I have heard bad things about nVidea on Linux. Part of the problem was a bug in certain AMD mother-boards that got fixed in the kernel two months ago. (AMD mother-boards in the sense that they worked with AMD cpus. AMD doesn't make mother boards itself). I think the problem was probably publicized more because people don't like the close source driver.
I don't remember hearing bad things about nVidea on windows.
>>All he's offering is an email for crying out loud, he's not offering any thing substansive at all, unless you count his blessings as substansive.
Yeah... I was really surprised when I clicked on the link to mail.gnome.org and saw an email.
A lot of times when you read email then there are cool videos and 3-d graphics. One time I found a live goat!
I guess open source email lists just aren't up to the standards Microsoft users are accustomed to. I mean *sheesh* email on an email list??? How old fashioned!
>>IE is fast because it's a tidy little COM object that's intertwined so closely with Windows
The problem with that statement is that there is no clear definition of "fast."
Probably this really means that IE starts up faster. The reason for this is that IE is mostly preloaded into memory at boot time. You can do this with Mozilla also on windows. I have heard that if you do then Mozilla starts as fast or maybe faster (people exagerate sometimes...) as IE.
The mozilla guys are working on a way to preload Mozilla in Unix but the issues are more complicated. I guess they are trying to find a way to do this so that it supports more than one user and so on.
From previous statements it looks like he might also be talking about the speed to start up new windows. Mozilla is definately slower here. I don't know why.
For just renderring html then I would say that IE and Mozilla are about the same speed. When I use IE at school I don't notice any difference.
The difference is that hard real time doesn't mean low latency it just means that there is a _guaranteed_ maximum latency.
Soft real time means that you can almost gaurantee the latency. Generally, of course, you want these latencies to be pretty small. Soft real time is for when you use check the "use real time where available" option on xmms and run it under sudo.
I hear that Linux (probably with patches) is a little better than windows and a little worse than os X for latency.
He only sites one source that Linux has more reported flaws than windows does. I couldn't find the data online. I can't believe his source is trust worthy unless I can see how the flaws were counted because people tend to over count because of the distributions. (His data is different from other data I have seen).
The rest of the proofs that Linux is less secure is because their are so many executables installed by default and the documentation is in different formats. The other "proof" that Linux is insecure is the number of lines of source in the kernel.
Forgive me if I'm not convinced.
(Note: I'm not claiming that open source is more secure than closed source although I think it is generally fairly secure.)
Compare them to something like security.debian.org or redhat.com/errata/ or sunsolve.sun.com/security. These links give information about what programs had security problems.
The first link you provided doesn't seem to have any useful information. The second link is too hard to remember. It also doesn't give any useful information.
The correct link if you want Microsoft security information is:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defaul t. asp?url=/technet/security/current.asp
I think that the fact you couldn't find the correct link proves my point that Microsoft needs to have a site dedicated to providing security information for their products.
>>How likely do you think this situation would be if the JCP (or something like it) was not in place?
Perl is open source and it manages to be identical on any UNIX.
>>What I would LOVE is to see Java open sources while ensuring that it remains cross-platform.
Java is cross platform so long as one of those platforms is not Linux. Have you ever tried to distribute a Java program to a Debian user? Java is fine for businesses but for regular Linux users it's not viable.
The whole line that "JAVA must remain proprietary so that it will be cross platform" is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Name one stituation where being open source made something non-cross platform. Python is cross platform. Perl is cross platform. Glibc is cross platform.
Microsoft has decided that java must die and did not release a JVM with XP. If Sun was smart they would stop spouting crap about how close-source makes things cross platform and realize that they need Linux now more than ever.
There was an interesting discussion on the alsa-devel list in January about "Alsa and the future of sound on Linux." Paul Davis the author of jackit.sf.net wrote some pretty convincing emails that a call back system is better than the popular Linux way with read/write like a file.
Jackit is designed for high end audio but it's really similar to Apple's CoreAudio. The problem is that most Linux developers don't want to mess around with callbacks and multi-threaded programming. And quite frankly most sound applications don't require such a high level of quality.
A good thing to do would be to change aRts to write to jack. That way you could use jack for the high end and aRts for basic mp3s etc.
I'm afraid that I have to agree with the rest of the posters who feel the question the Anonymous Coward asked is stupid.
In that situation the poster should obviously just use the programming language he is most familliar with. Learning a new language is always going to take longer than expected. This is going to delay the project and put it over budget.
Of course, if the poster was familliar with a programming language he would know how to deal with the pros and cons of the language and so he wouldn't even have to ask the stupid question.
On the other hand, the question that Cliff posed about what makes a powerful programming language is an interesting one. Perhaps he could ask it again without the Anonymous Coward.
And RMS[1] is down right disgusting. It's like a half finished database. I can not think of even one good reason why I would want to write the second half of a database.
Unix did the right thing by providing files as streams of bits. If you need a database in Unix there are dozens of REAL databases. Heck most of them even come complete with SQL interpretters.
[1] Record Management System, not the bearded GNU hacker.
It's been too much bother for everyone involved to make the two patches work together until now. I expect Andrew Morton will update his patches within a few weeks now.
The wininformant article is just meant to tick you off.
The title of this story is "SecurityFocus says windows is more secure than Linux" but that is a clear lie. SecurityFocus said nothing of the sort.
Look at the chart on security focus and count the local root exploits... Oh wait! Windows 98 doesn't have any protection to begin with so how can the protection fail?
It's embarassing when Linux weenies can't see that they are being trolled.
"Linus seems to dislike it, as usual, source code maintenance tools/organization are for wimps!"
I think most people who read the email assumed that the "patch penguin" was a machine with out reading the email. But the proposal is that someone (Dave Jones) take everyone's patches and filter them on to Linus.
It's not that Linus doesn't like organization, it's that he likes patches to come from maintainers. If Dave Jones gets all the patches he's going to be as overloaded as Linus is.
The reason that Robert Loves's pre-empt patch has not gone in is because that it can cause subtle bugs.
For example, there was a bug in the ne2000 driver that Alan Cox points out here. According to Mr. Cox, "this is one tiny example of maybe thousands of other similar flaws lurking. There is no obvious automated way to find them either."
Everyone has been quoting parts of this sentence but it deserves to be quoted in full.
"Nonetheless, the magnitude of the performance differential in numerically intense applications is such that only the most dramatic sort of improvement in the long-awaited version 3 of the GNU C/C++ compiler will stay the hammer that drives a stake through the fibrillating heart of the aging technology behind the GNU C compiler."
If I read that correctly, it means that they did all the tests with gcc2. I think gcc3 version has not been optomized as much so it would probably be worse, but it would still be interesting to see how they compare.
>>It's nice to see that they have under the traditional listing a server with every possible expensive option, while the opposite is true for the iMass.
I don't know that it's "traditional" to use Microsoft products, but it's certainly not unheard of.
Xfree is sufferring from poor PR
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I think it is interesting to compare kernel development with X development.
LKML has 1-2k emails per week. We have Kernel Traffic, Linux Weekly News kernel summary, kerneltrap.com, #kernelnewbies and there is generally one kernel update per day on linuxtoday.com. There are tons and tons of other articles about kernel development on Linux websites.
Compiling and installing a new kernel is easy enough that people are doing it on linuxnewbie.org
As a result the Linux kernel is one of the greatest pieces of software that exists today. People are willing to do a phenomenal amount of work to have their code included into the kernel.
We are at the point where even the most excelent code has to compete to be included. There were at least three different scheduler implementations for 2.5, two different VMs, and two different asynchronous io implementations. It is very good to be in the position where you can pick and choose what code will go into the kernel at this level.
On the other hand for Xfree had a closed email list until a year or so ago. There are about 250 emails per week to the Xpert mailing list. There are few websites with Xfree development articles.
Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.
People constantly complain about X needing to be replaced. While there are real problems with Xfree, most of the stuff that people complain about to slashdot is complete crap.
To me this suggests that Xfree needs to concentrate on their PR skills. Xfree guys need to make development easier for newbies. Key developers need to have more interviews. They need to prove that developing X is just as cool as developing the kernel. There need to be more frequent updates--posted to linuxtoday hopefully.
Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier. I think about it this way, once you compile something, you are only one step away from developing. All it takes after that is to open up an editor and change something.
To me Xfree is as important as the kernel. Without it I would not use Linux. This is true for the great majority of Linux users. Xfree deserves more attention and credit than it currently gets.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wonderring the same thing.
I have heard bad things about nVidea on Linux. Part of the problem was a bug in certain AMD mother-boards that got fixed in the kernel two months ago. (AMD mother-boards in the sense that they worked with AMD cpus. AMD doesn't make mother boards itself). I think the problem was probably publicized more because people don't like the close source driver.
I don't remember hearing bad things about nVidea on windows.
Is there a course in "not being an idiot?"
My worst bosses were never going to improve no matter how long they spent in the class room.
My best bosses were good people outside of work as well. Perhaps that's coincidence but I suspect it's not.
School can only take you so far when it comes to dealing with other people.
Yeah... I was really surprised when I clicked on the link to mail.gnome.org and saw an email.
A lot of times when you read email then there are cool videos and 3-d graphics. One time I found a live goat!
I guess open source email lists just aren't up to the standards Microsoft users are accustomed to. I mean *sheesh* email on an email list??? How old fashioned!
>>IE is fast because it's a tidy little COM object that's intertwined so closely with Windows
The problem with that statement is that there is no clear definition of "fast."
Probably this really means that IE starts up faster. The reason for this is that IE is mostly preloaded into memory at boot time. You can do this with Mozilla also on windows. I have heard that if you do then Mozilla starts as fast or maybe faster (people exagerate sometimes...) as IE.
The mozilla guys are working on a way to preload Mozilla in Unix but the issues are more complicated. I guess they are trying to find a way to do this so that it supports more than one user and so on.
From previous statements it looks like he might also be talking about the speed to start up new windows. Mozilla is definately slower here. I don't know why.
For just renderring html then I would say that IE and Mozilla are about the same speed. When I use IE at school I don't notice any difference.
The difference is that hard real time doesn't mean low latency it just means that there is a _guaranteed_ maximum latency.
Soft real time means that you can almost gaurantee the latency. Generally, of course, you want these latencies to be pretty small. Soft real time is for when you use check the "use real time where available" option on xmms and run it under sudo.
I hear that Linux (probably with patches) is a little better than windows and a little worse than os X for latency.
Except for the aliens who tend to have Australian accents.
He only sites one source that Linux has more reported flaws than windows does. I couldn't find the data online. I can't believe his source is trust worthy unless I can see how the flaws were counted because people tend to over count because of the distributions. (His data is different from other data I have seen).
The rest of the proofs that Linux is less secure is because their are so many executables installed by default and the documentation is in different formats. The other "proof" that Linux is insecure is the number of lines of source in the kernel.
Forgive me if I'm not convinced.
(Note: I'm not claiming that open source is more secure than closed source although I think it is generally fairly secure.)
Those links are not useful.
l t. asp?url=/technet/security/current.asp
Compare them to something like security.debian.org or redhat.com/errata/ or sunsolve.sun.com/security. These links give information about what programs had security problems.
The first link you provided doesn't seem to have any useful information. The second link is too hard to remember. It also doesn't give any useful information.
The correct link if you want Microsoft security information is:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/defau
I think that the fact you couldn't find the correct link proves my point that Microsoft needs to have a site dedicated to providing security information for their products.
>>How likely do you think this situation would be if the JCP (or something like it) was not in place?
Perl is open source and it manages to be identical on any UNIX.
>>What I would LOVE is to see Java open sources while ensuring that it remains cross-platform.
Java is cross platform so long as one of those platforms is not Linux. Have you ever tried to distribute a Java program to a Debian user? Java is fine for businesses but for regular Linux users it's not viable.
The whole line that "JAVA must remain proprietary so that it will be cross platform" is the stupidest thing I have ever heard. Name one stituation where being open source made something non-cross platform. Python is cross platform. Perl is cross platform. Glibc is cross platform.
Microsoft has decided that java must die and did not release a JVM with XP. If Sun was smart they would stop spouting crap about how close-source makes things cross platform and realize that they need Linux now more than ever.
>>Yes, and there has been a patch for this problem. So what did you expect MS to do? Spam all the IM users to install the patch?
Maybe they could send an email that describes the problem and the fix.
Also they could put a link on microsoft.com or create a site called security.microsoft.com.
These things are fairly common from companies that don't treat their customers like dirt.
Correct.
There was an interesting discussion on the alsa-devel list in January about "Alsa and the future of sound on Linux." Paul Davis the author of jackit.sf.net wrote some pretty convincing emails that a call back system is better than the popular Linux way with read/write like a file.
Jackit is designed for high end audio but it's really similar to Apple's CoreAudio. The problem is that most Linux developers don't want to mess around with callbacks and multi-threaded programming. And quite frankly most sound applications don't require such a high level of quality.
A good thing to do would be to change aRts to write to jack. That way you could use jack for the high end and aRts for basic mp3s etc.
Unfortunately jack is not finished yet.
That's already included.
I bet that XFS will get included before 2.6 also.
>>With all those changes, we'll be lucky to see 2.6 sometime this decade! And the end result won't likely be the most stable thing ever.
Because 2.4 took so long, tons of stuff was already finished by the time 2.5 forked.
I'm afraid that I have to agree with the rest of the posters who feel the question the Anonymous Coward asked is stupid.
In that situation the poster should obviously just use the programming language he is most familliar with. Learning a new language is always going to take longer than expected. This is going to delay the project and put it over budget.
Of course, if the poster was familliar with a programming language he would know how to deal with the pros and cons of the language and so he wouldn't even have to ask the stupid question.
On the other hand, the question that Cliff posed about what makes a powerful programming language is an interesting one. Perhaps he could ask it again without the Anonymous Coward.
And RMS[1] is down right disgusting. It's like a half finished database. I can not think of even one good reason why I would want to write the second half of a database.
Unix did the right thing by providing files as streams of bits. If you need a database in Unix there are dozens of REAL databases. Heck most of them even come complete with SQL interpretters.
[1] Record Management System, not the bearded GNU hacker.
It's been too much bother for everyone involved to make the two patches work together until now. I expect Andrew Morton will update his patches within a few weeks now.
I am interested interested in X. Why do you think that this will speed things up?
(I don't think it's going to happen any time soon even if you are right, but I'm curious anyways)
The title of this story is "SecurityFocus says windows is more secure than Linux" but that is a clear lie. SecurityFocus said nothing of the sort.
Look at the chart on security focus and count the local root exploits... Oh wait! Windows 98 doesn't have any protection to begin with so how can the protection fail?
It's embarassing when Linux weenies can't see that they are being trolled.
If they had, it would have been "interesting" instead of "informative" right?
I think most people who read the email assumed that the "patch penguin" was a machine with out reading the email. But the proposal is that someone (Dave Jones) take everyone's patches and filter them on to Linus.
It's not that Linus doesn't like organization, it's that he likes patches to come from maintainers. If Dave Jones gets all the patches he's going to be as overloaded as Linus is.
For example, there was a bug in the ne2000 driver that Alan Cox points out here. According to Mr. Cox, "this is one tiny example of maybe thousands of other similar flaws lurking. There is no obvious automated way to find them either."
"Nonetheless, the magnitude of the performance differential in numerically intense applications is such that only the most dramatic sort of improvement in the long-awaited version 3 of the GNU C/C++ compiler will stay the hammer that drives a stake through the fibrillating heart of the aging technology behind the GNU C compiler."
If I read that correctly, it means that they did all the tests with gcc2. I think gcc3 version has not been optomized as much so it would probably be worse, but it would still be interesting to see how they compare.
I don't know that it's "traditional" to use Microsoft products, but it's certainly not unheard of.
LKML has 1-2k emails per week. We have Kernel Traffic, Linux Weekly News kernel summary, kerneltrap.com, #kernelnewbies and there is generally one kernel update per day on linuxtoday.com. There are tons and tons of other articles about kernel development on Linux websites.
Compiling and installing a new kernel is easy enough that people are doing it on linuxnewbie.org
As a result the Linux kernel is one of the greatest pieces of software that exists today. People are willing to do a phenomenal amount of work to have their code included into the kernel.
We are at the point where even the most excelent code has to compete to be included. There were at least three different scheduler implementations for 2.5, two different VMs, and two different asynchronous io implementations. It is very good to be in the position where you can pick and choose what code will go into the kernel at this level.
On the other hand for Xfree had a closed email list until a year or so ago. There are about 250 emails per week to the Xpert mailing list. There are few websites with Xfree development articles.
Compiling and installing Xfree is difficult.
People constantly complain about X needing to be replaced. While there are real problems with Xfree, most of the stuff that people complain about to slashdot is complete crap.
To me this suggests that Xfree needs to concentrate on their PR skills. Xfree guys need to make development easier for newbies. Key developers need to have more interviews. They need to prove that developing X is just as cool as developing the kernel. There need to be more frequent updates--posted to linuxtoday hopefully.
Compiling and installing Xfree needs to be easier. I think about it this way, once you compile something, you are only one step away from developing. All it takes after that is to open up an editor and change something.
To me Xfree is as important as the kernel. Without it I would not use Linux. This is true for the great majority of Linux users. Xfree deserves more attention and credit than it currently gets.