In that respect, it's no different from linux kernel development.
(Wow, look, 2.2.17 and 2.4.0-test7; what a jump! NOT!)
The added features are funny, though: C and C++ looking language constructs; tell me when they allow blocks and semicolons instead of whitespace and newlines, and then we'll talk.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Has it gotten any better? I got an automated reply, and then nothing after that; it was *so* stupid. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Re:Stop saying a kernel isn't slash dot material
on
Linux 2.2.17 Released
·
· Score: 1
I'll second that.
Don't re-run slashdot, though; I miss it too much. April Fools Day from two or three years ago was priceless; last year was pitiful by comparison (and in general).
Actually, if I hadn't been here the whole time, I'm sure I'd just look at the Comments and say "What's all this stuff? Did some script kiddies get a hold of slashdot???", only to get a penis bird, a "Fuck Off", and an old-timer saying "No, son, it's always like that now. In my day...":) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, I'm running Mandrake now as well; it looks pretty slick. I hadn't gotten to try out Konquerer yet, so it'll be fun playing with all the installed software.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. I don't know, my drive doesn't do it, either. I could have tried it out, but I figured it wasn't really worth it. (I read through about enabling ATA/66 on Linux; I might have to patch my kernel for that, and use hdparm, but it didn't sound like even that offered much improvement)
Mandrake has a *lot* of extra stuff; I'm installing it now, from rpmfind.org, and it's taking its time. The installer looks really cool, though, especially their partitioning tool! --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Cool; I've hacked most of that into my system already, but it would be nice to see it supported out of the box.
Heck, I've got a couple of ReiserFS partitions, one of them as Software RAID-0. I've been playing around too much, I'm pretty happy with my 800 Mhz Thunderbird, myself.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
SDL is a wrapper, and it does some other stuff all by itself, but it's a standardized, platform-independent implementation for media stuff. I've messed with that a little, and even less with actual X internals, but I know it's possible to change the resolution on the fly, even as a regular user; I just don't know if it requires DGA. For a good example, fire up Heroes III for Linux. Also, that should give you an idea as to my gaming needs; 3D audio really is wasted there.
Actually, I think what I meant to say was, SDL is about equivalent to Direct X, and DGA lets you do some things like DirectDraw, or for that matter, SVGALib. (that is, get a full-screen console in a different graphics mode) If I missed anything, there's always OpenAL and OpenGL, but that should about cover it for multimedia APIs.
You're right; in this case, my argument is "I see no need for it, therefore it's not important". In fact, personally, that's generally my opinion on things. If, on the other hand, I think that it would be a really cool feature to have, well, then I'd want it. Example: The Office Assistant in Microsoft Office. I really see no need for it; therefore, I don't want it.:)
I couldn't tell you anything about NVIDIA benchmarks; I can tell you that I'm happy with my real-world performance with my Matrox G400. I'll happily run benchmarks between my Linux box and Windows '98; do you know of a good 3D benchmark suite? However, in any case, I don't think it's that big of a difference. When I find something I want to do that's noticably slower, I'll worry about it. Heck, I can load up an arcade game in MAME with GL support at 1280x1024x32, and it's smooth! That amazes me. Also, Q3A is pretty.:)
Is there a port of Half-Life to Linux? More to the point, do you know of any really good 3D role-playing games that I might be able to use? I couldn't get FF7 to work under Wine so far, and that's about it. I think the software-porting issue is more worrisome than the drivers, personally. And although I don't care about it, it looks like OpenAL supports 3D sound, or plans to. I haven't tried it, and don't know how mature it is yet, but I'm sure Loki will use it in a game sometime.:)
I don't play racing games; what about role-playing games? It's quite possible that I'm not enough of a gamer at heart to get it in the first place, unless side-scrollers count too...
The fact that manufacturers can sell identical products at vastly different prices based on a little configuration tweaking is pathetic. However, I didn't overclock my 800Mhz Thunderbird just because I wouldn't want to screw something up, or void the warranty. Even if it is trivially easy to do, I don't even have my box cooled very well, and I'm not much of a hardware hacker, either...:)
Well, sometimes NT can handle a week or two of uptime; even in a stable configuration, it still leaks memory. And if for some reason it isn't stable, well, then you're really in trouble. My Linux box isn't incredibly stable yet, either, but that's my problem; I'm trying out new stuff that probably isn't supported and recommended, and that's my fault. Most notably, I had to tweak arla a bit to get it to compile under kernel 2.4, and sometimes that module will die, but it doesn't bring down the whole system (it encounters a 'BUG()' in the kernel when it messes up, generally.) If I needed it for production, I'd be running kernel 2.2 and whatnot.:)
I just got a new computer, and I have an Abit KT7 board, an 800Mhz Athlon 'Thunderbird', a Matrox G400 DualHead 32MB, and an SB Live! Value... The DVD drive is a 12x Toshiba SD-M1402, and that's the only piece of hardware that isn't supported under linux. I installed Windows "Do You Want To Restart Your Computer?" '98 to test it out, and it seems to work just fine, though.
Incidentally, do you know of a good shell replacement in Win '98? I quickly tried a few of them last night, and they looked pretty unstable, or useless in the default configuration. I found a pager for Windows that's really cool, though; it's called DeskWin. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I tried to install 7.1 from CD, but the media was somewhat messed up, so I just went with what I knew, and did a network install of RH6.2.
How do you like Mandrake? Do you know if it would be faster/slower on an Athlon? (I don't think actual Pentium optimization would necessarily help...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, but Scheme doesn't look like C. Read the article again, and replace 'ML' with 'Scheme', or whatever your favorite functional language is.
Also, remember:
1) BWK is sympathetic to your plight.
2) Think that perhaps one reason why he picked 'C' is that he could probably write Scheme in C if he really had to, but you could never write C in Scheme, and if you did, it'd be too slow. If you ever manage to write an optimizing C compiler in Scheme, though, hat's off to you. I'd be impressed just by the assembler... Therefore, in the long run, I think he'd be better off with his choice.
But yeah, I kinda like Scheme too. I might try writing it in Perl sometime.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a network install image... It was somewhat buried, but I couldn't find it at all before! Has mandrake always supported doing an FTP install, or is this new?
I'd love to try it out, but (a) this is a BETA:) and (b) I just got my RedHat installation working decently on my cool new computer; I don't want to mess it up!
Oh well, I guess I could use a different partition for/usr, and whatnot, and back stuff up... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, watch closely. I can't stand vi. 'cat' and 'sed' are excellent tools. But I think what *he* was talking about was using some sort of text-based, interactive editor *from* the command line, and using the compiler entirely from the command line, and writing your program that way.
Hey, why isn't vi a CLI program, eh? Just 'cause it has that "EIGHT KILOBYTES of cursor positioning code"? I mean, really, what's wrong with xvi? Is it that megabyte of display-independent graphics code? Oh well. Ed. Ed is the standard. Text editor.;) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, maybe it's less useful now, but it made a lot more sense when computers were more expensive, and not everyone necessarily had one. However, I think it provides a great environment for people--like a BBS where you can get all your work done!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's called SDL; there's also OpenGL and OpenAL; that should be more than enough. Don't forget to thank Loki!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, one question: do you think BeOS has great multimedia support? Heck, it doesn't even play DVD's!;)
Windows and Linux and MacOS all have SDL. It supports DirectX on Windows, and DGA on X, which is the equivalent. The tests I saw for 3D acceleration didn't differ by much; it's way fast for me, even for Q3A. My speakers can't even take advantage of 3D sound decently, and I think I saw patches for all that stuff, but I really don't care yet. However, Linux *does* have great 3D acceleration, and the audio stuff is in hardware! Maybe our definitions of great differ, but the actual performance I'm seeing is pretty impressive. And I'm not saddened that I don't have 'force-feedback' on my Gravis Gamepad, I don't know of any games that support it, and I thought it was a dumb idea on the Playstation!
Yeah, Windows has more hardware support; that's because Microsoft doesn't have to write *ALL* the drivers. This situation is changing of course, and I like being able to poke around with the source code, but it'll take a while for this one to change--the corporate culture can be pretty entrenched about these things.
There are many different limited versions of Win2K. I don't care if it supports 2 processors out of the box, or what the configuration-of-the-week is; the bottom line is, Microsoft will always sell you the same product for much more by just making a minor registry tweak so you get the "new features", and I'm fundamentally opposed to that, because it's stupid; just as stupid as CPUs and overclocking, nowadays.
Well, I'd like to see the results of the tests before I draw my conclusions; you may be right. But if I did the tests, and one platform consistently crashed under certain conditions, I'd note that and put it in my review; that's NOT a feature.
Another benefit of Linux is the multitude of configuration options. Given the time and resources, I'd love to just benchmark Linux against itself! That is to say, configure one box with a standard kernel, OSS, ext2, XFree86 3.3.6, and a couple of IDE drives, and then configure another box with an optimized kernel, ALSA, reiserfs, XFree86 4.0.1, software RAID... well, in any case benchmark all the components against each other, and find out what the fastest, most stable Linux configuration is for a given hardware configuration. That isn't as straightforward in NT, because there aren't that many configuration options, and many of them aren't obvious or readily available.
Also, X has DGA, which allows direct video access. X has hardware acceleration, and there are third-party drivers that implement *better* acceleration. (I compiled UTAH-GLX for my Matrox card, and it's pretty impressive; I'm going to try the new drivers from Matrox if I try XFree86 4.0.1 again; the DRI project for it doesn't look mature yet) I realize that the way Windows does it is probably closer to the bare metal, but that way lies madness; you might as well just write a protected-mode DOS app to do it, 'cause it's about the same, except it's hooked into Windows. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Umm... Linux has support for quite a few processors out of the box, including 8, and you don't have to pay more for it. If you want a RAID card for Linux, look at the supported hardware list, just like you do when you want a RAID card for NT. If you want to test them, see where the two lists intersect. That is all. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No; in both cases, I wrote code for it that did not contain 'sort | uniq -c'.:)
This was our first assignment for the Operating Systems course I'm taking, CSC451. The goal is to get people up-to-speed in C.
However, once you have this program written, it's easy to hack in some tokenizing code, and get, say, each instance of a word. (or you could run something like "tr ' ' '/n'" and just cheat again.;)
Also, implementing it together allows for speed improvements; by definition in the command 'sort | uniq -c', sort has to sort the whole input stream, and then uniq deletes the duplicates. This approach is algorithmically slower than only adding the unique elements and maintaining a count, and I wrote this approach in Perl and C. In Perl, it is impelemented with hashes, and is about 7 lines long.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
while(<>) {
$index{$_}++;
}
foreach $word (sort keys(%index)) {
print "$index{$word}: $word";
}
The C version uses a simple binary tree structure with a reference count, and is slightly under 50 lines long. This is because, besides the simple tree code, I also have to dynamically allocate the strings to read them in up to the newline and whatnot... --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Your solution here is "Don't use UNIX, just buy another Workstation"?
The original point was, you could get a big workstation, and have everyone run the apps they need off of that. It's cost-effective, and works great at Universities. There's a product like this for Windows too, that actually works decently: Citrix Metaframe. But X has done this on Unix, and so has telnet, for basically as long as they've been around. And if I wanted to use a real copy of VisualAge for Java at my University, that's what I'd use. If I were under Windows, I'd have to install a free X-server, too.
Just because you don't use it or understand it doesn't mean other people don't want it or need it. --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Grab the FrontPage Extensions for Linux, and try to use FPExec for security--that way people who want FrontPage can use it there. If that's all you're using the Win2K box for, then format it, and install Linux, too. Once you get it working smoothly, you'll be so much happier.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, I was with you for about the first half of that, but then your advocacy started overshadowing your facts.
First, I saw Windows 2000 Beta 3 crash on INSTALLATION, something that should never happen. The only time I've seen anything like that on Linux... well, the media was physically corrupted, and it still tried to install.:)
Linux and Windows can run each other's binaries perfectly; the problem is finding a program that completely emulates or virtualizes the x86. At the moment, I know that VMWare does a good job, and Bochs does too if you can live with how slow it is. Plex86 is in the works, and is showing promise, since it can run DOS now...
I agree about Netscape, it isn't terribly stable; however, most graphical browsers aren't, for one reason or another, *including* IE, in my experience. But Netscape has the potential to be downright horrible about it. However, X has been pretty good to me, and in my experience I've had much more trouble with gdm. (which is a reason to use xdm...)
BTW, Linux has great multimedia support. Okay, okay, let me explain. I have a Matrox G400, and the hardware acceleration is *sweet*. Also, my SB Live Value is just excellent, I love the hardware mixing, the multiple DSP's... I installed ALSA and now the MIDI patches ("soundfonts") work too, and they sound good.
It's all about picking supported hardware, though, which you still have to do for Win2K, as well. My DVD drive isn't supported, because I (a) couldn't find much information about that on the net, and (b) just bought it first, figuring I'd test it out later. I'll probably ask the developers about this, since it works under Windows. I've heard it can be made to work under VMWare too, so all I really need is some debugging info.:)
Plus support for multi-processing makes it even better. Now, I don't have more than one processor, but I might set up a dual-proc test box if I can ever find an old board for it. However, I've seen it done on Linux, and it is sweet. No paying extra for a different version that just consists of a stupid registry hack, either. It has decent multi-processing support out of the box. And I'd love to see a comparison to Win2K here, since that's one thing that's supposed to be better in 2.4.
How about that, eh, guys? Something based around Linux Kernel 2.4.0 with a bunch of stable stuff, vs. Win2KSP1, or whatever is current and patched by then. Test multi-processing, test well-supported hardware, RAID, whatever. Just test the hell out of it.
Being a real system administrator is based on experience. Now, I won't be one, because I'm going to graduate from college with a CSC major, and I'd rather be coding, but just because I *went* to college doesn't mean I've been idle, or don't know my stuff. Maybe not about Win2K, but I haven't really wanted to use it a whole lot.:)
And no, you don't have to do anything *wrong* for Win2K to crash on you. Sometimes you don't have to do anything. It's better, but it isn't perfect yet. And Microsoft has been that arrogant about it from Day 1; I don't know why they even pretend to have tech support. And how is realplayer crap? Is it just not Windows Media Player? Was it not written for Windows Internals, but instead cross-platform? As for Netscape, I'd rather run Mozilla; IE is not cross-platform, and it shouldn't be integrated into the OS file browser, and it annoys the hell out of me. I haven't tested rendering yet, but I'd want to test two equivalently dated versions. (IE 4, NS4; Current IE, Current Mozilla...) --- pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
In that respect, it's no different from linux kernel development.
;)
(Wow, look, 2.2.17 and 2.4.0-test7; what a jump! NOT!)
The added features are funny, though: C and C++ looking language constructs; tell me when they allow blocks and semicolons instead of whitespace and newlines, and then we'll talk.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yeah, there have been enough licensing stories on slashdot, but this one could have been interesting.
Ah well, another slashdot story I didn't see because of another slashdot bug that won't get fixed....
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I remember Toshiba was feeling wishy-washy about the whole thing before, but IBM? Oh well.
I hope this doesn't set them back too much, because I want to see these things in action!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I tried to comment on stuff before, and the process they had was completely clueless.
See your tax dollars at work.
Has it gotten any better? I got an automated reply, and then nothing after that; it was *so* stupid.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'll second that.
:)
Don't re-run slashdot, though; I miss it too much. April Fools Day from two or three years ago was priceless; last year was pitiful by comparison (and in general).
Actually, if I hadn't been here the whole time, I'm sure I'd just look at the Comments and say "What's all this stuff? Did some script kiddies get a hold of slashdot???", only to get a penis bird, a "Fuck Off", and an old-timer saying "No, son, it's always like that now. In my day..."
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, I'm running Mandrake now as well; it looks pretty slick. I hadn't gotten to try out Konquerer yet, so it'll be fun playing with all the installed software. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
:) I know, right? That's why I made those comments about X and ncurses...
Personally, I like rhide, which is still text-mode, but...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Hmm. I don't know, my drive doesn't do it, either. I could have tried it out, but I figured it wasn't really worth it. (I read through about enabling ATA/66 on Linux; I might have to patch my kernel for that, and use hdparm, but it didn't sound like even that offered much improvement)
Mandrake has a *lot* of extra stuff; I'm installing it now, from rpmfind.org, and it's taking its time. The installer looks really cool, though, especially their partitioning tool!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Cool; I've hacked most of that into my system already, but it would be nice to see it supported out of the box.
;)
Heck, I've got a couple of ReiserFS partitions, one of them as Software RAID-0. I've been playing around too much, I'm pretty happy with my 800 Mhz Thunderbird, myself.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
SDL is a wrapper, and it does some other stuff all by itself, but it's a standardized, platform-independent implementation for media stuff. I've messed with that a little, and even less with actual X internals, but I know it's possible to change the resolution on the fly, even as a regular user; I just don't know if it requires DGA. For a good example, fire up Heroes III for Linux. Also, that should give you an idea as to my gaming needs; 3D audio really is wasted there.
:)
:)
:)
:)
:)
Actually, I think what I meant to say was, SDL is about equivalent to Direct X, and DGA lets you do some things like DirectDraw, or for that matter, SVGALib. (that is, get a full-screen console in a different graphics mode) If I missed anything, there's always OpenAL and OpenGL, but that should about cover it for multimedia APIs.
You're right; in this case, my argument is "I see no need for it, therefore it's not important". In fact, personally, that's generally my opinion on things. If, on the other hand, I think that it would be a really cool feature to have, well, then I'd want it. Example: The Office Assistant in Microsoft Office. I really see no need for it; therefore, I don't want it.
I couldn't tell you anything about NVIDIA benchmarks; I can tell you that I'm happy with my real-world performance with my Matrox G400. I'll happily run benchmarks between my Linux box and Windows '98; do you know of a good 3D benchmark suite? However, in any case, I don't think it's that big of a difference. When I find something I want to do that's noticably slower, I'll worry about it. Heck, I can load up an arcade game in MAME with GL support at 1280x1024x32, and it's smooth! That amazes me. Also, Q3A is pretty.
Is there a port of Half-Life to Linux? More to the point, do you know of any really good 3D role-playing games that I might be able to use? I couldn't get FF7 to work under Wine so far, and that's about it. I think the software-porting issue is more worrisome than the drivers, personally. And although I don't care about it, it looks like OpenAL supports 3D sound, or plans to. I haven't tried it, and don't know how mature it is yet, but I'm sure Loki will use it in a game sometime.
I don't play racing games; what about role-playing games? It's quite possible that I'm not enough of a gamer at heart to get it in the first place, unless side-scrollers count too...
The fact that manufacturers can sell identical products at vastly different prices based on a little configuration tweaking is pathetic. However, I didn't overclock my 800Mhz Thunderbird just because I wouldn't want to screw something up, or void the warranty. Even if it is trivially easy to do, I don't even have my box cooled very well, and I'm not much of a hardware hacker, either...
Well, sometimes NT can handle a week or two of uptime; even in a stable configuration, it still leaks memory. And if for some reason it isn't stable, well, then you're really in trouble. My Linux box isn't incredibly stable yet, either, but that's my problem; I'm trying out new stuff that probably isn't supported and recommended, and that's my fault. Most notably, I had to tweak arla a bit to get it to compile under kernel 2.4, and sometimes that module will die, but it doesn't bring down the whole system (it encounters a 'BUG()' in the kernel when it messes up, generally.) If I needed it for production, I'd be running kernel 2.2 and whatnot.
I just got a new computer, and I have an Abit KT7 board, an 800Mhz Athlon 'Thunderbird', a Matrox G400 DualHead 32MB, and an SB Live! Value... The DVD drive is a 12x Toshiba SD-M1402, and that's the only piece of hardware that isn't supported under linux. I installed Windows "Do You Want To Restart Your Computer?" '98 to test it out, and it seems to work just fine, though.
Incidentally, do you know of a good shell replacement in Win '98? I quickly tried a few of them last night, and they looked pretty unstable, or useless in the default configuration. I found a pager for Windows that's really cool, though; it's called DeskWin.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Thanks!
I tried to install 7.1 from CD, but the media was somewhat messed up, so I just went with what I knew, and did a network install of RH6.2.
How do you like Mandrake? Do you know if it would be faster/slower on an Athlon? (I don't think actual Pentium optimization would necessarily help...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Definitely; otherwise, it would be time to protect you from my girlfriend. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Yes, but Scheme doesn't look like C. Read the article again, and replace 'ML' with 'Scheme', or whatever your favorite functional language is.
;)
Also, remember:
1) BWK is sympathetic to your plight.
2) Think that perhaps one reason why he picked 'C' is that he could probably write Scheme in C if he really had to, but you could never write C in Scheme, and if you did, it'd be too slow. If you ever manage to write an optimizing C compiler in Scheme, though, hat's off to you. I'd be impressed just by the assembler... Therefore, in the long run, I think he'd be better off with his choice.
But yeah, I kinda like Scheme too. I might try writing it in Perl sometime.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
There's a network install image... It was somewhat buried, but I couldn't find it at all before! Has mandrake always supported doing an FTP install, or is this new?
:) and (b) I just got my RedHat installation working decently on my cool new computer; I don't want to mess it up!
/usr, and whatnot, and back stuff up...
I'd love to try it out, but (a) this is a BETA
Oh well, I guess I could use a different partition for
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, watch closely. I can't stand vi. 'cat' and 'sed' are excellent tools. But I think what *he* was talking about was using some sort of text-based, interactive editor *from* the command line, and using the compiler entirely from the command line, and writing your program that way.
;)
Hey, why isn't vi a CLI program, eh? Just 'cause it has that "EIGHT KILOBYTES of cursor positioning code"? I mean, really, what's wrong with xvi? Is it that megabyte of display-independent graphics code? Oh well. Ed. Ed is the standard. Text editor.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Well, maybe it's less useful now, but it made a lot more sense when computers were more expensive, and not everyone necessarily had one. However, I think it provides a great environment for people--like a BBS where you can get all your work done! :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
It's called SDL; there's also OpenGL and OpenAL; that should be more than enough. Don't forget to thank Loki! :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
First, one question: do you think BeOS has great multimedia support? Heck, it doesn't even play DVD's! ;)
Windows and Linux and MacOS all have SDL. It supports DirectX on Windows, and DGA on X, which is the equivalent. The tests I saw for 3D acceleration didn't differ by much; it's way fast for me, even for Q3A. My speakers can't even take advantage of 3D sound decently, and I think I saw patches for all that stuff, but I really don't care yet. However, Linux *does* have great 3D acceleration, and the audio stuff is in hardware! Maybe our definitions of great differ, but the actual performance I'm seeing is pretty impressive. And I'm not saddened that I don't have 'force-feedback' on my Gravis Gamepad, I don't know of any games that support it, and I thought it was a dumb idea on the Playstation!
Yeah, Windows has more hardware support; that's because Microsoft doesn't have to write *ALL* the drivers. This situation is changing of course, and I like being able to poke around with the source code, but it'll take a while for this one to change--the corporate culture can be pretty entrenched about these things.
There are many different limited versions of Win2K. I don't care if it supports 2 processors out of the box, or what the configuration-of-the-week is; the bottom line is, Microsoft will always sell you the same product for much more by just making a minor registry tweak so you get the "new features", and I'm fundamentally opposed to that, because it's stupid; just as stupid as CPUs and overclocking, nowadays.
Well, I'd like to see the results of the tests before I draw my conclusions; you may be right. But if I did the tests, and one platform consistently crashed under certain conditions, I'd note that and put it in my review; that's NOT a feature.
Another benefit of Linux is the multitude of configuration options. Given the time and resources, I'd love to just benchmark Linux against itself! That is to say, configure one box with a standard kernel, OSS, ext2, XFree86 3.3.6, and a couple of IDE drives, and then configure another box with an optimized kernel, ALSA, reiserfs, XFree86 4.0.1, software RAID... well, in any case benchmark all the components against each other, and find out what the fastest, most stable Linux configuration is for a given hardware configuration. That isn't as straightforward in NT, because there aren't that many configuration options, and many of them aren't obvious or readily available.
Also, X has DGA, which allows direct video access. X has hardware acceleration, and there are third-party drivers that implement *better* acceleration. (I compiled UTAH-GLX for my Matrox card, and it's pretty impressive; I'm going to try the new drivers from Matrox if I try XFree86 4.0.1 again; the DRI project for it doesn't look mature yet) I realize that the way Windows does it is probably closer to the bare metal, but that way lies madness; you might as well just write a protected-mode DOS app to do it, 'cause it's about the same, except it's hooked into Windows.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Umm... Linux has support for quite a few processors out of the box, including 8, and you don't have to pay more for it. If you want a RAID card for Linux, look at the supported hardware list, just like you do when you want a RAID card for NT. If you want to test them, see where the two lists intersect. That is all.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I was writing a program for the class.
Do you know what the program was called?
That's right, 'sortuniq'.
I had already written similar code in Perl, though, while analyzing data for a simple Markov chain text hack, so I figured I'd compare the two.
Slashdot poster diverts attention from the on-topic Perl/C comparison.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
No; in both cases, I wrote code for it that did not contain 'sort | uniq -c'. :)
;)
This was our first assignment for the Operating Systems course I'm taking, CSC451. The goal is to get people up-to-speed in C.
However, once you have this program written, it's easy to hack in some tokenizing code, and get, say, each instance of a word. (or you could run something like "tr ' ' '/n'" and just cheat again.
Also, implementing it together allows for speed improvements; by definition in the command 'sort | uniq -c', sort has to sort the whole input stream, and then uniq deletes the duplicates. This approach is algorithmically slower than only adding the unique elements and maintaining a count, and I wrote this approach in Perl and C. In Perl, it is impelemented with hashes, and is about 7 lines long.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
while(<>) {
$index{$_}++;
}
foreach $word (sort keys(%index)) {
print "$index{$word}: $word";
}
The C version uses a simple binary tree structure with a reference count, and is slightly under 50 lines long. This is because, besides the simple tree code, I also have to dynamically allocate the strings to read them in up to the newline and whatnot...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
WHAT???
Your solution here is "Don't use UNIX, just buy another Workstation"?
The original point was, you could get a big workstation, and have everyone run the apps they need off of that. It's cost-effective, and works great at Universities. There's a product like this for Windows too, that actually works decently: Citrix Metaframe. But X has done this on Unix, and so has telnet, for basically as long as they've been around. And if I wanted to use a real copy of VisualAge for Java at my University, that's what I'd use. If I were under Windows, I'd have to install a free X-server, too.
Just because you don't use it or understand it doesn't mean other people don't want it or need it.
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
How much RAM do you have?
NT loves to chew up RAM, and this isn't fixed decently yet in 2000...
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Grab the FrontPage Extensions for Linux, and try to use FPExec for security--that way people who want FrontPage can use it there. If that's all you're using the Win2K box for, then format it, and install Linux, too. Once you get it working smoothly, you'll be so much happier. :)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, I was with you for about the first half of that, but then your advocacy started overshadowing your facts.
:)
:)
:)
First, I saw Windows 2000 Beta 3 crash on INSTALLATION, something that should never happen. The only time I've seen anything like that on Linux... well, the media was physically corrupted, and it still tried to install.
Linux and Windows can run each other's binaries perfectly; the problem is finding a program that completely emulates or virtualizes the x86. At the moment, I know that VMWare does a good job, and Bochs does too if you can live with how slow it is. Plex86 is in the works, and is showing promise, since it can run DOS now...
I agree about Netscape, it isn't terribly stable; however, most graphical browsers aren't, for one reason or another, *including* IE, in my experience. But Netscape has the potential to be downright horrible about it. However, X has been pretty good to me, and in my experience I've had much more trouble with gdm. (which is a reason to use xdm...)
BTW, Linux has great multimedia support. Okay, okay, let me explain. I have a Matrox G400, and the hardware acceleration is *sweet*. Also, my SB Live Value is just excellent, I love the hardware mixing, the multiple DSP's... I installed ALSA and now the MIDI patches ("soundfonts") work too, and they sound good.
It's all about picking supported hardware, though, which you still have to do for Win2K, as well. My DVD drive isn't supported, because I (a) couldn't find much information about that on the net, and (b) just bought it first, figuring I'd test it out later. I'll probably ask the developers about this, since it works under Windows. I've heard it can be made to work under VMWare too, so all I really need is some debugging info.
Plus support for multi-processing makes it even better. Now, I don't have more than one processor, but I might set up a dual-proc test box if I can ever find an old board for it. However, I've seen it done on Linux, and it is sweet. No paying extra for a different version that just consists of a stupid registry hack, either. It has decent multi-processing support out of the box. And I'd love to see a comparison to Win2K here, since that's one thing that's supposed to be better in 2.4.
How about that, eh, guys? Something based around Linux Kernel 2.4.0 with a bunch of stable stuff, vs. Win2KSP1, or whatever is current and patched by then. Test multi-processing, test well-supported hardware, RAID, whatever. Just test the hell out of it.
Being a real system administrator is based on experience. Now, I won't be one, because I'm going to graduate from college with a CSC major, and I'd rather be coding, but just because I *went* to college doesn't mean I've been idle, or don't know my stuff. Maybe not about Win2K, but I haven't really wanted to use it a whole lot.
And no, you don't have to do anything *wrong* for Win2K to crash on you. Sometimes you don't have to do anything. It's better, but it isn't perfect yet. And Microsoft has been that arrogant about it from Day 1; I don't know why they even pretend to have tech support. And how is realplayer crap? Is it just not Windows Media Player? Was it not written for Windows Internals, but instead cross-platform? As for Netscape, I'd rather run Mozilla; IE is not cross-platform, and it shouldn't be integrated into the OS file browser, and it annoys the hell out of me. I haven't tested rendering yet, but I'd want to test two equivalently dated versions. (IE 4, NS4; Current IE, Current Mozilla...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.