Here in L.A., there are Chevron stations at $1.29. So even the extra-specially-formulated California gas costs quite a bit less outside of Silicon Valley.
I guess this is why I'm really looking forward to moving up there next month...
Yes it can; it's a term used in clinical psychology, roughly synonymous to "emotion." For example, "he spoke without affect" is a legitimate sentence.
Ordinarily, I let stuff like this pass--I'm pretty much in the "if I understand what you mean, it's OK" school. Bruce was 100% right in intention, and there isn't a person here reading his words who didn't understand just what he meant. On the other hand, folks who make silly critiques look silly themselves when their criticism is wrong in its particulars...
Off-topic: The reason usually given for the USPS monopoly on first-class mail is that another company could come in and "cream skim" the lucrative routes and leave the USPS to handle rural and other more expensive routes, raising the overall cost of USPS mail (since they must, by law, deliver everywhere). Of course, they could eliminate the flat rate for first-class postage, like they do for parcels, but no senator or representative wants to vote for something that will penalize his/her state vs. more densely populated states.
On-topic: I've used X10 for a number of years, and have noticed that they work much better if you have non-conduit wiring as opposed to wiring in metal conduit (like in many apartments and businesses). There seems to be higher signal attenuation in the latter case. Also, stuff like computer power supplies and compact fluorescent lamps seem to inject enough noise into the line or lower line impedance enough for the low-frequency RF X10 signals to lower the reliability of devices close to them. So plan accordingly.
Agreed, water is a pretty good absorber of EMR at 2.45GHz, but this isn't due to "resonance" in any conventional sense. The microwaves couple pretty well to water molecules due to the molecules' polar nature (one side is electrically negative relative to the other). They vibrate quite strongly as a result, resulting in heat.
I think people confuse resonance with simple vibrational energy.
How many postings are going to erroneously claim that microwave ovens operate at "the resonance frequency of water?" Although it's true that microwaves "vibrate" the water molecules to form the basic mechanism for microwave cooking, this phenomenon has nothing to do with "resonance." A very broad range of RF frequencies will produce heating effects in water due to dielectric losses. And tissue with poor heat dissipation properties-- such as the lens of the eye--is especially vulnerable to damage from such heating. (The testes are also sensitive to such heating--yes, RF can make you sterile, at least temporarily.)
Microwave ovens operate at the frequency they do because it is in an FCC-allocated band for industrial use, harmonically related to many such "junk" bands. The particular band chosen had a wavelength short enough to suit a reasonably small resonant cavity but long enough to penetrate reasonably well through food. If it were an actual resonant frequency for water, most of the energy would be absorbed near the surface of the food--not a good thing.
An aside not directly related to the above: For decades it's been assumed that such heating was the only source of biological damage for EM radiation at energies below the ultraviolet. (Photons at energies of UV and above can break chemical bonds, resulting in direct biological damage.) But consider that lower frequencies--red and near-IR--can have profound effects on certain dye-catalyzed reactions, such as photosynthesis and certain drug treatments, even though they lack the energy to directly affect chemical bonds. It's a pretty big stretch from there to RF, but it's conceivable that other resonance effects may occur at lower frequencies, perhaps by influencing part of a large enzyme molecule whose shape is determined by far weaker forces than "normal" chemical bonds. It seems pretty unlikely, but not so impossible as to dismiss out-of-hand.
Years ago, as USENET was threatening to dissolve in chaos for the first time, an old ARPAnaut told me that what was happening was the "Four-Sigma Effect." It's a statistical fact, he said, that as a population grows, it becomes more and more likely to contain members more than four standard deviations (i.e. "sigma") from the mean. And it is these individuals (the technical term was "kooks") who yell the loudest, longest, and most frequently, leading to the mistaken impression that the whole population has taken a turn for the worse.
Of course, the net provides a wonderful way for kooky folks to find each other (to either join forces or do battle), so an amplification phenomenon occurs, enhancing the basic four-sigma effect.
My point is that this is just a normal aspect of Linux's and Slashdot's popularity. There are now millions and millions of folks on the Linux bandwagon, so it should be of no surprise that a few riders enjoy throwing rocks. The rest of us have to be careful not to let them speak for us, and maybe encourage them to ride elsewhere.
-Ed
Re:When will they learn?
on
Linux 2.2.10
·
· Score: 1
"Stable" is a relative term. Name a commercial OS that is bug-free, and which will never develop "issues" for one or more of its customers. There aren't any.
Put another way, 2.2.X is "stable," and getting more so as hundreds of millions of hours of experience in hundreds of thousands of different environments accumulate.
Look at the case with commercial OS's. Solaris 2.X is widely regarded as one of the most stable general-purpose OS's out there. MS doesn't even pretend that WinNT is as stable as Solaris. Yet Solaris 2.3 was only barely usable. (God help anyone using a version before that.) 2.4 had thousands of reported bugs before 2.5 was released, and 2.5.1 came on 2.5's heels to fix some serious bugs in it. After more than five years, Sun finally released a version of Solaris 2.X that would fit your definition of "stable."
Compared to this, Linux is doing amazingly well. Free software can't defy the law of gravity any more than commercial software. A few bugs that remain latent with a community of a few hundred developers will almost always manifest when released to a few million users. But the great majority of those users will never see those bugs. They'll get fixed anyway, and responsible sys admins will upgrade when they see sufficient benefits in doing so vs. any disruptions or other risks. It seems vaguely neurotic to upgrade to a new kernel just because it's there. And it's naive in the extreme to claim that any software several hundred thousand lines long can be "bug free."
I bet my left nut that it's sitting in a bunker at Fort Mead working on a way to violate our privacy.
You're likely one step away from eunuch-hood. I doubt if the NSA computers you're thinking of are on this list--or even run linear algebra software, for that matter. Those "classified" machines are in all likelihood simulating nuclear reactions and other defense-related tasks.
It is one thing to say that science is laden with politics and subjective opinions, and quite another to say that this equates it to myth and mysticism. I don't think you can say that our myths or mystical insights or even our cultures or governments are better than they were two thousand years ago. Different, yes. Better, probably not. They seem to fit our perception of the world more or less as well as they ever have, and do just about as good or bad a job of explaining and controlling the world as they ever have.
But our science is indisputably better than it was 2000 years ago, and it's "fit" to the world as we experience it improves almost monotonically over time. Perhaps this is why we pang for better myths and greater mysteries, since the old ones don't seem to work as well even though our need for them continues unabated.
This may be why many of us try to mix science and myth, attempting to empower each with the other. This may be a mistake. Our myths and mysteries might not belong with science's notion of continual progress and refinement. The mystery of the meaning of our existance may never be satisfied by any amount of physical or biological explanation. Our relationship to each other and the world might be much more effectively described through our myths than through our neurochemistry, no matter how far we advance that science.
That said, there is a sense in which our relationship to the mysterious can and should be a progressing one. Each of use should strive to better understand the incredible mystery that surrounds and infuses each of us: our selves.
-Ed
Re:More like "Designed with Red Hat in mind"
on
Linux is Not Red Hat
·
· Score: 1
Instead of saying CodeWarrior *only* works with Red Hat Linux, it would be better off saying something like the following:
Requirements: - Linux distribution with glibc2.1, etc. (recommended for use with Red Hat Linux 6.0)
In the best of all possible worlds, your suggestion would be the only reasonable one. But the pointy-haired bosses and bean-counters have been conditioned by requirements like:
Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT/4.0
They'd run from the room screaming if someone listed all the DLL's and other supporting files this requirement implies.
Face it, the folks who write the checks aren't prepared to deal with a file-by-file, library-by-library list of requirements. Multiple flavors of Windows are bewildering enough for them. Until the various Linux standards efforts coalesce into a stable and widely-recognized standard that can be listed in a single line on a PO, commercial software will list one or at best a handful of distributions as requirements.
"./configure; make; make install" only works for sourcecode distributions--which I suppose is a feature for open-source diehards. This then becomes a battle between those who are offended at the sight of closed software running on an open OS (or anywhere, for that matter) and those who think it's a necessary evil (or even perhaps a Good Thing). I don't expect that particular battle to end for quite some time--certainly not here.
Lest someone take my brief posting as Offical History(tm), note that I glossed over a lot (such as using KERMIT and the XYZ-MODEM protocols for modem-based file exchange, especially outside of the UNIX world, or the role of BBS's in the early days of "microcomputer" software development). In general, a lack of bandwith and connectivity was frequently overcome by cleverness and shear patience. And sometimes throwing a tape or floppy into the snailmail was the best way. But even in the days of 300 baud modems and $.50/minute long distance, slow but effective ad hoc networks spanned the US (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Europe and Japan).
BTW, I have absolutely no nostalgia for those days. Give me a fast Linux box with an ADSL connection, and I'll never look back.
...the majority of the source code passing was done via tapes.
Nope.
FTP (and for the ARPANET-deprived, UUCP) were used for exchanging files years before many Slashdot readers were born. Coordination was accomplished and patches (to be hand-applied) exchanged via email. Tapes were only used for the final distribution (where the slow speeds of ARPANET or modem-based file transfers made high-volume data transfer impractical).
Linux is certainly the first large project accomplished by such a large international group via the Internet, but it is hardly the first project constructed via network collaboration. In fact, much of the GNU software that Linux was built upon was developed in this way.
I can think of a few things I would like. A 64 bit linux kernel...
Already got one. Alpha and SPARC64 run it.
Making Linux run well on Merced isn't likely to be very hard by itself. Making GCC work well with it will be much harder (with emphasis on "well"--a half-assed job wouldn't be hard).
Let's not be too cynical about this. The fact is that many corporate research efforts don't come close to making "the tools and findings of their research... freely available to anyone." Even institutions like Bell Labs have become corporate cost centers valued solely for the competitive edge they provide the parent company. IBM has been making some bold steps toward openness (though viewed as a whole the corporation still is overly focused on "building intellectual capital," IMHO). They may be small steps, but they certainly aren't business as usual, especially for Big Blue.
Time will tell if IBM has really decided to take a more open role as corporate citizen, or if their latest moves prove to be anomalies. I'm hopeful that they see mutual benefit in openness, and not just unilateral advantage; that would be a refreshing change from the usual corporate game.
Like the Mindcraft benchmark/media event, this will wind up making Linux stronger.
It may be hard for us to accept, but some of their complaints about Linux will wind up being true. Then we show them a strength Linux has that they will never have: the Linux developer community. A solution will be created, tested, and deployed in the time it takes Microsoft to organize a project team.
The only way Microsoft can beat us is if we fear looking at our own flaws, and so don't focus on fixing them.
You make it sound like a WinNT network maintains itself, or that good WinNT admins somehow cost less than Unix admins. That's nonesense. At least in my experience, it is just as difficult to configure and run a WinNT network as a Unix network, and admins for WinNT aren't any easier or cheaper to hire.
-Ed
Now that common Unix sysadmin tools are appearing for Linux, it's becoming pretty much equivalent to commercial Unix at the workstation level--at a much lower cost.
A Linux port would be a good alternative for a company which is currently running Unix but needs to reduce its costs. A lot less retraining is involved--both for admins and staff--and Linux will integrate much more smoothly into the existing network than WinNT.
I'll only live about 700,000 hours, and although a new StarWars movie may be worth two or three of those, I feel like I've already come close to that even before it's been released.
(Just my opinion, of course; someone who sees it two dozen times and has a lot of fun each time gets my respect for their intensity. But that's not me.)
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?
But that 21-year-old hasn't "done a better job," by Thompson's standards. From a researcher's perspective, Linus didn't create a better OS--just a more successful one. Linux doesn't fix Unix's conceptual deficiencies, it extends them. Read the rest of the article. Thompson has spent the past 20 years trying to move beyond the mistakes he made in Unix.
I don't think Thompson was particularly rational when he made his comments; they certainly don't bear scrutiny. Ane they hardly qualify as "constructive criticism." But I don't see sour grapes over a "better Unix"--more likely, I think he's PO'd that none of the new ideas and lessons learned since AT&T wrested Unix away from the Labs has seen wider distribution.
So maybe there is "sour grapes," but it's sour grapes over the phenomenal success of Open Source as a means of bringing ideas to market--so successful that other, possibly better, ideas are drowned out. Folks like Ken Thompson have done amazing work at Bell Labs for over half a century, only to have it kept under tight control and milked ineptly by AT&T (and now Lucent) and its lawyers for profit. That's gotta smart...
Imagine, if you will, that Unix was open-source back in the 1970's, and remained open source. I think operating systems would have progressed much further, and that bright minds like Linus Torvalds' would be at the forefront of adding to that legacy rather than having to reinvent it piecemeal.
From our perspective, is Linux a "better Unix"? Featurewise, Research Unix Edition 7 (the last version to make it out of Bell Labs) can't even hold a candle to it. But then, it ran in 96KB of memory on hardware with a cycle time measured in kilohertz (and supported useful amounts of multi-user software development and text processing in that configuration). Linux is twenty times as big, running on hardware tens to thousands of times more powerful. It had damn well better be better! But it has to be asked: was improving a 30-year-old OS the best we could do?
Really, I've {smoked/handled poisonous snakes/played tag on the freeway} for 20+ years, now...heavily. [I've never had a problem.]
If you ever had carpal tunnel or other RSI, or known some who has, you'd know just how un-funny your post is. Ask RMS if he think his condition is funny...
OK, instead of risking even a hint of support for the killers (and I don't think we are--even "understanding" is far different than "approval"), let's look at this from a coldly pragmatic viewpoint: how do we prevent such killings in the future? Newspapers are full of quotations and editorials giving "solutions," most of them with the word "mandatory" embedded in them somewhere (fill in the blank: "prayer," "counseling," "gun control," et cetera, ad nauseum). The discussions I've seen here go an awful lot farther toward finding effective answers by zeroing in on the real underlying phenomena: intolerance and alienation.
It is not "supporting" the killers to say that taking steps to lessen the feelings of alienation and persecution they felt and others feel would reduce the chance of this sort of tragedy. Yet look at the most common "solutions" presented in the mass media: more intolerance and more persecution toward kids who stand out in some way. It's time to show the public the bubbling cauldron of despair and anger that schools have become for many students, and let them know that unless they throw water on the fire (instead of turning up the heat), Littleton will only be another member of a growing trend.
So let's bring out these issues, not because we support the killers, but because we want to avoid others becoming like them. This is simple, cold pragmatism, even though it also serves to put a more human face on the killers. And it should do so, because seeing them as human forces us to understand them, and understanding, not fear, is the key to prevention.
Don't give me crap about how "permissive" their parents must have been. If their parents had been more permissive with their ears I doubt this sort of thing would happen. Kids learn at an early age whether their feelings matter or not; we shouldn't be surprised that those who are denied a sense of purpose at home become violent when they fail to find it from their peers.
Startup companies go through perilous periods of growth--and statistics show that a majority fail to make such transitions. RedHat is at such a stage.
I've been through several startups, both successful and not, and the two most perilous times are
bringing the initial product to market, and
making the transition from "lean and mean" to "well-organized."
The latter is the stage that RedHat is at: too many employees to organize informally, but much danger from instituting more formal "rules and procedures" inappropriately. It really is a phase change (like from liquid to solid) in the life of a company when informally organized groups of dedicated individuals are no longer enough to hold a company together.
Those of us who work as drones for corporations (like I currently do) often are isolated from the organizational needs of a company as it grows beyond the everybody-knows-everybody-else stage. There is a bit of black art about bringing many groups of people with wildly divergent world views into focus upon a common goal. Many more people are bad at melding the combination of leadership, support, and organization than are good at it. Companies will pay people big bucks just on the vague notion that someone has such skills.
It's unnatural to treat people a bit like objects, organizing them according to their attributes, yet still allowing them to remain human and develop their abilities as well as contribute them. Yet that's what makes companies successful. It's especially hard in technological areas, where each developer is more of an expert in her/his specialty than the manager is--but where the overall product forms the goal, and not any particular expert's view of it.
The sad thing is that many of us have never worked for a good manager--or worse, we have, but our current manager is compentent in nothing beyond sucking up to superiors. A good manager is a rare breed. Now think of how rare a good manager of managers must be! Yet companies die for the want of such people. I've seen it happen right before my eyes. And this is the saddest thing of all: to see the effort of good people wasted because management sucked. Almost everyone reading this will see it, if they stay in the industry long enough.
Although I doubt I've swayed many (if any) management-haters among us, my point is: RedHat needs someone with a special set of skills and experiences. Private and public corporations both need the same things from their upper management. The fact that RedHat hired someone who has worked as an upper manager in public corporations says nothing about their intentions for going public. But it's a good sign that they are preparing for their own growth by hiring someone who has been through this difficult phase several times before.
Check out your local paper's Letters To The Editor section. Far more people write to complain about things than to praise them. If you did a poll I'm sure you'd find that the overwhelming number of/.'ers feel that RedHat is a largely if not wholely positive force. But who takes the trouble to write just because they agree with something? It's clear from the responses here that, given a chance to disagree with something like "RedHat Sux!" a lot of folks are willing to pipe up and say "Does not!"
It's human nature. It's also nice to be reminded of it now and then. If I actually assumed that the average geek was represented by the average/. post, I'd have hung it all up and gone into something like used car sales a long time ago...
SunOS 4.X (and earlier) is a direct BSD descendent (given the Bill Joy connection, one might say that Sun was more BSD than BSD). But SunOS 5.X was no closer to BSD than other SysV R4 varients.
There are some old Sun hands out there who still haven't forgiven them for abandoning BSD.
Slashdot Mirror
Here in L.A., there are Chevron stations at $1.29. So even the extra-specially-formulated California gas costs quite a bit less outside of Silicon Valley.
I guess this is why I'm really looking forward to moving up there next month...
Yes it can; it's a term used in clinical psychology, roughly synonymous to "emotion." For example, "he spoke without affect" is a legitimate sentence.
Ordinarily, I let stuff like this pass--I'm pretty much in the "if I understand what you mean, it's OK" school. Bruce was 100% right in intention, and there isn't a person here reading his words who didn't understand just what he meant. On the other hand, folks who make silly critiques look silly themselves when their criticism is wrong in its particulars...
Off-topic:
The reason usually given for the USPS monopoly on first-class mail is that another company could come in and "cream skim" the lucrative routes and leave the USPS to handle rural and other more expensive routes, raising the overall cost of USPS mail (since they must, by law, deliver everywhere). Of course, they could eliminate the flat rate for first-class postage, like they do for parcels, but no senator or representative wants to vote for something that will penalize his/her state vs. more densely populated states.
On-topic:
I've used X10 for a number of years, and have noticed that they work much better if you have non-conduit wiring as opposed to wiring in metal conduit (like in many apartments and businesses). There seems to be higher signal attenuation in the latter case. Also, stuff like computer power supplies and compact fluorescent lamps seem to inject enough noise into the line or lower line impedance enough for the low-frequency RF X10 signals to lower the reliability of devices close to them. So plan accordingly.
Agreed, water is a pretty good absorber of EMR at 2.45GHz, but this isn't due to "resonance" in any conventional sense. The microwaves couple pretty well to water molecules due to the molecules' polar nature (one side is electrically negative relative to the other). They vibrate quite strongly as a result, resulting in heat.
I think people confuse resonance with simple vibrational energy.
Is there a moderator in the house?
How many postings are going to erroneously claim that microwave ovens operate at "the resonance frequency of water?" Although it's true that microwaves "vibrate" the water molecules to form the basic mechanism for microwave cooking, this phenomenon has nothing to do with "resonance." A very broad range of RF frequencies will produce heating effects in water due to dielectric losses. And tissue with poor heat dissipation properties-- such as the lens of the eye--is especially vulnerable to damage from such heating. (The testes are also sensitive to such heating--yes, RF can make you sterile, at least temporarily.)
Microwave ovens operate at the frequency they do because it is in an FCC-allocated band for industrial use, harmonically related to many such "junk" bands. The particular band chosen had a wavelength short enough to suit a reasonably small resonant cavity but long enough to penetrate reasonably well through food. If it were an actual resonant frequency for water, most of the energy would be absorbed near the surface of the food--not a good thing.
An aside not directly related to the above: For decades it's been assumed that such heating was the only source of biological damage for EM radiation at energies below the ultraviolet. (Photons at energies of UV and above can break chemical bonds, resulting in direct biological damage.) But consider that lower frequencies--red and near-IR--can have profound effects on certain dye-catalyzed reactions, such as photosynthesis and certain drug treatments, even though they lack the energy to directly affect chemical bonds. It's a pretty big stretch from there to RF, but it's conceivable that other resonance effects may occur at lower frequencies, perhaps by influencing part of a large enzyme molecule whose shape is determined by far weaker forces than "normal" chemical bonds. It seems pretty unlikely, but not so impossible as to dismiss out-of-hand.
Years ago, as USENET was threatening to dissolve in chaos for the first time, an old ARPAnaut told me that what was happening was the "Four-Sigma Effect." It's a statistical fact, he said, that as a population grows, it becomes more and more likely to contain members more than four standard deviations (i.e. "sigma") from the mean. And it is these individuals (the technical term was "kooks") who yell the loudest, longest, and most frequently, leading to the mistaken impression that the whole population has taken a turn for the worse.
Of course, the net provides a wonderful way for kooky folks to find each other (to either join forces or do battle), so an amplification phenomenon occurs, enhancing the basic four-sigma effect.
My point is that this is just a normal aspect of Linux's and Slashdot's popularity. There are now millions and millions of folks on the Linux bandwagon, so it should be of no surprise that a few riders enjoy throwing rocks. The rest of us have to be careful not to let them speak for us, and maybe encourage them to ride elsewhere.
"Stable" is a relative term. Name a commercial OS that is bug-free, and which will never develop "issues" for one or more of its customers. There aren't any.
Put another way, 2.2.X is "stable," and getting more so as hundreds of millions of hours of experience in hundreds of thousands of different environments accumulate.
Look at the case with commercial OS's. Solaris 2.X is widely regarded as one of the most stable general-purpose OS's out there. MS doesn't even pretend that WinNT is as stable as Solaris. Yet Solaris 2.3 was only barely usable. (God help anyone using a version before that.) 2.4 had thousands of reported bugs before 2.5 was released, and 2.5.1 came on 2.5's heels to fix some serious bugs in it. After more than five years, Sun finally released a version of Solaris 2.X that would fit your definition of "stable."
Compared to this, Linux is doing amazingly well. Free software can't defy the law of gravity any more than commercial software. A few bugs that remain latent with a community of a few hundred developers will almost always manifest when released to a few million users. But the great majority of those users will never see those bugs. They'll get fixed anyway, and responsible sys admins will upgrade when they see sufficient benefits in doing so vs. any disruptions or other risks. It seems vaguely neurotic to upgrade to a new kernel just because it's there. And it's naive in the extreme to claim that any software several hundred thousand lines long can be "bug free."
You're likely one step away from eunuch-hood. I doubt if the NSA computers you're thinking of are on this list--or even run linear algebra software, for that matter. Those "classified" machines are in all likelihood simulating nuclear reactions and other defense-related tasks.
It is one thing to say that science is laden with politics and subjective opinions, and quite another to say that this equates it to myth and mysticism. I don't think you can say that our myths or mystical insights or even our cultures or governments are better than they were two thousand years ago. Different, yes. Better, probably not. They seem to fit our perception of the world more or less as well as they ever have, and do just about as good or bad a job of explaining and controlling the world as they ever have.
But our science is indisputably better than it was 2000 years ago, and it's "fit" to the world as we experience it improves almost monotonically over time. Perhaps this is why we pang for better myths and greater mysteries, since the old ones don't seem to work as well even though our need for them continues unabated.
This may be why many of us try to mix science and myth, attempting to empower each with the other. This may be a mistake. Our myths and mysteries might not belong with science's notion of continual progress and refinement. The mystery of the meaning of our existance may never be satisfied by any amount of physical or biological explanation. Our relationship to each other and the world might be much more effectively described through our myths than through our neurochemistry, no matter how far we advance that science.
That said, there is a sense in which our relationship to the mysterious can and should be a progressing one. Each of use should strive to better understand the incredible mystery that surrounds and infuses each of us: our selves.
In the best of all possible worlds, your suggestion would be the only reasonable one. But the pointy-haired bosses and bean-counters have been conditioned by requirements like:
They'd run from the room screaming if someone listed all the DLL's and other supporting files this requirement implies.Face it, the folks who write the checks aren't prepared to deal with a file-by-file, library-by-library list of requirements. Multiple flavors of Windows are bewildering enough for them. Until the various Linux standards efforts coalesce into a stable and widely-recognized standard that can be listed in a single line on a PO, commercial software will list one or at best a handful of distributions as requirements.
"./configure; make; make install" only works for sourcecode distributions--which I suppose is a feature for open-source diehards. This then becomes a battle between those who are offended at the sight of closed software running on an open OS (or anywhere, for that matter) and those who think it's a necessary evil (or even perhaps a Good Thing). I don't expect that particular battle to end for quite some time--certainly not here.
Careful! Methylene chloride is pretty toxic stuff. Breath enough of it and you risk liver damage (not to mention that it is a probable carcinogen).
Lest someone take my brief posting as Offical History(tm), note that I glossed over a lot (such as using KERMIT and the XYZ-MODEM protocols for modem-based file exchange, especially outside of the UNIX world, or the role of BBS's in the early days of "microcomputer" software development). In general, a lack of bandwith and connectivity was frequently overcome by cleverness and shear patience. And sometimes throwing a tape or floppy into the snailmail was the best way. But even in the days of 300 baud modems and $.50/minute long distance, slow but effective ad hoc networks spanned the US (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Europe and Japan).
BTW, I have absolutely no nostalgia for those days. Give me a fast Linux box with an ADSL connection, and I'll never look back.
Nope.
FTP (and for the ARPANET-deprived, UUCP) were used for exchanging files years before many Slashdot readers were born. Coordination was accomplished and patches (to be hand-applied) exchanged via email. Tapes were only used for the final distribution (where the slow speeds of ARPANET or modem-based file transfers made high-volume data transfer impractical).
Linux is certainly the first large project accomplished by such a large international group via the Internet, but it is hardly the first project constructed via network collaboration. In fact, much of the GNU software that Linux was built upon was developed in this way.
-Ed
Already got one. Alpha and SPARC64 run it.
Making Linux run well on Merced isn't likely to be very hard by itself. Making GCC work well with it will be much harder (with emphasis on "well"--a half-assed job wouldn't be hard).
-EdLet's not be too cynical about this. The fact is that many corporate research efforts don't come close to making "the tools and findings of their research ... freely available to anyone." Even institutions like Bell Labs have become corporate cost centers valued solely for the competitive edge they provide the parent company. IBM has been making some bold steps toward openness (though viewed as a whole the corporation still is overly focused on "building intellectual capital," IMHO). They may be small steps, but they certainly aren't business as usual, especially for Big Blue.
Time will tell if IBM has really decided to take a more open role as corporate citizen, or if their latest moves prove to be anomalies. I'm hopeful that they see mutual benefit in openness, and not just unilateral advantage; that would be a refreshing change from the usual corporate game.
Like the Mindcraft benchmark/media event, this will wind up making Linux stronger.
It may be hard for us to accept, but some of their complaints about Linux will wind up being true. Then we show them a strength Linux has that they will never have: the Linux developer community. A solution will be created, tested, and deployed in the time it takes Microsoft to organize a project team.
The only way Microsoft can beat us is if we fear looking at our own flaws, and so don't focus on fixing them.
You make it sound like a WinNT network maintains itself, or that good WinNT admins somehow cost less than Unix admins. That's nonesense. At least in my experience, it is just as difficult to configure and run a WinNT network as a Unix network, and admins for WinNT aren't any easier or cheaper to hire.
Now that common Unix sysadmin tools are appearing for Linux, it's becoming pretty much equivalent to commercial Unix at the workstation level--at a much lower cost.
A Linux port would be a good alternative for a company which is currently running Unix but needs to reduce its costs. A lot less retraining is involved--both for admins and staff--and Linux will integrate much more smoothly into the existing network than WinNT.
I'll only live about 700,000 hours, and although a new StarWars movie may be worth two or three of those, I feel like I've already come close to that even before it's been released.
(Just my opinion, of course; someone who sees it two dozen times and has a lot of fun each time gets my respect for their intensity. But that's not me.)
But that 21-year-old hasn't "done a better job," by Thompson's standards. From a researcher's perspective, Linus didn't create a better OS--just a more successful one. Linux doesn't fix Unix's conceptual deficiencies, it extends them. Read the rest of the article. Thompson has spent the past 20 years trying to move beyond the mistakes he made in Unix.
I don't think Thompson was particularly rational when he made his comments; they certainly don't bear scrutiny. Ane they hardly qualify as "constructive criticism." But I don't see sour grapes over a "better Unix"--more likely, I think he's PO'd that none of the new ideas and lessons learned since AT&T wrested Unix away from the Labs has seen wider distribution.
So maybe there is "sour grapes," but it's sour grapes over the phenomenal success of Open Source as a means of bringing ideas to market--so successful that other, possibly better, ideas are drowned out. Folks like Ken Thompson have done amazing work at Bell Labs for over half a century, only to have it kept under tight control and milked ineptly by AT&T (and now Lucent) and its lawyers for profit. That's gotta smart...
Imagine, if you will, that Unix was open-source back in the 1970's, and remained open source. I think operating systems would have progressed much further, and that bright minds like Linus Torvalds' would be at the forefront of adding to that legacy rather than having to reinvent it piecemeal.
From our perspective, is Linux a "better Unix"? Featurewise, Research Unix Edition 7 (the last version to make it out of Bell Labs) can't even hold a candle to it. But then, it ran in 96KB of memory on hardware with a cycle time measured in kilohertz (and supported useful amounts of multi-user software development and text processing in that configuration). Linux is twenty times as big, running on hardware tens to thousands of times more powerful. It had damn well better be better! But it has to be asked: was improving a 30-year-old OS the best we could do?
If you ever had carpal tunnel or other RSI, or known some who has, you'd know just how un-funny your post is. Ask RMS if he think his condition is funny...
OK, instead of risking even a hint of support for the killers (and I don't think we are--even "understanding" is far different than "approval"), let's look at this from a coldly pragmatic viewpoint: how do we prevent such killings in the future? Newspapers are full of quotations and editorials giving "solutions," most of them with the word "mandatory" embedded in them somewhere (fill in the blank: "prayer," "counseling," "gun control," et cetera, ad nauseum). The discussions I've seen here go an awful lot farther toward finding effective answers by zeroing in on the real underlying phenomena: intolerance and alienation.
It is not "supporting" the killers to say that taking steps to lessen the feelings of alienation and persecution they felt and others feel would reduce the chance of this sort of tragedy. Yet look at the most common "solutions" presented in the mass media: more intolerance and more persecution toward kids who stand out in some way. It's time to show the public the bubbling cauldron of despair and anger that schools have become for many students, and let them know that unless they throw water on the fire (instead of turning up the heat), Littleton will only be another member of a growing trend.
So let's bring out these issues, not because we support the killers, but because we want to avoid others becoming like them. This is simple, cold pragmatism, even though it also serves to put a more human face on the killers. And it should do so, because seeing them as human forces us to understand them, and understanding, not fear, is the key to prevention.
Don't give me crap about how "permissive" their parents must have been. If their parents had been more permissive with their ears I doubt this sort of thing would happen. Kids learn at an early age whether their feelings matter or not; we shouldn't be surprised that those who are denied a sense of purpose at home become violent when they fail to find it from their peers.
Startup companies go through perilous periods of growth--and statistics show that a majority fail to make such transitions. RedHat is at such a stage.
I've been through several startups, both successful and not, and the two most perilous times are
- bringing the initial product to market, and
- making the transition from "lean and mean" to "well-organized."
The latter is the stage that RedHat is at: too many employees to organize informally, but much danger from instituting more formal "rules and procedures" inappropriately. It really is a phase change (like from liquid to solid) in the life of a company when informally organized groups of dedicated individuals are no longer enough to hold a company together.Those of us who work as drones for corporations (like I currently do) often are isolated from the organizational needs of a company as it grows beyond the everybody-knows-everybody-else stage. There is a bit of black art about bringing many groups of people with wildly divergent world views into focus upon a common goal. Many more people are bad at melding the combination of leadership, support, and organization than are good at it. Companies will pay people big bucks just on the vague notion that someone has such skills.
It's unnatural to treat people a bit like objects, organizing them according to their attributes, yet still allowing them to remain human and develop their abilities as well as contribute them. Yet that's what makes companies successful. It's especially hard in technological areas, where each developer is more of an expert in her/his specialty than the manager is--but where the overall product forms the goal, and not any particular expert's view of it.
The sad thing is that many of us have never worked for a good manager--or worse, we have, but our current manager is compentent in nothing beyond sucking up to superiors. A good manager is a rare breed. Now think of how rare a good manager of managers must be! Yet companies die for the want of such people. I've seen it happen right before my eyes. And this is the saddest thing of all: to see the effort of good people wasted because management sucked. Almost everyone reading this will see it, if they stay in the industry long enough.
Although I doubt I've swayed many (if any) management-haters among us, my point is: RedHat needs someone with a special set of skills and experiences. Private and public corporations both need the same things from their upper management. The fact that RedHat hired someone who has worked as an upper manager in public corporations says nothing about their intentions for going public. But it's a good sign that they are preparing for their own growth by hiring someone who has been through this difficult phase several times before.
Check out your local paper's Letters To The Editor section. Far more people write to complain about things than to praise them. If you did a poll I'm sure you'd find that the overwhelming number of /.'ers feel that RedHat is a largely if not wholely positive force. But who takes the trouble to write just because they agree with something? It's clear from the responses here that, given a chance to disagree with something like "RedHat Sux!" a lot of folks are willing to pipe up and say "Does not!"
It's human nature. It's also nice to be reminded of it now and then. If I actually assumed that the average geek was represented by the average /. post, I'd have hung it all up and gone into something like used car sales a long time ago...
SunOS 4.X (and earlier) is a direct BSD descendent (given the Bill Joy connection, one might say that Sun was more BSD than BSD). But SunOS 5.X was no closer to BSD than other SysV R4 varients.
There are some old Sun hands out there who still haven't forgiven them for abandoning BSD.