plan 9, and almost defintily more hardware by count then Plan 9. Same for Inferno if you ignore Inferno running as a guest OS under Windows (and whichever IBM S/390 OS's they support). Inferno runs a few places Linux doesn't (like the Sony PlayStation), but I expect Linux runs places Inferno doesn't, and could probbably run on just as much bare metal as Inferno.
He didn't complain that Linux doesn't support lots of hardware. He complained about it's reliability. Which isn't something I can't comment (much) on, I havn't found Linux to be particurally unstable, nor have I heard creditable reports of it being unstable. As others have said maybe he tested an old version of Linux.
Note: we still have the complex overengineered *interfaces*. Programmers please think of all the work you need to do to open a TCP socket, connect it to a remote host and port (three syscalls, plus a call to gethostbyname, and getprotobyname). Contract that to Plan9's:
finger_fd = open("/net/inet/tcp/hostname.domain/finger", O_RDWR, 0);
I'm sure I didn't get the exact path, I'm not a Plan9 user, I just read all the White Papers I could find. Also note that this is so simple you can write a finger client as a tiny shell script.
Linux or *BSD could choose to implment this in addition to the normal interface (there are several *BSD implmentations of this sort of thing using portals), but they can't discard the overcomplex socket interface.
As a matter of Law, no signifigant quantity of copyrighten material (which I think means cpio in it's entierity, some header files that really only have one strightforward representation, and nothing else). Go hunt up AT and T's lawsuit against BSDI.
I expect almost everything he ever produced that was intresting, and not turned into a product has a paper written about it. A paper that can located and read. It is depressing that so little of it has code you can get for free, or even for a "modest" fee (Lucent's Toolchest II CD is $500, more then I can afford at home, a pittace for my employer to buy).
The thing I find depressing is I'm sure there are flaws in Linux, and if he had pointed out a handful of them people would rush off and work on them, maybe even manage to fix them. Unfortunitly all his Linux comment will do is cause some to snicker, and other to get pissed off.
P.S. I think one big reason "Plan9 lost in the marketplace" is Plan9 was never really in the marketplace. You could get it for free (or cheep? Inferno was free), and do non-products with it for free. A product baised on it would cost $250,000 or call for pricing. Plan9 is cool, but i can't see it saving $250,000 over Linux or *BSD on very many projects.
One to go...
and spawned an industry
One down.
When there are more Linux seats than there ever have been Unix seats, that might count for something. Are we there yet?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
We have more than enough experience of talented programmers giving away their work. Ignore this troll.
Bruce Perens.
There are lots of great ideas that never make it out of the lab. People at Xerox invented what we know as the "Mac" paradigm today. It took Steve Jobs to bring it out of the lab. Unix was a dying thing before Linus came along. Linus didn't invent it, but he stumbled across the methodology necessary to do it right.
There were electric lights before Edison, you know.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Regarding whether or not Linux is a better Unix, that's my judgement as a Unix systems programmer since 1981. I guess not everyone will agree with me, that's life.
One of the best things we're seeing is the vast number of uncredentialed researchers doing good work with Linux. The system needed some shaking up.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I think that it's not unusual for an OS researcher to have some resentment about OS practice.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
From 1981-1986 I was worked at the NYIT Computer Graphics Laboratory, predecessor of Pixar. We had these two really hot researchers who just moped around all day and played lots of video games. They'd convinced themselves that all of the real innovations in CG had already been done, and that they really had no chance to make a major contribution. Lots of major contributions in CG were made during the subsequent decade, but not by those two.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I wonder though if it could be like physics in the 1920's, when people thought the fundamentals were done, just before quantum mechanics happened.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Plan 9 and its descendants have their share of good ideas, but they're not going to go anywhere as long as there's no Open Source. They've even been replaced by Linux as a research OS at most universities, and they have never seen very much practical use.
Don't you think it would be difficult for Thompson to accept that a 21-year-old kid had come along and done a better job with Thompson's own idea than Thompson could do with all of the power of ATT behind him?
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
But what if what you love is programming free software? There's more to job quality than merely the type of project you're working on.
Here is link to the thread on Deja.
link
True to an extent. But where do you think the idea of /proc came from. At least on Solaris /proc was created by an ex-Bell Labs employee who worked on Plan 9.
The idea behind Plan 9 is that "there are no special set of system calls for applications to call to deal with the state of the kernel. Instead, the applications can be written using standard file I/O system calls." (taken from a SUNWORLD article by Peter Galvin"
Parts of Beowulf also make use of the Plan 9 ideal.
So it's being used and slowly the ideals are being incorporated.
Also Plan 9 is not for embedded use. It's a distributed system. Check out the Plan 9 home page for more information. If only it didn't cost $300 bucks.
I'm not going into your bad experience(s) with linux, or your opinions on other OSs. I just want to make one point, lest anybody out there reading this believe misinformation:
Just checking your email requires all regular users to have a root account or at least privledges (typos corrected)
That is entirely, 100% false. I check my email several times a day, and with my standard account (which I use for everything except installing software, or configuring global settings, just like NT.)
Like I said, I will not degenerate into a "my OS is better than your OS," I just don't want misinformation floating around.
I played with Plan 9. It runs on a very restricted set of hardware. That fact alone makes it easier to improve stability. Overall, I did not find that it was more stable than many UNIX like OS's that I have used.
I will say that the whole environment was kind of neat and I liked it.
Troy
The Hungry Programmers are working on Y. I don't know how it's different from X & Berlin, though.
If you don't have the projects at work you really want to be coding, what else do you do but join the Open Source movement?
You get a different job where you can do what you enjoy. You sound as if it's difficult to get a programming job or something. The only people that can't get a programming job doing what they love are the *worst* programmers (and who wants to use software written by them??).
I hear this a lot - conventional wisdom says not to use linux as an NFS server, if you need free NFS, BSD is probably better.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Yes! This is something BSD'er never take into account. Linux is much easier to use; I know that if 10 months ago I had installed free BSD I probably would have gotten as far as I have with linux. I'm not talking about GNOME and KDE here, but bash (much more sensible than csh for a new user) and a nice installer.
Let's face it - for a PC person whose never been exposed to unix it is very difficult - overwhelming - at first. Linux makes it easier. BSD probably has not gotten a single windows -> unix convert, FWIW.
support gun control: take guns from cops
I thought Be had no security built into the filesystem and no partitioning of user/system data ... haven't we learned from the mistakes of windows and macintosh?
support gun control: take guns from cops
"I don't see any articles bearing this ..."
Maybe that's his point. KT's comments don't hold up to analysis. In fact one wonders if he really has tried Linux, or if he has just heard some bad gossip.
I thought Plan 9 had disappeared down the back of the sofa ages ago, and maybe it's resentment at this which produced such a bizarre comment.
Chris Wareham
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
Unreliable? Linux? In a non-PC environment? Linux runs on many architectures, and is pretty well known for its reliability. Linux is more unreliable than MS? I think MS should hire him as a spokesman.
For all he knows or claims to know about Unix, he knows very little about Linux. He is criticizing it in areas that it is quite strong in. Where is he coming from?
Is he just pissed that Plan 9 or whatever didn't take off?
Also, did anyone notice that CmdrTaco posted this at 4:20? I seem to recall 420 being the police code for something. I forget what.
Isn't this exactly the FUD that that guy from Microsoft was telling everyone?
The same FUD that's been debunked countless times if you've been reading Slashdot?
I've got a Dell Poweredge server here...
(scsi0) Downloading sequencer code... 407 instructions downloaded
(scsi1) found at PCI 6/0
(scsi1) Narrow Channel, SCSI ID=7, 3/255 SCBs
(scsi1) Downloading sequencer code... 419 instructions downloaded
megaraid: found 0x101e:0x9010:idx 0:bus 2:slot 10:fun 0
scsi2: Found a MegaRAID controller at 0xe490, IRQ: 18
megaraid: [Uc77:1.47] detected 1 logical drives
scsi0 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.10/3.2.4
scsi1 : Adaptec AHA274x/284x/294x (EISA/VLB/PCI-Fast SCSI) 5.1.10/3.2.4
scsi2 : AMI MegaRAID Uc77 254 commands 16 targs 2 chans
minty:/proc/sys/fs# uptime
4:53pm up 14 days, 23:23, 1 user, load average: 2.22, 2.39, 2.53
Been up for 14 days since the last reboot, and there haven't been any problems. And this thing serves Samba, Imap, Email, DNS, Intranet stuff for over 100 users. The drivers seem rather stable.
I wasn't bragging. My point was that Linux runs just fine with those Adaptec SCSI controllers.
I've never had a crash on this machine, and we've been using it for months now.
Ben
I've seen more accounts of long uptimes with Linux versus those for NT.
I don't know where you're coming from, but the Linux community has been rather good at taking criticism that is warranted and doing something about it (such as putting up a site for tuning information after the Mindcraft Debacle).
Show me a few examples of NT machines running for over a year without a reboot, and I'll reconsider my position.
Have you taken a look at Debian 2.1 and Debian Potato?
I use it on all the servers I admin, and it works flawlessly, is stable, and is a great server OS.
It's easy to maintain, keep up to date, etc., and it has a really effective bug tracking system.
I've used FreeBSD, but I still like Debian better because there is more going on in the Linux camp.
As far as stability, neither FreeBSD nor Linux has crashed on me, but I had to use FreeBSD as a bridging firewall, since nothing like that exists for Linux.
I don't think it's time to write off Linux on the server. I use it on systems where the loads are high, and the system just keeps chugging. And the kernel is rock-solid. That's where it's most important. Linux hasn't gotten any worse in reliability from 2.0.x to 2.2.x as far as I can tell.
Before everybody goes off the deep end, consider this question. When was the last time Thompson did a serious evaluation of Linux? If he last looked at Linux two years ago, would his opinions be different now? My guess is that he would still frown upon variability in the quality of the code, but he might change his views on the reliability issue.
Linux development has been rapid paced. Everytime a new kernel is released, I somehow recall seeing comments about how such and such bug has been fixed, or widget xyz works better. The time frame in which Thompson makes his Linux appraisal is important.
But I don't know the time frame. Can anybody shed some light on this?
Check the page at:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/
All the bsod's always mention a video card access problem. IT shouldnt happen and I will try to take linux off my web server at work because I now fear that a system crash is inevitable like NT
:)
... and missing.
Seems a little bit on the drastic side. No OS is immune to crashing. Sure popping in and out of video modes can mess stuff up. But I have never personally had a corrupt display take the system down. And I've had some pretty f'd up displays. Just gotta wait till the load is light, telnet in, and reboot it.
q3test is also alpha code, who knows what stuff it is doing in memory.... and considering the fact that you are recommended to run it as ROOT, i'm not surprised it can mess stuff up.
I'm also not saying that linux is the best thing since sliced bread. Its just a nifty OS that can do lots of cool stuff for free. As some other comment said, there is no one OS for every task.
there, I just felt I had to say something in this abnormally huge comment section
---------------------------------------
The art of flying is throwing yourself at the ground...
I think what's happening here is that Thompson and you have somewhat different criteria for careers. I really don't think he cares all that much about the money; it's the opportunity to be on the frontiers of a new field. Computing really doesn't have much of that anymore, it's starting to mature and a lot of the fundamental work has been done. Biotech, OTOH, is very new, and there's a bigger chance to have a major impact on the field by doing that fundamental sort of stuff.
So no, you may not make as much money, but you get the chance to do some really exciting stuff (at least for people such as Thompson, it seems).
I do think Thompson may be wrong about all the interesting stuff being gone from computer work. Quantum computing, anyone?
Well, too many replies to read them all, I'm sure somebody pointed out what I'm going to say :-)
The problem is sure, maybe not all the software for linux or maybe even not all parts of linux itself is super high quality. But I refuse to believe that every single line written for a commercial (closed source) OS is a work of brilliance either. And between the two guess which will evolve faster?
But he still goes on to say that MS is more reliable and that Linux is only a backlash against MS. Both are clueless statements in any context.
Personally, I'd love to see KT elaborate on the unreliability of Linux. It would be even better if he released some patches :) Somehow I doubt that is going to happen, though.
Specifically, the BeOS GUI was written with the assumption that there is a single display device, always on the local machine, that has a frame buffer that can be directly accessed in memory space. This is fine for a single-monitor desktop machine, but will present problems if they try to support multi-monitor systems or remote terminals.
Well, not quite. It's may not be as pretty on multiple monitors or remote displays, but it's possible. The direct window API just maps framebuffer into your address space and tells you where not to draw. With multiple monitors you would just have to move the window from monitor to monitor all at once (kinda kludgy). With remote display you would run into the same nasty copy-fest that Xshm has to deal with.
On the one hand, Thompson criticizes Linux based on technical merits - and he has a point there, technically linux is far from perfect and is based on very old technology. On the other hand, he admits that the reality of the OS market means that nobody really cares if your system is technically superior and to compete you have to put an enormous effort in application development - and there's no denying that Linux has done exactly that.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I think that ius the point. MS's product was good (for the money), back when it was one of few affordable personal computer OSes. Now most people are stuck in legacy stuff and aren't even aware alternatives exist. Nearly 3 millenia ago Aristotle (Father of Logic) pointed out the error in this arguement as Ad Populem. To express it colloqially, if all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you? If you post, please do so intellegently and with some support for your point, otherwise it is just flamebait.
Either he used an old version of Linux or a modern one. If it was an early version of Linux, it is dishonest of him not to acknowledge that fact, and he has misrepresented his knowledge of the operating system. This doesn't speak well of him.
On the other hand, if he tried a modern version, he has either never tried a Microsoft OS, or he's a liar, or he's a fool. I don't think he's a fool, and if he has never used an M$ OS he has no business comparing Linux to one (in which case he is misrepresenting his ability to compare them).
Despite Thompson's genius, and despite the fact that he could probably rewrite me in assembly one evening just for kicks, there's no getting around the fact that his comments about Linux are pure unadulterated balderdash. He deserves to be criticized for them.
I'll grant that it's certainly possible that Thompson's comments could have been edited, or that his experience may have been on non-PC hardware -- but then he has no business comparing Linux on non-PC hardware to a PC-based OS like Windows. It's possible that his views were not clearly represented in the article, but there's no question that the content of the article is garbage with resepect to Linux (though I thought the rest of it was interesting).
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Uptime for our Phoenix firewall servicing a T-1 on an aging p-100 = non-stop until hardware failure. Boy, you hate to contradict the father of UNIX, but real-life experience is just that, real-life.
"oohhh... I didn't know Schopenhauer was a philosopher!"
Can it be downloaded? Or do you have to know the super-sekrit code word to get it? Is there a compiler for it? A JVM?
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
When I first read the article I, too, was hurt. But then I realised that I had a hidden assumption as I started reading: that Ken Thompson, as a father of Unix, MUST love/defend/etc Linux. But this assumption is false. What someone did twenty years ago only has bearing on today if he has consistently pursued that path all along. If Thompson were interested in developing Unix as an open-source PC operating system, he undoubtedly would have done so, and none of us would have heard of Linus. But he wasn't. He has involved himself in other things. Now we come along, with Linux central to our computing lives, ready to seize on his pearls of wisdom... Thompson probably hasn't given much thought to Linux at all. He is very unlikely to have given it a thorough stability test. He's heard of it, he's heard some comments, it's not central to his life, why should he exert himself to give an objective opinion? The only reason we attach a lot of importance to his comments is because of work he did twenty years ago. Now, if a highly experienced sysadmin, using Unix and Linux and NT on a daily basis, were to say Linux is less stable than NT, then I would worry. But, on this topic, who is Ken Thompson? Might as well ask Al Gore.
I can read this rant, therefore you haven't been censored. (although if there ever was an argument for censorship, you're it) You've been moderated, but not censored.
Also, most people have a hard time taking *anyone* seriously if they can't even spell "faggot" or "fucking" correctly. Go back to usenet, you little troll.
0 1 - just my two bits
I had a huge headache at work a week and a half ago when everything died. I'm in a scientific group, and we've mostly used Solaris in the past. We've been ramping up our Linux usage, and on the whole Linux has been *more* stable than Solaris. However, we just recently started writing in bulk to a Linux disk NFS exported to a Solaris machine, and the nfs daemon *kept* *dying*. Very annoying. I solved it with some Alan Cox patches that included H.J. Lu's latest knfsd. So Linux isn't as unreliable as it first looked. But there are a few places where Linux still does falter.
But look at how fast it was fixed - you found an error, it was something Alan Cox and H.J. Lu had already found and fixed. Those fixes will appear in the next AC full kernel revision patch. So within, what - a few months tops, the problem is solved for everyone.
Try that with anything comming out of MS. Or for that matter any of the commercial UNIX flavors which often take longer to even find and fix the glitch, let alone begin to distribute it to those who need it.
No realistic person will say Linux is currently, or will ever be, the perfect operating systems - one that works on everything, always, from now till time everlasting.
The facinating thing about Linux, the GNU tools, and body of GPL applications - is the ever evolving nature of them. Yes - headaches for Venders, and fodder for VARs and consultants. However one can always apply "If it's not broke don't fix it" with linux. If your 2.0.xx kernel works fine with the hardware in a dedicated environment works - there is no reason to change anything save any fixes for security or bugs. No need for the latest and greatest like virtual frame buffers found in the 2.2.x series.
The key to Linux is, it turns the operating system into a commodity. Linux does for the operating system market what cheap PCs have done for the computer industry.
As an example, the USA would never have grown as mighty as it is today if the intersate rail and road networks were locked behind toll booths. The same goes for the break up of "blessed monopolies" such as MaBell, and more recently with the move to have gas and eletric companies loose exclusive rights to regions. It's only when you remove the toll boths to progress, do we end going anywhere.
Linux is not the destination we should be seeking, it's mearly the open road to tommorow.
--
James Michael Keller
"Linux is not our destination, it is simply the open road to tommorow"
Well you obviously have your threshold at -1 or you wouldn't have read the message. So why do you care? If people want to trust in the moderator/censors then let 'em. I personally keep my threshold at -1 cuz I like to decide for myself what is worthy of consideration.
--Bricktoad
My friends, we are nothing but wings on the chicken of society.
That's right kiddies, whine and bitch all you want about his comments, the simple fact of the matter is without Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, et al, Linux would not exist. Linux's source code is a mess of varying quality. Perhaps he's commenting on old kernel versions, I don't know nor will I presume to speak for him. Just remember that Linux is a Unix clone and without these men, Unix would not exist. Thank goodness for the sanity of the FreeBSD world.
Trolling is a art,
I use BeOS regularly, and while it is indeed quite nice, I think that there are some features of X-Windows that BeOS should adopt. Specifically, the BeOS GUI was written with the assumption that there is a single display device, always on the local machine, that has a frame buffer that can be directly accessed in memory space. This is fine for a single-monitor desktop machine, but will present problems if they try to support multi-monitor systems or remote terminals.
I'm not saying that everything about X-Windows is good; just that this is a useful feature that X-Windows has that BeOS's GUI and graphics API lacks. I look forward to seeing future revisions of both systems.
Please tell me you're not serious here.
Maybe he did Unix and a lot of great things, but if it says that linux is worse than MS it really needs an oculist. While it's true that there's a variation on cuality from parts to parts of the linux kernel , in overall is fairly better than any mS thing around. I also tested it on non intel platforms and it's rock solid, fairly more stable than native os for them in most cases. Maybe he suffers from envy, or he needs medical assistance.
Good Point. He is also a computer scientist, and is therefore interested in new approaches to computng problems. Linux is hardly a new approach to anything (except for the development model), and therefore probably is of very little interest to Thompson.
I doubt Thompson has much operational experience with any recent commercial operating system, except for what's sitting on his desk. So take his opinion for what it is. However, he is probably familiar with other computer scientists working at Microsoft and their work. Which probably interests him more than a bunch of folks on the Internet rebuilding the wheel.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It seems the moderation tendencies are as follows:
(from highest scores to lowest)
1) Factual corrections, additional information, eyewitness accounts.
2) Long winded eloquent restatements of the Linux Advocacy party line.
3) Anything by Bruce Perens (I think this is automatic)
4) Long winded expositions of the greatness of Free Software in general and Linux in particular.
5) Thoughtful comments of other types.
6) Not so eloquent restatements of the Linux Advocacy party line and other Linux testimonials.
7) Random comments, responses, etc.
8) First Posts, Hitler stuff, etc.
Not that this is so bad, just that the moderation is getting predictable. It was more interesting when the scores were more dynamic (ranging from -1 to 10 rather than -1 to 4.)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
For a lot of us programming is a love more than an occupation. If you don't have the projects at work you really want to be coding, what else do you do but join the Open Source movement?
And if you don't love to code, chances are you are not a talented programmer.
Let's face it, Ken Thompson is full of himself. He co-created UNIX. It had a lot of new concepts for the time. But, thinking back, they were pretty logical. Heirarchical file systems? Think biological classification. We've done it for millenia. Time sharing? Obvious. C I admit is a nice language, and I use it extensively, but it has plenty of oddnesses. Like, you have to separately declare a typedef to make a struct into a type, or forever refer to it as "struct foo"... the "continue" statement is only valid in a for context... You know the drill. (Obviously all of this is arguable.)
Ken seems to be famous for doing something and then getting angry at others doing it later. For example, you must have heard about his cute trick of inserting some self-reproducing code into the C compiler to make it compile login with a username/password for him to get in. Real cute, Ken. Way to humiliate everyone who nominated you for the ACM award. Yet he was quoted as saying that RTM, the author of the infamous Internet worm of '88, should be put behind bars for a long time. And we're getting the same sort of conceited hypocracy here. "UNIX? Been there, done that. It's all about this OTHER system, you see, that's totally different, although strangely similar. Free software, what a fad." Then watch Lucent start releasing free source. I'll never stop laughing.
I can respect the man's background, but I can't respect his utter insolence. I realize I'm sounding pretty damn conceited and insolent myself, but... hell, it's a Slashdot comment, and I'm a damn undergraduate. I'm allowed to sound stupid.
Jeez.
It's just a damn operating system. Okay, it's a nice one, and I'm not fond of Windows either, but let's get some perspective here. You're not competing with Thompson.
Furthermore, re-implementing and refining something isn't quite on the same level as inventing it. Linux is to UNIX as Windows 95 is to Xerox PARC, more or less.
Think about it.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
remember Ezra Pound, a great man who, motivated by envy and other personal issues made some statements he later came to regret during WWII.
It's true that he later came to regret a lot of the crap he spewed out, but IIRC there was some ugly nonsense in a lot of the pre-war Cantos as well. God knows he was a great poet, but he was a swine on a personal level for more than just those few years.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
They compete directly with Linux in a number of areas and have a lot to gain by using their leverage to apply ample amount of FUD to the Linux phenomenon.
Is Inferno really competing with Linux? Like for web servers and such?
Even if it is, I really think that a techy interview with Ken Thompson is hardly a great way to spread FUD to the masses. This is an intervew with a research scientist at Bell Labs. With no pictures! The IT suits are not reading this stuff. Christ, for all I know Thompson may have a Ph.D. or something.
Here's a quote from the article:
Multics was a virtual memory system with page faults, and it didn't differentiate between data and programs. You'd jump to a segment as it was faulted in, whether it was faulted in as data or instructions.
You really think the average MSCE is reading that stuff and getting all pumped up about Microsoft World Domination? It doesn't seem likely.
"Once a solution is found, a compatibility problem becomes indescribably boring because it has only... practical importance"
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I'm not even convinced that Plan 9 scales as well as Linux (and that isn't saying all that much). And Plan 9 lacks a lot of practically important features, some by accident, some by design (e.g., Plan 9 has no sparse address spaces because the Plan 9 designers believe they are "bad for you").
Like most of Bell Lab's research operating systems, Plan 9 is contributing a lot of important ideas, even if it itself isn't widely used. I think the accolades that group has received are well deserved. Some of Plan 9's features have already made it into Linux, and I hope some more will. But even if Plan 9 was licensed in the same way Linux is, I wouldn't switch.
If you want to berate someone for berating Thompson then learn to think for yourself. I don't care if he says linux sucks, or rather, parts of it suck. Big deal. Unix isnt perfect and neither is he. Switching to NT because he said so? You're missing the point of his article man, he isn't saying linux is the worst OS in the world, he is just saying like most everything else in the world, it needs work. I can think of a few places other Unixes need some help. You only have the right to berate others when you've reached perfection.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
For all of you people canonizing Ken thompson as a saint...just stop right there. The same for everyone canonizing Linus Torvalds as a saint. Ken designed a revolutionary operating system. Linus reworked that operating system to work better on computer you and I could afford. Sure the BSDs and Solaris can work on a computer I can afford, way back when when Linus wrote linux it was because it was what he needed. Remember he was using minix and was unhappy with it's performance so he took a que from it and wrote linux. Linus didnt reinvent anything, he just used the same creative spirit Ken used over 20 years ago to do something nobody else had done. I dont understand why anyone would think NT is better at anything, other than crashing at the worst possible times, then linux. The only advantage M$ has over linux is that the hardware manufacturers write the drivers which gives M$ the advantage in support. Some companies are now writing linux drivers along with Windows drivers. It's a start. Read the article not for a Ken Thompson linux berating but an interview with a computer science pioneer. Take the critizism as a point to start improving linux, thats the point of thousands of us having access to the code.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If you want to know more about this statement, and how the Linux community reacts to it, check out the archives of the linux-kernel mailing list at http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /index.html
Look for postings with subject containing "Ken Thompson interview in IEEE Computer magazine", since 04/05, 12:55 +0530
This is interesting reading!
http://ward.vandewege.net/blog/
Yes, and I keep mine at -1 usually because of what I was just complaining about: legitimate posts sometimes getting knocked down because they happen to criticize Linux. It would be easier to set my own filter higher if I knew that the only thing I would be missing was flamebait garbage or a post from someone else whose stuff is usually obnoxious garbage. Especially on threads that get as long as ones like this, it would make reading all the potentially worthwhile ones much quicker.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Because I had read the archive list last night (I had already seen Russinovich's article) -- I had been hoping Slashdot would post a link so that everyone else could see it. Thanks for posting the link for others, I didn't have it on me when I posted earlier. About the pathetic and laughable thing: I would imagine that more substantive critiques have since been added to the subset which I read last night. However, a good deal of the ones I read were just hands-over-the-ears attacks, rather than a willingness to look at Russinovich's critiques objectively -- a bit below the standards I would expect for a dev list. Even so much to the point where it seemed as if Russinovich's knowledge of the Linux kernel after perusing the source surpassed some of the people responding to him.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
I've actually noticed that a lot lately. When the moderation system was first implemented, it seemed like good posts got moderated up, obnoxious flames got moderated down, and most stayed the same, no matter the OS-slant of the writer. (Well, except for _one_ annoying tendency that's been there throughout -- the longer the post, the greater chance of getting moderated up, even when it's complete pablum. Makes me wonder if Katz is doing the moderating ;-))
Lately, however, it seems like a lot of posts that are critical of Linux in non-inflammatory ways are getting moderated down, long posts espousing the virtues of Linux get moderated up, no matter how trite, and inflammatory posts by Linux fanatics don't get touched. It's as if there are some moderators out there who are trying to keep legitimate criticisms of Linux from most readers. Lame.
Along the same line, why hasn't Slashdot put up Mark Russinovich's dissection of Linux's enterprise OS merits? I admit that I didn't submit it, but only because I'm sure that other people have. Is it because since even the people on the Linux kernel list have done such a pathetic job of refuting his claims, you figure that most people here would just embarrass the Linux movement with their own answers? C'mon, give 'em a chance! Hell, please just post a link to the kernel list archive where they tried to rebut him, that's good for a lot of laughs.
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
Linux. You get what you pay for.
The poster implied that Thompson's comments about Linux were the least interesting part of the article (note the use of the word "otherwise") and yet the title of the article is "Thompson Critical of Linux", and most of the replies seem related to that too. Hmm.
Sounds like whoever titled the article (CmdrTaco I presume) and other Linux advocates are going to try to break the heretic-flaming records previously set by Amiga and OS/2 users. (I am an OS/2 and Amiga user, so I'm allowed to make fun of both groups. ;-)
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Unix begat Linux but the child is growing and it's time to cut the cord.Linux is destined for the desktops and laptops of the world..Unix is not. Unix has been and will always be geared for the enterprise.Linux can do both.I also detect a touch of envy in his comments...when did Unix get so much good press ..or any press for that matter.
Tired of being another body in the flock? Linux ! We are not sheep anymore.
However, Linux works, linux is open, linux is readily available, and linux is stable. Mr Thompson seems to have an axe to grind. No one has payed any attention to Plan 9. Plan 9, and Inferno, are supposedly the promise of the future in Operating systems and related components. However, they have failed to deliver on their promise. I can understand Mr Thompson's frustration. It's hard to capture the magic of the past. Mr Kernigen, Mr Ritche, and Mr Thompson have made the most important contribution to early computing. This legacy lives with us today, the world runs on Unix. However, instead of trying to relive the past, perhaps they should contribute to help building the future.
What I mean by this, is that perhaps they should work on building upon the already sound foundation of Unix. A great architect builds upon the knowledge of the past, he does not try to re-invent the art. Plan 9 seems to me that they are trying to re-invent the art. Unix works, it's nearly perfect, and it's extremely stable. With another 20 years of development, Unix will be perfect. Why start all over, why try to re-invent the wheel. Focus on the details, perfect the art. Anyhow, no matter what Mr Thompson says, I will always respect him for his work on defining the art. His work has paved the way for me, and many others, to ply our craft. That craft is Unix, and the art is computer science.
-Master Switch, one more element in the machine
Well If they can't see the merit of non-optimal solutions, then they are not smart in any useful way. They must be able to see both. Smart people should try not to become so focused on their area that they cannot see what is obvious.
I know that there are lots of lurkers, out there, but I think they lurk for the same reason I do most of the time. Why confront so much ignorance? Let them be the way they are, as long as they don't hurt anyone. I'd rather have an intelligent discussion with someone who has a clue.
I've also had to deal with plenty of the crap MS puts out. I can tell you without a doubt that fdisk is my favorite ms app. But I really don't care about MS or what they do. IMHO, Linux really doesn't have anything to do with MS.
-earl
Yeah, that's what I was talking about, but only partly. This guy was actually funny. ;) -earl
None of these people are gods in my eyes, nobody is, we're all human. But to hear criticism from someone so universally respected in the industry, and to whom we owe so much; and to simply call him old, and throw other juvenile insults at him. It's really a sign of the times isn't it?
Slashdot has become a victim of it's own success. I say this in the same way I do about RedHat. There was a time when if you were a newcomer to Linux _and_ Unix at the same time, RedHat was a Godsend. Also there was a time when Slashdot was quite a haven from the hype and the misinformation in the popular media, and you could expect intelligent, thought out comments to articles. It was intellectually stimulating to participate.
Now I've found that the same smart people are still putting this stuff together (Slashdot & RedHat), and they keep it mostly at the same high standard of quality, but now the flavor has gone bad. Too many uneducated reactionaries joining the party. Far to many people whose mantra is "Linus is GOD, Microsoft is the DEVIL".
The signal/noise ratio is way down, maybe even below 1, but I can't stay away since the core of the site is still top notch. All of a sudden I _completely_ understand why Rob went through all that effort to put the moderation system together. But you can't cure AIDS with a band-aid, not even emergency surgery will help. People, I regret to inform you that the Slashdot you once knew is dead... Long live Slashdot. I'm thinking maybe if the site went down for a couple weeks, unannounced, most of the losers would drift off in search of a new haven, but that's naive. A new forum is needed. Maybe it already exists, I'm on a quest to find it. But don't expect to hear about it on Slashdot. I wouldn't want to see a good thing ruined ... again.
Thanks Rob, Hemos, Nate, Sengan, Jon, Cliff. It's been quite a ride. I'll still be around, but I can't say I relly enjoy it anymore.
-earl
P.S.
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, you just might be part of the problem.
Well, Linus has said that he doesn't expect Linux to last forever or to keep expanding (at least kernel-wise) at an exponential rate. Soon or later, someone will say, "This isn't how things should be done." and they'll start a new OS that will be better. So who knows; maybe 10 years down the road we'll be doing a Plan-9 compliant system instead, and doing it right. History repeats.
I have a 4 way sql server that has been running for 2 years straight. I tried to experiment with linux and run q3test but it froze my os and crashed netscape multiple times after the game was run
When it comes to abusing hardware, Games are much worse than things like RDBMS's. Have you tried to run an Oracle 8.x Database on Linux on a 4 way system? I have, it is extremely stable, and FAST.
it gets its butt kicked by NT with the defualt settings according...
NT was nowhere near the default settings, they had MSCE's from MS itself help them tune it for many hours.
You may think Linux sucks, that's fine, but I have multiple Linux boxes with uptimes nearing a year (I had to upgrade above 2.0.18 due to some SMP troubles, or it may be longer). And I even have one with multiple 100mb cards on a simple P200 running a Novell -> NFS Gateway 24/7 for the past 8 months, with only 3 hours downtime. This box is used approx 16 out of every 24 hours, for heavy traffic, and has light traffic the rest of the time. The downtime was caused by a very nasty power outage. When the power came back, so did the server.
I have a LinuxPPC workstation which had a longer uptime than any NT server in our company until the Network card went south on me, and it has had some major Software upgrades before that. (No reboot required, even when swapping out the Window Manager, which is NOT tied into the OS).
I know that Linux is lacking a few things, however he was not comparing Linux with UNIX, or even Plan 9, he was comparing it to NT, which is laughable at best.
I have to agree with several of the other posters, that he is really, really annoyed that Plan 9 didn't take off. I remember when he started it, it was going to replace everything! I haven't seen an actual install of it yet for business reasons.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
It's not in the articles on that page, for some reason. Instead, search DejaNews on fa.linux.kernel for the Ken Thompson articles.
I suppose, though, it wouldn't hurt to mention the alternatives specifically. ;-)
The only alternative window system of whose development I am aware is Berlin. Check out the Berlin Consortium home page
Are there any others?
Lets not forget that Linus made an unflattering comment about Plan 9 in his Open Sources essay. I think we are seeing the professional equivalent of men tweaking noses.
That site doesn't seems to have added posts after the 3rd yet. The thread is available here.
I've read a lot of comments here talking about us needing an unbiased comparison between Linux, Unix, and NT. Well then, let's do it.
Here's what I propose. An independant testing center -- one with world-wide respect -- will conduct a test, benchmarking all three different systems against each other. The hardware, of course, would be identical. Have a MCSE from Microsoft install and tune the NT box, a Linux guru install and tune the Linux box, and a Unix guru to install and tune the Unix box.
If this doesn't allow for unbiased testing, then I personally don't think it's possible.
Remember, we need to treat the other OS's as equals before we can be accepted as one ourselves.
ick. Micros~1 is monopolistic not a monopoly
sigh
Lowmag.net
I put in a debian cd (no redhat -- it angries up his blood) into the pooch's mouth and the next thing i know he has been up and running for over a month with 1.16 1.05 1.09 load average, which never happened with a microsoft pedigree.
please describe your installation problem more specifically. which distribution? how did you install? orally or rectally? did you notice anything wrong with linux prior to the dog's death? when you rebooted, did the dog kept dying over and over again? did you try recompiling with a newer glibc? and, of course, was there anything wrong with the dog prior to the installation? unusual sweating? fleas? has he ever tried to breed? if yes, was he using fork? if cp'ed, did he copy correctly?
forward the answers to these question to comp.os.canine.linux and see if any suggestions apply.
8)
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
Microsoft is not the reason Linux is popular (no more than MacOS, BeOS, xBSD or any other OS about not from Microsoft).
The GPL is.
Phill
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
Ok, people, time to move. Someone got a PAC converter and player yet?
Help achieve Liberty in your lifetime - join the Free State Project - http://www.freestateproject.org
He also talks about getting rather harsh critcism from his peers for some of his work and how it caused him to do a rewrite and improve it.
I don't think he was trying to imply anything, I think he was simply being himself and giving his opinions. Many people in the CS industry are rather harsh when it comes to other peoples work. We tend to eat our young sometimes....
I don't think we have to agree with everything he says but we should certainly *respect* the man for his opinions.
thats kind of made ms irrelevant.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
> I really hope that we're not at the
> point where open source and free software
> eclipse innovative products just because they
> aren't Open Source(TM).
But that's always the way it's been. The markets hate proprietary technology. No company likes to be held hostage to a monopoly provider. VHS won out over Beta, even though Beta was a superior technology introduced a year before VHS, simply because VHS was non-proprietary. The Mac lost out to the PC, in spite of its superior technology, because it also was closed, proprietary technology, whereas the PC was open.
The one apparent exception to this is Windows, but that appears to be a temporary phenomenon. I fully expect Windows NT and it successors to be nothing bad a bad memory in five years. Windows might still have a presence on the desktop, but I think it will have disappeared from servers.
Hmm, I wonder when K.T. last tried Linux? Kernel 0.99 maybe? Linux has a ways to go before it's to the 'ease of use' level of MSWin or MacOS, but it's stability is solid now. He does have a point about it being more a response to MS than something orthagonal like Plan9. People like KT live for orthagonal ideas and originality, the Linux scene is more Postmodern.
Now that compression he talked about, I can believe it's a lot better than MP3, the Telcos live for squeezing a few bits out of a phone conversation. I'd think most of their algorithms are optimized for voice, not music. I'm sure it's patented to hell and back, little chance for the opensource crowd getting a look under the hood.
On the other hand, patents do expire, and the Telcos have been into digital compression for a long time, maybe there's something in the archives worth using...
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Yeah, I hear what you guys are saying. I mean, if Microsoft's stuff actually was good, almost everyone would be using it!
Oh, wait a minute...
well, isn't knfsd still tagged as "experimental"?
If yes, then you shouldn't base any reliability judgements on it...
Your writing 'style' obviously shows that you have yet to learn to think for yourself. He is out of touch and past his prime. The article shows that he has issues with his life as much as it shows anything about Linux.
Thompson brings up a few interesting points. Saying that windows is unreliable, Something many people know understand and yet still trust? and that Linux IS worse.. That seemed a little harsh. Butt come to think of it. I have tried FreeBSD, and I have tried Linux and I LIVE with NT at work. Often times ive asked my bosses why not Linux, or Why not *nix. The answer is pretty simple since we are a small shop that needs very quick and rapid application development. NT has all the tools and can stay running long enough to make the money, The interface saves time mostly in learning curve I would imagine. Linux perhaps needs to and already has taken note of this. Thompson think slinux is unreliable. And from his perspective it is a chaotic world of turmoil. Reading further up in his post he said give him something complex and he cant understand it well. And the development cycle of linux is chaotic and somewhat complex. So perhaps hes not out to get linux as much as everyone thinks. He hardly commented much on it proving one of a few things. Either A>he doesnt care B> he didnt have enuff technical information ( which is probably not true since he said he read the source ) or C> He is jealous and out to completely annihilate all *nix butt plan 9. Yeeah.. Anyhow. thats what I think. Keep on coding. Butt keep on fixing stuff. Also. Its when we fail to improve what already exists that we lose something to innovativity and to bloated software. If we just keep adding cool features and dont make the code we have nicer/better/faster/smaller that Linux dies. And people its happenin..
I'm actually very glad he said this. It may be quite valuable to the DOJ...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
"Computer: In a sense, Linux is following in this tradition. Any thoughts on this phenomenon?
Thompson: I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft-a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very
successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people
have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically.
My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a
non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways,
embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go." Computer MAgizine
He is right in the fact work needs to be done on linux. But is that not what we are doing everyday? Alot of people know there are problems and are trying to fix them. Can everybody say the same about Microsoft.
Thompson may be feeling a little pissed that Linux has a shot at the user market when Unix was never considered for it.
As for the problems he and his freinds had with Linux the comman man would never tweak a system as hard as Ken. On any system if you keep going into the kernal and playing around you should expect problems. I think Linux is in it for the long haul for several reasons. One is the price free as PC,Apple etc.. keep droping in price people will not want to spend $200 of a $400 system just for the OS, and no apps. Also the portablity think about it you can run it on almost any hardware out there, so then your not stuck with just one hardware type you can buy the cheapest and know the interface will be the same. I also know that intel has already complied a 64bit Linux for the Merced chip using Vmware, so Linux is already for the next generation of Hardware. Is Microsoft ready?
Don't panic - Hitchhikers guide 2 the galaxy
i believe AT&T got sued by MSoft for it's proposed use of NT source code (which it had received under a restrictive license)... i'm pretty sure he has access to NT source.
redJester
redJester
I think maybe he hasn't used it in a few years... (he's apparently a pretty bright guy - but maybe he tried a pre-v1 or something, and made up his mind there and then?)
I use it everyday for firewalls and gateways (in addition to web & email servers, plus it's my primary desktop OS,) and it's ALWAYS 100% rock solid.. the number of times it's crashed on me: ZERO. (uptime on our main server is over 6 months, and it shows no sign of slowing down... Although as soon as I get my ass in gear and get up early on a Sunday morning when nobody's using it, I'll probably upgrade the kernel...)
Compare this with the SCO server I upgraded today, which the user says has to be rebooted once a week, and I'd that it's pretty reliable...
I hate to say this, Taco, but I had hoped for a slightly less biased description of the article. I had expected various rabid Linux types to defend it to death against each other, but not for the Linux bias to show up right at the top.
FWIW, a lot of people I know who have been using unices for quite a while have an anti-linux bent. (I know that I certainly have some negative feelings about it from back when you had to include some inane just to get PATH_MAX.)
It's interesting, the "software darwinism" at Bell that Thompson refers to in the beginning of the interview, is very much like the open source movement. Some of it is good, and it trickles up to the top, some of it is lame and gets dumped (or not).
The critism that "a whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically" is right on the money. Any programmer would have to concede the bad code in many parts of Linux. There are many poorly written, or unfinished lines of software here! Its the truth.
The recent push to 'celo-wrap' Linux has raised the bar of expectations. And all Linux's dirty laundry is open for public consumption. Ultimately, this will be a good thing, as software darwinism ensures that better code will replace poor code. Linux has flaws, the community should admit it, remove them, and move forward.
John
We should be keeping a list of Linux's shortcomings. Someday I hope to have a completely linux environment, however Win98 is still on my desktop. My firewalls and home server are all linux based. The right tool for the right job for my needs.
/root]# uptime
That being said, I've got a LOT of Linux boxes at the office. I've managed to minimize the amount of overpriced poorly performing solutions by implementing them using open standards on Linux.
Oh, and my mail server uptime is
[root@gateway
7:13pm up 143 days, 16:08, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00
Not much of a load, but then it's hideously overpowered (Pentium II 400Mhz) for what it does (secondary internal DNS, Intranet web server, public and private SMTP, POP3 for 75 users). Built on cheap clone box hardware. My only issue is eventual disk failure.
http://www.bullnet.com
> Linux distributions contain more software than BSD systems, and the documentation exists in various
>forms. (not all of it is in man format)
>I agree that a few more man pages should be written for Linux, though.
Yet, GNU have declared man pages "obsolete" by
fiat. That really rubs me the wrong way.
I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft, a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically. My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go. Linux is more unreliable than M$ crap? Come on. That looks like a to-hell with Linux to me. He's calling it dead-end, without even giving it a chance. Did he write all his software in a day? You say, "I am right, the hell with you." And, of course the person who has been "to helled with" wants to prove his point, and so he goes off and does it. That's ultimately the way you prove a point. So that is the way most of the arguments are done simply by trying them. He's right about this. We are the to-helled people here, and we need to go ahead and prove that Linux can do all it can, and more.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Of course you are correct. Although saying Linux is worse than M$ stuff is going a little too far. I think he loses his god status for that. :)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
I view Linux as something that's not Microsoft, a backlash against Microsoft, no more and no less. I don't think it will be very successful in the long run. I've looked at the source and there are pieces that are good and pieces that are not. A whole bunch of random people have contributed to this source, and the quality varies drastically.
My experience and some of my friends' experience is that Linux is quite unreliable. Microsoft is really unreliable but Linux is worse. In a non-PC environment, it just won't hold up. If you're using it on a single box, that's one thing. But if you want to use Linux in firewalls, gateways, embedded systems, and so on, it has a long way to go.
Linux is more unreliable than M$ crap? Come on. That looks like a to-hell with Linux to me. He's calling it dead-end, without even giving it a chance. Did he write all his software in a day?
You say, "I am right, the hell with you." And, of course the person who has been "to helled with" wants to prove his point, and so he goes off and does it. That's ultimately the way you prove a point. So that is the way most of the arguments are done simply by trying them.
He's right about this. We are the to-helled people here, and we need to go ahead and prove that Linux can do all it can, and more.
(P.S.) It's annoying that the HTML tags are lost when you preview your comments
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Well, here we go again, folks.
How many times have we heard this assertation? In short, Linux users use Linux for the sole reason of boycotting Microsoft. They don't use it because they like the stability, the reliability, or the power. They don't use it because it's the environment that they're used to. No; they use Linux simply to thumb their noses at Bill Gates and sleep haughtily at night, knowing that they're "thwarting the evil empire."
We've heard this sort of nonsense from Microsoft. We've heard it from the "mainstream technical press." And now, apparently, we're hearing it from Ken Thompson, for crying out loud.
Get the message out, folks. There's a lot of good, technical reasons to use Linux, and these are the reasons why it's enjoyed its recent successes. Linux users are not, by and large, noisy protesters looking to rock the boat. They're people who care about their work, and people who have selected Linux for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Microsoft.
In the end, the quality of an operating system is determined by the operating system itself, not by what people say about it. Yes, this even includes Thompson. One might argue that he is not in a comfortable position to be praising Linux.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
.. there are plenty of people who use Linux because they don't like Windows, and lots of others who enjoy the idea of "boycotting" Microsoft. What I'm saying is that this is not the only reason that people use it, which is what comments like Thompson's seem to make people believe.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'd like to know how Linux is worse then Microsoft on non-PC environments when Windows/NT does even really run on non-PC environments...
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F Scott Fitzgerald
That's quite the comment to post here at /. I know that there are hundreds of pretty well educated people here that can spout out tons of references to discredit you, Thompson, Tannenbaum, and every other person who's ever said something bad about Linux or even OSS in general.
Let's face it - for all the talk about how much FUD there is out there, the Linux community as a whole is just as guilty of it in reverse. God forbid there should be room for more than one OS in the desktop market. I've got Win98, NT, and Linux on the same machine and you know what? I use them all (ok, so mostly Linux, but that's not the point). They've each got a little place in my heart.
I wholeheartedly disagree with this poster about Linux's place in the OS heirarchy, but he makes a valid point - most of the stuff we read everyday (here and elsewhere) is written by people who're biased towards the operating system (or the license behind it). I'd really like to see some decent consumer reports about OSes that aren't written by oldhand UNIX players or NT-only Admins.
TeX has been around for years and years and is still the best solution for numerous tasks.
Sometimes i wonder about people like you. Is it amazing courage, extra ordinary bravery, or plain stupidity and ignorance. I personally think that you dont believe anything that you wrote, and that you just came here because you wanted to stir up arguments with linux geeks. After all if you are such a HARDCORE NT guy, then why are you reading /.? if you are such a HARDCORE NY guy, then why did you have linux in the first place. Dont tell me you installed it just to try out Q3 test? If you are such a HARDCORE NT guy then i guess it explains why you thought that you needed root priv's to check email. If you are such a HARDCORE NT guy then it explains your mindless consumption of M$ *cha-ching* software and your "mac-like" devotion to your OS! Its too bad that you decided to come here and get flamed! But then again thousands of geeks are laughing at you right now, so i guess your waste of electrons has benefitted someone.
When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion!
> ERROR: IEXPLORE caused an invalid page fault in module MSCONV97.DLL at 0137:01212d19. Stack dumped:
This is EXACTLY what I believe Earl was talking about. We need to stop the flame. :). But he said that Microsoft will eventually fail due to a new paradigm. I believe that this new paradigm is called Open Source.
I'm a very opinionated person but I also respect others opinions! Always argue with facts and not insults. I disagree with Thompsons statements about Linux but I feel the rest of his article was very good. I haven't read all the comments (I wish I could, but don't have time), but I haven't seen anyone mention what he says at the end of his article (maybe nobody read past the Linux statement
So please don't just pick on him because he states that Linux is "worse" then MS. Prove it, it's not hard, and show that he is wrong. But, please, don't fall to insults. We all make mistakes!
Steven Rostedt
-- Nevermind
NFS.
I had a huge headache at work a week and a half ago when everything died. I'm in a scientific group, and we've mostly used Solaris in the past. We've been ramping up our Linux usage, and on the whole Linux has been *more* stable than Solaris. However, we just recently started writing in bulk to a Linux disk NFS exported to a Solaris machine, and the nfs daemon *kept* *dying*. Very annoying.
I solved it with some Alan Cox patches that included H.J. Lu's latest knfsd. So Linux isn't as unreliable as it first looked. But there are a few places where Linux still does falter.
I think Thompson greatly overstates it, however. And, it is important qualifier on my NFS problems that there were patches out there I could apply that solved them.
-Rob