Why not functionally group files to decrease or eliminate fragmentation? Or maybe this is already done.
In a Linux system, this is easily done, but few people bother.
Most of the write activity in Linux is in/tmp, and also in/var (for example, log files live in/var/log). User files go in/home.
So, you can use different partitions, each with its own file system, for/,/tmp,/home, and/var.
The major problem with this is that, if you guess wrong about how big a partition should be, it's a pain to resize things. So my usual thing is just to put/tmp on its own partition, and have a separate partition for / and for/home.
The/tmp partition and swap partition are put at the beginning of the disc, in hopes that seek penalties might be a little lower there. Then / has a generous amount of space, and/home has everything left over.
When a *NIX system runs out of disk space in/tmp, Very Bad Things happen. Far too much software was written in C by people who didn't bother to check error codes; things like disk writes don't fail often, but when/tmp is 100% full, every write fails. A system may act oddly when/tmp is full, without actually crashing or giving you a warning. So, the moral of the story is: disk is cheap, so if you give/tmp its own partition, make it pretty big; I usually use 4 GB now. However, if you run out of disk space in/var, it is not quite as serious. Your system logs stop logging. And, many databases are in/var so you may not be able to insert into your database anymore.
The main Ubuntu installer is fast, because it wipes out the / partition and puts in all new stuff. So, if you have separate partitions for / and/home, life is good: you just let the installer wipe/, and your/home is safely untouched. It's annoying when you have/home as just a subdirectory on / and you want to run the installer. But, by default, the Ubuntu installer will make one big partition for everything; if you want to organize by partitions, you will need to set things up by hand.
I am amazed by all the posts complaining that this is "retarded". Guess what, folks... she may not be completely serious.
The same woman also claims that, if you watch the three best Star Wars movies in order, they make a story arc different from what George Lucas had in mind overall.
I don't wear red shirts anymore... just can't do it.
Heh. I still wear red shirts sometimes, but every time I put one on I think "Dressed in red--soon be dead." I put it on anyway, just like I don't freak out when a black cat crosses my path. (Our pet cat is a black cat, so that's, like, eighteen dozen times a day, unless she just sits down in front of me and demands pettings.)
It wasn't just Red Shirts who died; any time you had a party beam down with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Never-Seen-Him-Before, you could be pretty sure that a salt vampire or a lightning bolt or a kligat or something was going to kill him before the next commercial break.
Did you ever watch Galaxy Quest? (If you didn't, you really need to.) One of the classic gags from that movie was the one guy who was certain he was going to die, because when he was on Galaxy Quest he never had a name, and the name characters never died but unnamed ones died about every week.
I read the article, and one of Walter Bender's comments jumped out at me:
I've said this over and over again since the early 1990s, but the reason why the Web took off as a protocol is that the Mosaic browser had a View Source menu item, which meant that anybody using the Web could also create things for the Web. The idea with Sugar is that anyone using Sugar should also be able to create things with Sugar.
This is the best thing about Sugar for the long run. In the old days of Apple ][ or Commodore 64 computers, lots of software was written in BASIC; and it wasn't too hard to interrupt the program, look around inside it, and even tweak it a bit. The hardest part was the sucky BASIC language. Now Sugar is being explicitly designed to not only make this kind of tweaking possible, but encourage it and make it as easy as possible. And Python is the best language they could have possibly chosen for encouraging school kids to try to tweak things.
If you read the article, you can read about how they have extended the "Turtle Art" program to allow programming the turtle movement in Python. So someone can learn trivial programming by chaining control blocks together, and then learn somewhat more advanced programming to script a special block in Python, and then perhaps move from there to tweaking the behavior of other parts of the system.
P.S. The OLPC project proper seems to be walking away from this sort of constructionist learning; putting Windows on a laptop is the total opposite of the above approach. I really wonder what Negroponte is thinking.
Who wants to pay a fee each and every month to listen to music, only to lose all their music should they stop paying?
That would be me.
I have an account with the Rhapsody online music service. For about $12 a month, I have access to over five million audio tracks. Five. Million.
Now, I would be the last person to claim that they are five million good audio tracks; there are plenty of lame covers and there is plenty of just music I hate. But that still leaves a vast amount of stuff I like, and I'm having fun exploring my way around. Recently I have been listening to the entire back catalog of Alan Parsons Project music; I found a few gems and a bunch of stuff I don't care about. Without buying anything, I figured out which songs I actually would want to get on a best-of compilation album.
I still buy CDs and I still buy music from Magnatune. But there is a place for music exploration using Rhapsody and Pandora.
If I wanted to be snide, I could comment that ITMS is vastly inferior to Rhapsody because you must pay a buck just to hear the whole song to find out whether it's worth buying or not. But why should we bash each others' preferences? There is plenty of room for both types of music service.
The worst thing about Rhapsody: buggy software. Really buggy. Maybe the Windows client is better, but I never use that.
The best thing about Rhapsody: Five. Million. Audio tracks.
From the summary: everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs.
I am not an expert on video codecs, but here is my understanding of the situation.
Theora is a relatively undeveloped technology in comparison with the industry standards of MPEG2 or MPEG4. There are relatively few developers working on it. Overall they have done a pretty good job of defining a standard, but they are still working on improving the encoder. The encoding format is now frozen, which means you can write a decoder and expect it to be able to decode any future Theora bitstream; but the encoders are still being improved. The earliest Theora encoders were pretty terrible, but newer ones have gotten better, to the point where Theora is now more efficient than MPEG2. ("More efficient" meaning encoding the same video at the same quality in fewer bits, or encoding better quality in the same number of bits.) MPEG4 is currently more efficient than Theora, but not free.
There is plenty of room for a clever encoder to reduce the bitstream with video. As a trivial example, suppose we are encoding a scene where a car is driving from left to right. A brain-dead encoder could simply notice that the car pixels have changed, and encode them all over again; a smarter encoder could detect that the next frame looks very much like the previous frame, except that certain pixels have slid over a bit, and instead of re-encoding every changed pixel, the clever encoder can encode "these pixels are like those older pixels, except slid to the right by X amount". It's not easy to write an encoder that can do an optimal job of figuring out the most efficient way to represent the changes between several frames of video. Many more man-years have been spent on proprietary MPEG encoders compared to the time spent on Theora so far.
It is not clear to me how much room for further improvement there might be. Can Theora ever approach MPEG4 for efficiency? My guess is that there are patented technologies in MPEG4 which allow for more efficiency than is possible with Theora, but I don't know to what degree. Note that the Theora guys are saying that Theora is in the same class with MPEG4.
Given that MPEG2 is considered adequate for many purposes, it seems to me that Theora should be adequate for many purposes, and it's free. I have high-speed Internet and I would love it if Youtube and such sites offered Theora video in addition to Flash; the Flash player seems to leak memory a lot and I wish I didn't need it.
I wonder if we will start to see Theora-encoded video cutscenes in video games, just as we have seen Vorbis-encoded audio in video games?
If I got anything wrong in the above, please correct me.
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality
First: <pedantic>Ogg is the container format, like QuickTime or AVI. Vorbis is the audio codec being compared to MP3. You could, if you wanted to, put MP3 bits into an Ogg container; I guess this would be "Ogg MP3". </pedantic>.
Vorbis gives you better quality per bit than MP3. That means you can have higher quality in the same number of bits, or similar quality in fewer bits. Given that most of us aren't using modems anymore, perhaps this is only a weak selling point for Vorbis. It's still nice for small portable music players, though.
but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
As I understand it, the overhead for Vorbis isn't really that bad. The chief sticking point is that the little portable players use DSP chips, and the DSP chip vendors have excellent support for MP3 and no support for Vorbis. This means that when a project like Rockbox adds Vorbis support to a portable player, often they use the main CPU instead of the DSP chip, and that means a drastically worse power drain.
A sticking point from the past was that Vorbis was written to use floating-point math in the decoder. The Vorbis folks made an integer-math-only decoder called Tremor, which answers that point.
For a desktop computer, you would never notice the difference between a good Vorbis decoder and a good MP3 decoder.
I think the main reason for the lack of Vorbis takeup is inertia. Everyone has MP3s, so the players all support MP3s. Since the players support MP3s, only geeks like me bother with Vorbis, so the player companies don't feel motivated to support anything but MP3. I used to hope for Vorbis support everywhere, but now MP3 is just a few years away from its patents expiring, so it's going to be MP3 for the near to middle term.
I own a couple of Sansa players that can play Ogg Vorbis. They have excellent battery life, despite being tiny little things. They stand as examples that there is no inherent technical reason why Vorbis cannot work on small portable players. By the way, if you are a geek, you should consider one of these before you buy an iPod Shuffle; more features for less money, and it works as a USB storage device so it works perfectly well on Linux.
I accidentally started drinking a lot more caffeine than usual, and after a while, I started having worse and worse tremors. My hands would shake. The day I went to see my doctor about it, I had to concentrate furiously to get my hand steady enough to sign my signature at the front desk.
We didn't know what was going on. I was certain it wasn't the coffee I was drinking, because coffee had never been a problem for me before. My doctor gave me some tests, and told me he was sure it wasn't anything scary (Parkinson's disease or something). He recommended I start taking magnesium supplements.
I took the magnesium and it helped right away! Then over time the tremors started to get worse again. I was starting to get scared.
My doctor sent me to a neurologist. I decided to cut out all coffee for a week or so before visiting the neurologist; I was still certain coffee wasn't the cause of my problems, but I figured it would be helpful to remove one variable from the equation. After being tested in various ways while hooked up to cool machines, I was ruled not to have anything scary. More importantly, after a week with no coffee, I was starting to feel a lot better.
So I decided to stay off the coffee. I had some bad withdrawal symptoms (headache, etc.) and took a lot of aspirin and ibuprofen. (And around this time I started to get bad tinnitus on top of everything else!)
Now I am mostly off caffeine. I sometimes have a single cup of caffeinated coffee. The tremors have passed and I'm grateful that my symptoms are gone. (The tinnitus stopped when I stopped taking the aspirin and ibuprofen.)
An important thing I want to tell you: I never drank a cup of coffee and then immediately had my hands start shaking. I had a gradual onset of hand tremors and it was chronic, with no obvious increase right after I drank coffee. This convinced me the tremors could not be caused by the coffee, but now I am convinced that they were.
You may be wondering how I could accidentally start overdosing on caffeine. Well, I started working in a building where the coffee was awful (Farmer Brothers commercial coffee service), so I started making my own coffee using an Aeropress. This is an excellent coffee maker (Dan likes it!), and I still use it and recommend it. But when I first got it, I was using caffeinated coffee, and I was trying to make "doppio ristretto" portions for myself, so I was using two scoops of finely ground espresso beans. I now believe that one AeroPress scoop of coffee makes a double shot, so I was effectively drinking four espresso shots worth of caffeine; and I usually drank two of these per day. So while I thought I was drinking 4 espresso shots worth of caffeine, I suspect I was drinking 8 shots worth, possibly even a little more.
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. I drank reasonable portions of caffeine for years and didn't notice any ill effects at all; it was only when I drank too much that I had the scary tremors.
If you get hand tremors, I do suggest you cut out all caffeine for a while and see if it helps.
This is a truly disappointing news item. Instead of setting the bar higher and truly trying to reduce boot time, they have not done much more than shave seconds off the existing boot time.
I just checked, and it does seem that a fast boot time was one of the goals that Mark Shuttleworth set for Jaunty.
There are some specific goals that we need to meet in Jaunty. One of them is boot time. We want Ubuntu to boot as fast as possible - both in the standard case, and especially when it is being tailored to a specific device. The Jackalope is known for being so fast that it's extremely hard to catch, and breeds only when lightning flashes. Let's see if we can make booting or resuming Ubuntu blindingly quick.
Given that, I must confess that I'm also a bit disappointed that the boot time isn't closer to five seconds.
I love your work with the 5 second boot, and I look forward to that technology being implemented widely. On a modern super fast CPU with a solid-state hard drive, I should hope that a desktop computer could boot as fast as a netbook. (And I'd be willing to install Coreboot to get that speed.)
I'm seeing comments and tags using words like "scumbag". Well, I actually RTFA, and this guy doesn't seem to be a complete jerk.
According to him, the adware he wrote did not crack into your system using exploits, and when you ran the uninstaller it would go away and never come back. Also, according to him, it didn't scan for really personal information like credit card numbers.
I'm not about to start a fan club for him, but I don't hate him either.
I was interested in the technical stuff. His software would find other adware on a system and kick the other adware off; it was also designed to be very difficult for other adware to kick off.
The best single exchange in the interview:
S: In your professional opinion, how can people avoid adware?
If we had a digital health records system that worked, the insurers would be quick to analyze those records and use the data in consumer-unfriendly ways. Since employers pay the insurers (and ultimately incur the cost of health care), they would be among the first to "score" the health cost of new job applicants. People with certain manageable conditions (eg, diabetes) would be unemployable and therefore uninsurable.
I really, really hate the way insurance and jobs are tied together. It's slightly good for the consumer some of the time, because some big companies can get a good deal on insurance; the rest of the time it's a big lose for the consumer. People should sign up for insurance on their own, and their insurance should go with them as they change jobs. The employer should not care about insurance.
I really want a Health Savings Account. My current employer just doesn't offer that.
As you noted, someone with a condition like dabetes may have great trouble switching jobs or getting a new job, because of the way insurance and jobs are tied together. That just sucks.
Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?
Well, I'm sure they don't really want to allow you to block the ads. But I'm also sure that you will be able to.
If they really wanted to make sure no one ever could block ads, they could have simply not released the source. They could have released a free-as-in-beer web browser, and crippled it however they liked. This would reduce overall acceptance of their browser, as some of us wouldn't use it, but probably wouldn't kill the project outright.
When they released the source code to Chrome, Google had to know that ad blocking would happen someday. Even if they never added plugins, someone would fork the code base and add plugins, and that would be it.
Google has made the calculation that a really good web browser is good for them, as well as everyone else. The current use of Ad Blocker isn't killing Google, and the future use of it won't either. The benefits to Google (and everyone else) of having a free and open web browser that is really excellent far outweigh whatever cost Ad Blocker imposes.
Don't forget: Google is the top supporter of Firefox, which runs Ad Blocker.
the moment I saw the whopping 130w listed next to the i7 920 I immediately decided I didn't want one.
And don't forget -- this is an Intel power rating, which means "typical use". I have a computer with an AMD Phenom 9850, and that's rated at 120W, but that's worst case, not typical. In actual use the computer has been quiet and cool. (I ought to try recompiling the Linux kernel on all four cores or something.)
Intel is selling far more CPUs than AMD can even make, and they have the top absolute performance, but AMD is selling plenty of Opterons into data centers because AMD does well on performance/power ratio. AMD is also selling some CPU chips with a maximum heat dissipation of 45W. AMD is already working on cornering the efficiency market.
All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.
I share your admiration for the Saturn V. But re-creating it is not the best idea.
According to Henry Spencer, the blueprints for the Saturn V still exist, but much of the undocumented extra knowledge was in fact lost. The skilled machinists who knew how to turn those designs into working parts are long retired or dead; the special heat treatments needed to make some of the alloys are forgotten; etc.
And, as another poster noted in this thread, if you did build a Saturn V it would have 1960's electronics.
If you say "but we will just update the alloys and electronics" then it isn't really a Saturn V anymore, and it will need to be re-tested and re-engineered. In which case, you might as well have started from a clean sheet of paper.
Also, the Saturn V was our answer to the problem of getting boots on the moon as fast as possible. I'd prefer to see the problem of moon travel solved correctly, which IMHO means making it easier and faster to mount expeditions, and making it possible to send larger payloads. This means I want to see a cheap, really reusable orbital vehicle; a space station suitable for staging moon missions; an Earth-moon spacecraft, assembled in space, that was never designed to land on Earth or the moon; and reusable moon landing vehicles.
Every time you use a Saturn V to go to the moon, you destroy one Saturn V. That's expensive, and it doesn't scale well. If we have a reliable "pickup truck" that can carry a small payload to orbit, then do it again in less than a week, we can send up the crew and supplies for a moon mission.
With the Saturn V, our astronauts lived inside a little tin can for a few days, then returned. I'd like to see an actual moon base sent over in pieces, and see people living on the moon for months at a time (and doing science the whole time).
Cheap, reliable, routine flights to orbit change the whole game. Instead of repeating the space race, let's build an infrastructure and go to space to stay.
(far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth)
Yes, yes, yes!! And make that prize tax-free while you are at it. And put a smaller prize for second place. These prizes would be cheap if someone succeeds, and if no one succeeds we would pay nothing. It's better than paying cost plus contracts to aerospace contractors.
We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb.
Start buying a different brand immediately.
When I first decided to save energy by getting fluorescent lights, I bought a complete special fixture with a special bulb. The brand was "Lights of America" brand. I was totally pleased by the warm, pleasant color of the light, so I bought a bunch more and replaced almost all of the ceiling fixtures in my home.
Then they began to fail.
The light would go out, and I would try to replace the bulb... half the time, the replacement wouldn't work either, the whole light was fried (and the bulb was blackened and ruined when the fixture killed itself). When I was lucky and the replacement bulb worked, it was just a matter of time before it would die again with similar results.
So now I went around my house and replaced the fixtures again, this time with standard fixtures. But I'm putting in compact fluorescent bulbs. There is some brand sold at my local Home Depot that is available with a nice color temperature, and I have yet to have a single one burn out. If it does, it can't possibly require a new fixture, since CFL bulbs are self-contained and incandescent fixtures are tough.
Well, for Linux gaming, you are, for now anyway. But over the long term, we should get free, open-source drivers, which means drivers that actually work. In the long run, you may be better off with ATI cards.
And, I will be voting with my dollars: I'll now try to buy ATI cards where it makes sense, partly because for the long term I think they will be a win, but also to thank ATI for doing something I wanted them to do.
I admit that unlike with these guys I don't easily work with the hardware you already have...
Oh come on, that's needlessly harsh, and not funny. It's not even correct. Does OS X work with the hardware I already own? Does Windows Vista?
Take an Ubuntu 8.04 install CD, and try booting it on "the hardware you already have". In my experience, it will Just Work on just about any computer from the past few years. (An Ubuntu 8.10 install CD will probably work also, but I have seen that fail to work on a laptop... some drivers issue. 8.04 is the "Long Term Support" version, and extra care was taken to make it stable, so that's slightly better for Just Working.)
Ubuntu will do a better job of Just Working on "the hardware you already have" than Windows Vista! 1 GB of RAM is plenty for Ubuntu, and while it might be enough for Vista, I have heard that it's not "plenty". (Supposedly you really want to have at least 2 GB.) Semi-lame graphics cards are fine for Ubuntu, including the desktop bling, where Vista will run in some kind of fallback mode unless your card supports programmable shaders.
If a user can be happy with just a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, email program, web browser (with Flash support), instant messenger, photo viewer, photo editor, music player, and a few light games such as a minesweeper game, then that user can be happy with Ubuntu, nearly out of the box. (For the music player, you will probably want to install the extra codecs such as MP3 that are not installed by default.)
An average user might not be able to install Ubuntu, but will be able to use it if an expert sets it up correctly. An average user might not be able to install Windows, either.
steveha
Re:Chiropractic treatment worked for me
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I had a serious fall... I consulted a chiropractic. He was able to make some of the pain disappear immediately.
I'm glad that worked out for you. But I'm still pretty ambivalent towards chiropractic.
On the one hand, evidence seems to suggest that some people, such as you, have had some benefit from chiropractic. Mostly this seems to be physical therapy sort of stuff.
On the other hand, there are people out there who think chiropractic is some sort of general treatment for anything that's wrong with you. What scares me is that chiropractors are among them. Here's the very first sentence from the Wikipedia page on chiropractic:
Chiropractic is a health care profession that emphasizes diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mechanical disorders of the musculoskeletal system, especially the spine, under the hypothesis that these disorders affect general health via the nervous system.
Digging a bit in Wikipedia, we find that the son of the founder of chiropractic insisted that even smallpox was caused by spinal misalignment!
Sorry, but I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who calls himself a "chiropractor". If he tells me that he just wants to help people who were hurt by bad falls, and he believes smallpox is caused by germs, I might reconsider.
I'm not trying to be a smartass, but why did he mention in TFA that his supercomputer cost $4000 if the 8 consoles were "Sony-donated"?
Oh come on, you are being pedantic. Clearly what he meant was "$4000 worth of consoles", never mind that they were donated. $X worth of consoles is a useful number if someone is considering buying PS3s and setting up a supercomputer; it's also a fun number to compare to the cost of renting time on some large supercomputer.
He asked for Sony to donate the PS3s because he didn't think the NSF would give him grant money to buy video game systems. Now that he has actually built the supercomputer and it does everything he hoped it would do, perhaps other researchers will be able to justify the money to set up their own clusters (without donations from Sony).
The numbers are a no-brainer: he used to spend $5000 to do a single simulation run using rented supercomputer time. For less than the cost of a single simulation run, you can set up your own supercomputer and make simulation runs whenever you feel like it.
ALso, like the iPod example at the top of the post, most research use of the technology won't come from actual iPods or consoles
Um, he is using actual PS3 consoles to do actual research.
If one wanted to build their own home "super" computer then why not just use CUDA and a few Nvidia cards?
If you think that is a good way to make a super computer, why don't you go ahead and do it, and make a web site explaining how it is done?
Meanwhile, he thought he had a good way to go with the PS3, and it did in fact work as he expected, so what's the problem?
Anyway, here's why he thought it was a good idea. From the above linked Wired article:
According to Rimon, the Cell processor was designed as a parallel processing device, so he's not all that surprised the research community has embraced it. "It has a general purpose processor, as well as eight additional processing cores, each of which has two processing pipelines and can process multiple numbers, all at the same time," Rimon says.
Khanna says that his gravity grid has been up and running for a little over a month now and that, crudely speaking, his eight consoles are equal to about 200 of the supercomputing nodes he used to rely on.
It looks like the current trend is to use stem cells from within a patient's own body. That way there are no ethical issues and no worries about tissue rejection. Researchers are figuring out ways to extract stem cells from a patient's own blood.
In my experience the only people who have a strong dislike of NFS are those that only experienced it years ago, or who don't know how to use it properly.
Could you please tell me a book or web site that will teach me how to use modern NFS properly?
I'm a software developer, not a professional sysadmin, but I am the sysadmin for the computers in my home. The one time I tried NFS (years ago) I had trouble with it, got frustrated, and stopped. SAMBA has been working pretty well for me, but I'd like to give NFS a try, because almost all of my computers are running Linux anyway.
Python will let you focus on the fun and interesting parts. Compare "Hello, world!" in C vs. in Python; in Python you jump right in and print something, whereas in C you need to declare your main() function and import before you can do anything.
I recommend you grab Python 3.0 and use that to teach the kids. It's Python 2.x with a few sharp corners knocked off. For example, integer division is now unsurprising:
print(1 / 2) # prints "0.5"
In older versions of Python, (1 / 2) evaluates to 0 (just like C, C++, Pascal, Ruby, etc.). In recent 2.x versions you can get the new behavior if you want it, but it is not the default.
Here is an essay about why Python 3.0 is better than Python 2.x for teaching.
P.S. I know that Ruby fans probably think Ruby would be a good choice for teaching. IMHO Python would be a better first language. However it would not be unreasonable to offer Ruby in an advanced class. IMHO, Ruby is not as straightforward and tidy as Python, and it would be needlessly harder for an introductory class. No flames intended, YMMV.
Moreover, and this is the critical part, a manager who is not an expert can tell if his monkies are keeping up with patches. MS tells him what he need to do. With Linux you can't really tell if the IT guy is doing it all, or if your pants are around your ankles.
I'm not sure this is correct.
With Ubuntu, a little icon lights up on the desktop if there are updates available. If you click it and type the admin password, the updates are installed and the icon goes out.
So, what more do you need than this? The manager can see if the icon is lit up or not. And all the updates, including critical security updates, come through this same updater; so if you are up to date, you are up to date.
It seems to me that it is easier to keep an Ubuntu desktop secured than a Windows desktop. With Ubuntu, you just run the one updater; with Windows, you have the Microsoft updater, the Symantec updater, the Apple updater, the Sun Java updater, etc. etc.
Ubuntu is what I'm most familiar with, but I know Red Hat has "up2date" which is similar, and basically all modern Linux systems have some sort of unified automatic updater.
So all that I'm left with is that there aren't as many trained monkeys with Linux certifications. But you can always get a support contract from Red Hat, Canonical, or someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not functionally group files to decrease or eliminate fragmentation? Or maybe this is already done.
In a Linux system, this is easily done, but few people bother.
Most of the write activity in Linux is in /tmp, and also in /var (for example, log files live in /var/log). User files go in /home.
So, you can use different partitions, each with its own file system, for /, /tmp, /home, and /var.
The major problem with this is that, if you guess wrong about how big a partition should be, it's a pain to resize things. So my usual thing is just to put /tmp on its own partition, and have a separate partition for / and for /home.
The /tmp partition and swap partition are put at the beginning of the disc, in hopes that seek penalties might be a little lower there. Then / has a generous amount of space, and /home has everything left over.
When a *NIX system runs out of disk space in /tmp, Very Bad Things happen. Far too much software was written in C by people who didn't bother to check error codes; things like disk writes don't fail often, but when /tmp is 100% full, every write fails. A system may act oddly when /tmp is full, without actually crashing or giving you a warning. So, the moral of the story is: disk is cheap, so if you give /tmp its own partition, make it pretty big; I usually use 4 GB now. However, if you run out of disk space in /var, it is not quite as serious. Your system logs stop logging. And, many databases are in /var so you may not be able to insert into your database anymore.
The main Ubuntu installer is fast, because it wipes out the / partition and puts in all new stuff. So, if you have separate partitions for / and /home, life is good: you just let the installer wipe /, and your /home is safely untouched. It's annoying when you have /home as just a subdirectory on / and you want to run the installer. But, by default, the Ubuntu installer will make one big partition for everything; if you want to organize by partitions, you will need to set things up by hand.
steveha
I am amazed by all the posts complaining that this is "retarded". Guess what, folks... she may not be completely serious.
The same woman also claims that, if you watch the three best Star Wars movies in order, they make a story arc different from what George Lucas had in mind overall.
http://www.ohesso.com/essays/essay004.htm
She also devotes a whole essay to explaining how her friends like to drink beer out of a prosthetic leg.
Next up: Slashdot analyzes the wisdom of Steven Wright to decide which of his suggestions are best not tried out in real life.
P.S. Her funniest essay is "I Like Babies". It's not what you expect... or, if it is, you are very strange.
http://www.ohesso.com/essays/essay002.htm
steveha
I don't wear red shirts anymore ... just can't do it.
Heh. I still wear red shirts sometimes, but every time I put one on I think "Dressed in red--soon be dead." I put it on anyway, just like I don't freak out when a black cat crosses my path. (Our pet cat is a black cat, so that's, like, eighteen dozen times a day, unless she just sits down in front of me and demands pettings.)
It wasn't just Red Shirts who died; any time you had a party beam down with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Never-Seen-Him-Before, you could be pretty sure that a salt vampire or a lightning bolt or a kligat or something was going to kill him before the next commercial break.
Did you ever watch Galaxy Quest? (If you didn't, you really need to.) One of the classic gags from that movie was the one guy who was certain he was going to die, because when he was on Galaxy Quest he never had a name, and the name characters never died but unnamed ones died about every week.
steveha
I read the article, and one of Walter Bender's comments jumped out at me:
This is the best thing about Sugar for the long run. In the old days of Apple ][ or Commodore 64 computers, lots of software was written in BASIC; and it wasn't too hard to interrupt the program, look around inside it, and even tweak it a bit. The hardest part was the sucky BASIC language. Now Sugar is being explicitly designed to not only make this kind of tweaking possible, but encourage it and make it as easy as possible. And Python is the best language they could have possibly chosen for encouraging school kids to try to tweak things.
If you read the article, you can read about how they have extended the "Turtle Art" program to allow programming the turtle movement in Python. So someone can learn trivial programming by chaining control blocks together, and then learn somewhat more advanced programming to script a special block in Python, and then perhaps move from there to tweaking the behavior of other parts of the system.
P.S. The OLPC project proper seems to be walking away from this sort of constructionist learning; putting Windows on a laptop is the total opposite of the above approach. I really wonder what Negroponte is thinking.
steveha
Who wants to pay a fee each and every month to listen to music, only to lose all their music should they stop paying?
That would be me.
I have an account with the Rhapsody online music service. For about $12 a month, I have access to over five million audio tracks. Five. Million.
Now, I would be the last person to claim that they are five million good audio tracks; there are plenty of lame covers and there is plenty of just music I hate. But that still leaves a vast amount of stuff I like, and I'm having fun exploring my way around. Recently I have been listening to the entire back catalog of Alan Parsons Project music; I found a few gems and a bunch of stuff I don't care about. Without buying anything, I figured out which songs I actually would want to get on a best-of compilation album.
I still buy CDs and I still buy music from Magnatune. But there is a place for music exploration using Rhapsody and Pandora.
If I wanted to be snide, I could comment that ITMS is vastly inferior to Rhapsody because you must pay a buck just to hear the whole song to find out whether it's worth buying or not. But why should we bash each others' preferences? There is plenty of room for both types of music service.
The worst thing about Rhapsody: buggy software. Really buggy. Maybe the Windows client is better, but I never use that.
The best thing about Rhapsody: Five. Million. Audio tracks.
steveha
I heard about some Solaris boxes (at UC Berkeley I think) with the names: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, Pride.
These were called "The Seven Deadly Suns". <rimshot>
steveha
Thank you for taking the time to post all that information. I'm not an expert in this stuff but I'm very interested in it.
From the summary:
everything I have heard about Theora is that it is technically inferior to many other video codecs.
I am not an expert on video codecs, but here is my understanding of the situation.
Theora is a relatively undeveloped technology in comparison with the industry standards of MPEG2 or MPEG4. There are relatively few developers working on it. Overall they have done a pretty good job of defining a standard, but they are still working on improving the encoder. The encoding format is now frozen, which means you can write a decoder and expect it to be able to decode any future Theora bitstream; but the encoders are still being improved. The earliest Theora encoders were pretty terrible, but newer ones have gotten better, to the point where Theora is now more efficient than MPEG2. ("More efficient" meaning encoding the same video at the same quality in fewer bits, or encoding better quality in the same number of bits.) MPEG4 is currently more efficient than Theora, but not free.
There is plenty of room for a clever encoder to reduce the bitstream with video. As a trivial example, suppose we are encoding a scene where a car is driving from left to right. A brain-dead encoder could simply notice that the car pixels have changed, and encode them all over again; a smarter encoder could detect that the next frame looks very much like the previous frame, except that certain pixels have slid over a bit, and instead of re-encoding every changed pixel, the clever encoder can encode "these pixels are like those older pixels, except slid to the right by X amount". It's not easy to write an encoder that can do an optimal job of figuring out the most efficient way to represent the changes between several frames of video. Many more man-years have been spent on proprietary MPEG encoders compared to the time spent on Theora so far.
It is not clear to me how much room for further improvement there might be. Can Theora ever approach MPEG4 for efficiency? My guess is that there are patented technologies in MPEG4 which allow for more efficiency than is possible with Theora, but I don't know to what degree. Note that the Theora guys are saying that Theora is in the same class with MPEG4.
Given that MPEG2 is considered adequate for many purposes, it seems to me that Theora should be adequate for many purposes, and it's free. I have high-speed Internet and I would love it if Youtube and such sites offered Theora video in addition to Flash; the Flash player seems to leak memory a lot and I wish I didn't need it.
I wonder if we will start to see Theora-encoded video cutscenes in video games, just as we have seen Vorbis-encoded audio in video games?
If I got anything wrong in the above, please correct me.
steveha
Ogg might be "better" than MP3 in terms of sound quality
First: <pedantic>Ogg is the container format, like QuickTime or AVI. Vorbis is the audio codec being compared to MP3. You could, if you wanted to, put MP3 bits into an Ogg container; I guess this would be "Ogg MP3". </pedantic>.
Vorbis gives you better quality per bit than MP3. That means you can have higher quality in the same number of bits, or similar quality in fewer bits. Given that most of us aren't using modems anymore, perhaps this is only a weak selling point for Vorbis. It's still nice for small portable music players, though.
but ultimately it consumes significantly more CPU time.
As I understand it, the overhead for Vorbis isn't really that bad. The chief sticking point is that the little portable players use DSP chips, and the DSP chip vendors have excellent support for MP3 and no support for Vorbis. This means that when a project like Rockbox adds Vorbis support to a portable player, often they use the main CPU instead of the DSP chip, and that means a drastically worse power drain.
A sticking point from the past was that Vorbis was written to use floating-point math in the decoder. The Vorbis folks made an integer-math-only decoder called Tremor, which answers that point.
For a desktop computer, you would never notice the difference between a good Vorbis decoder and a good MP3 decoder.
I think the main reason for the lack of Vorbis takeup is inertia. Everyone has MP3s, so the players all support MP3s. Since the players support MP3s, only geeks like me bother with Vorbis, so the player companies don't feel motivated to support anything but MP3. I used to hope for Vorbis support everywhere, but now MP3 is just a few years away from its patents expiring, so it's going to be MP3 for the near to middle term.
I own a couple of Sansa players that can play Ogg Vorbis. They have excellent battery life, despite being tiny little things. They stand as examples that there is no inherent technical reason why Vorbis cannot work on small portable players. By the way, if you are a geek, you should consider one of these before you buy an iPod Shuffle; more features for less money, and it works as a USB storage device so it works perfectly well on Linux.
http://www.sansa.com/players/sansa_clip/tech
steveha
I can vouch for the dangers of too much caffeine.
I accidentally started drinking a lot more caffeine than usual, and after a while, I started having worse and worse tremors. My hands would shake. The day I went to see my doctor about it, I had to concentrate furiously to get my hand steady enough to sign my signature at the front desk.
We didn't know what was going on. I was certain it wasn't the coffee I was drinking, because coffee had never been a problem for me before. My doctor gave me some tests, and told me he was sure it wasn't anything scary (Parkinson's disease or something). He recommended I start taking magnesium supplements.
I took the magnesium and it helped right away! Then over time the tremors started to get worse again. I was starting to get scared.
My doctor sent me to a neurologist. I decided to cut out all coffee for a week or so before visiting the neurologist; I was still certain coffee wasn't the cause of my problems, but I figured it would be helpful to remove one variable from the equation. After being tested in various ways while hooked up to cool machines, I was ruled not to have anything scary. More importantly, after a week with no coffee, I was starting to feel a lot better.
So I decided to stay off the coffee. I had some bad withdrawal symptoms (headache, etc.) and took a lot of aspirin and ibuprofen. (And around this time I started to get bad tinnitus on top of everything else!)
Now I am mostly off caffeine. I sometimes have a single cup of caffeinated coffee. The tremors have passed and I'm grateful that my symptoms are gone. (The tinnitus stopped when I stopped taking the aspirin and ibuprofen.)
An important thing I want to tell you: I never drank a cup of coffee and then immediately had my hands start shaking. I had a gradual onset of hand tremors and it was chronic, with no obvious increase right after I drank coffee. This convinced me the tremors could not be caused by the coffee, but now I am convinced that they were.
You may be wondering how I could accidentally start overdosing on caffeine. Well, I started working in a building where the coffee was awful (Farmer Brothers commercial coffee service), so I started making my own coffee using an Aeropress. This is an excellent coffee maker (Dan likes it!), and I still use it and recommend it. But when I first got it, I was using caffeinated coffee, and I was trying to make "doppio ristretto" portions for myself, so I was using two scoops of finely ground espresso beans. I now believe that one AeroPress scoop of coffee makes a double shot, so I was effectively drinking four espresso shots worth of caffeine; and I usually drank two of these per day. So while I thought I was drinking 4 espresso shots worth of caffeine, I suspect I was drinking 8 shots worth, possibly even a little more.
As the saying goes, the dose makes the poison. I drank reasonable portions of caffeine for years and didn't notice any ill effects at all; it was only when I drank too much that I had the scary tremors.
If you get hand tremors, I do suggest you cut out all caffeine for a while and see if it helps.
steveha
This is a truly disappointing news item. Instead of setting the bar higher and truly trying to reduce boot time, they have not done much more than shave seconds off the existing boot time.
I just checked, and it does seem that a fast boot time was one of the goals that Mark Shuttleworth set for Jaunty.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-announce/2008-September/000481.html
Given that, I must confess that I'm also a bit disappointed that the boot time isn't closer to five seconds.
I love your work with the 5 second boot, and I look forward to that technology being implemented widely. On a modern super fast CPU with a solid-state hard drive, I should hope that a desktop computer could boot as fast as a netbook. (And I'd be willing to install Coreboot to get that speed.)
steveha
I'm seeing comments and tags using words like "scumbag". Well, I actually RTFA, and this guy doesn't seem to be a complete jerk.
According to him, the adware he wrote did not crack into your system using exploits, and when you ran the uninstaller it would go away and never come back. Also, according to him, it didn't scan for really personal information like credit card numbers.
I'm not about to start a fan club for him, but I don't hate him either.
I was interested in the technical stuff. His software would find other adware on a system and kick the other adware off; it was also designed to be very difficult for other adware to kick off.
The best single exchange in the interview:
steveha
If we had a digital health records system that worked, the insurers would be quick to analyze those records and use the data in consumer-unfriendly ways. Since employers pay the insurers (and ultimately incur the cost of health care), they would be among the first to "score" the health cost of new job applicants. People with certain manageable conditions (eg, diabetes) would be unemployable and therefore uninsurable.
I really, really hate the way insurance and jobs are tied together. It's slightly good for the consumer some of the time, because some big companies can get a good deal on insurance; the rest of the time it's a big lose for the consumer. People should sign up for insurance on their own, and their insurance should go with them as they change jobs. The employer should not care about insurance.
I really want a Health Savings Account. My current employer just doesn't offer that.
As you noted, someone with a condition like dabetes may have great trouble switching jobs or getting a new job, because of the way insurance and jobs are tied together. That just sucks.
steveha
Why would a technology company that generates revenue from ads want to allow you to block the ads?
Well, I'm sure they don't really want to allow you to block the ads. But I'm also sure that you will be able to.
If they really wanted to make sure no one ever could block ads, they could have simply not released the source. They could have released a free-as-in-beer web browser, and crippled it however they liked. This would reduce overall acceptance of their browser, as some of us wouldn't use it, but probably wouldn't kill the project outright.
When they released the source code to Chrome, Google had to know that ad blocking would happen someday. Even if they never added plugins, someone would fork the code base and add plugins, and that would be it.
Google has made the calculation that a really good web browser is good for them, as well as everyone else. The current use of Ad Blocker isn't killing Google, and the future use of it won't either. The benefits to Google (and everyone else) of having a free and open web browser that is really excellent far outweigh whatever cost Ad Blocker imposes.
Don't forget: Google is the top supporter of Firefox, which runs Ad Blocker.
steveha
the moment I saw the whopping 130w listed next to the i7 920 I immediately decided I didn't want one.
And don't forget -- this is an Intel power rating, which means "typical use". I have a computer with an AMD Phenom 9850, and that's rated at 120W, but that's worst case, not typical. In actual use the computer has been quiet and cool. (I ought to try recompiling the Linux kernel on all four cores or something.)
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article169-page3.html
AMD could corner the efficiency market.
Intel is selling far more CPUs than AMD can even make, and they have the top absolute performance, but AMD is selling plenty of Opterons into data centers because AMD does well on performance/power ratio. AMD is also selling some CPU chips with a maximum heat dissipation of 45W. AMD is already working on cornering the efficiency market.
http://enterprise.amd.com/us-en/AMD-Business/Technology-Home/Power-Management.aspx
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3003
steveha
All we need to actually get back to the Moon is a Saturn V stack updated with newer materials and automation technologies.
I share your admiration for the Saturn V. But re-creating it is not the best idea.
According to Henry Spencer, the blueprints for the Saturn V still exist, but much of the undocumented extra knowledge was in fact lost. The skilled machinists who knew how to turn those designs into working parts are long retired or dead; the special heat treatments needed to make some of the alloys are forgotten; etc.
And, as another poster noted in this thread, if you did build a Saturn V it would have 1960's electronics.
If you say "but we will just update the alloys and electronics" then it isn't really a Saturn V anymore, and it will need to be re-tested and re-engineered. In which case, you might as well have started from a clean sheet of paper.
Also, the Saturn V was our answer to the problem of getting boots on the moon as fast as possible. I'd prefer to see the problem of moon travel solved correctly, which IMHO means making it easier and faster to mount expeditions, and making it possible to send larger payloads. This means I want to see a cheap, really reusable orbital vehicle; a space station suitable for staging moon missions; an Earth-moon spacecraft, assembled in space, that was never designed to land on Earth or the moon; and reusable moon landing vehicles.
Every time you use a Saturn V to go to the moon, you destroy one Saturn V. That's expensive, and it doesn't scale well. If we have a reliable "pickup truck" that can carry a small payload to orbit, then do it again in less than a week, we can send up the crew and supplies for a moon mission.
With the Saturn V, our astronauts lived inside a little tin can for a few days, then returned. I'd like to see an actual moon base sent over in pieces, and see people living on the moon for months at a time (and doing science the whole time).
Cheap, reliable, routine flights to orbit change the whole game. Instead of repeating the space race, let's build an infrastructure and go to space to stay.
(far better to offer a $20B X-Prize for the first organization to put 30 men on the Moon for a year and a day, and return them safely to Earth)
Yes, yes, yes!! And make that prize tax-free while you are at it. And put a smaller prize for second place. These prizes would be cheap if someone succeeds, and if no one succeeds we would pay nothing. It's better than paying cost plus contracts to aerospace contractors.
steveha
We seem to have to replace 6 CFLs for every one incandescent bulb.
Start buying a different brand immediately.
When I first decided to save energy by getting fluorescent lights, I bought a complete special fixture with a special bulb. The brand was "Lights of America" brand. I was totally pleased by the warm, pleasant color of the light, so I bought a bunch more and replaced almost all of the ceiling fixtures in my home.
Then they began to fail.
The light would go out, and I would try to replace the bulb... half the time, the replacement wouldn't work either, the whole light was fried (and the bulb was blackened and ruined when the fixture killed itself). When I was lucky and the replacement bulb worked, it was just a matter of time before it would die again with similar results.
So now I went around my house and replaced the fixtures again, this time with standard fixtures. But I'm putting in compact fluorescent bulbs. There is some brand sold at my local Home Depot that is available with a nice color temperature, and I have yet to have a single one burn out. If it does, it can't possibly require a new fixture, since CFL bulbs are self-contained and incandescent fixtures are tough.
steveha
You're still better off with Nvidia for linux.
Well, for Linux gaming, you are, for now anyway. But over the long term, we should get free, open-source drivers, which means drivers that actually work. In the long run, you may be better off with ATI cards.
And, I will be voting with my dollars: I'll now try to buy ATI cards where it makes sense, partly because for the long term I think they will be a win, but also to thank ATI for doing something I wanted them to do.
steveha
I admit that unlike with these guys I don't easily work with the hardware you already have...
Oh come on, that's needlessly harsh, and not funny. It's not even correct. Does OS X work with the hardware I already own? Does Windows Vista?
Take an Ubuntu 8.04 install CD, and try booting it on "the hardware you already have". In my experience, it will Just Work on just about any computer from the past few years. (An Ubuntu 8.10 install CD will probably work also, but I have seen that fail to work on a laptop... some drivers issue. 8.04 is the "Long Term Support" version, and extra care was taken to make it stable, so that's slightly better for Just Working.)
Ubuntu will do a better job of Just Working on "the hardware you already have" than Windows Vista! 1 GB of RAM is plenty for Ubuntu, and while it might be enough for Vista, I have heard that it's not "plenty". (Supposedly you really want to have at least 2 GB.) Semi-lame graphics cards are fine for Ubuntu, including the desktop bling, where Vista will run in some kind of fallback mode unless your card supports programmable shaders.
If a user can be happy with just a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, email program, web browser (with Flash support), instant messenger, photo viewer, photo editor, music player, and a few light games such as a minesweeper game, then that user can be happy with Ubuntu, nearly out of the box. (For the music player, you will probably want to install the extra codecs such as MP3 that are not installed by default.)
An average user might not be able to install Ubuntu, but will be able to use it if an expert sets it up correctly. An average user might not be able to install Windows, either.
steveha
I had a serious fall... I consulted a chiropractic. He was able to make some of the pain disappear immediately.
I'm glad that worked out for you. But I'm still pretty ambivalent towards chiropractic.
On the one hand, evidence seems to suggest that some people, such as you, have had some benefit from chiropractic. Mostly this seems to be physical therapy sort of stuff.
On the other hand, there are people out there who think chiropractic is some sort of general treatment for anything that's wrong with you. What scares me is that chiropractors are among them. Here's the very first sentence from the Wikipedia page on chiropractic:
Digging a bit in Wikipedia, we find that the son of the founder of chiropractic insisted that even smallpox was caused by spinal misalignment!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebral_subluxation#.22A_cause_in_the_spine.22
Sorry, but I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who calls himself a "chiropractor". If he tells me that he just wants to help people who were hurt by bad falls, and he believes smallpox is caused by germs, I might reconsider.
steveha
I'm not trying to be a smartass, but why did he mention in TFA that his supercomputer cost $4000 if the 8 consoles were "Sony-donated"?
Oh come on, you are being pedantic. Clearly what he meant was "$4000 worth of consoles", never mind that they were donated. $X worth of consoles is a useful number if someone is considering buying PS3s and setting up a supercomputer; it's also a fun number to compare to the cost of renting time on some large supercomputer.
The original Wired article is informative:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/10/ps3_supercomputer
He asked for Sony to donate the PS3s because he didn't think the NSF would give him grant money to buy video game systems. Now that he has actually built the supercomputer and it does everything he hoped it would do, perhaps other researchers will be able to justify the money to set up their own clusters (without donations from Sony).
The numbers are a no-brainer: he used to spend $5000 to do a single simulation run using rented supercomputer time. For less than the cost of a single simulation run, you can set up your own supercomputer and make simulation runs whenever you feel like it.
ALso, like the iPod example at the top of the post, most research use of the technology won't come from actual iPods or consoles
Um, he is using actual PS3 consoles to do actual research.
If one wanted to build their own home "super" computer then why not just use CUDA and a few Nvidia cards?
If you think that is a good way to make a super computer, why don't you go ahead and do it, and make a web site explaining how it is done?
Meanwhile, he thought he had a good way to go with the PS3, and it did in fact work as he expected, so what's the problem?
Anyway, here's why he thought it was a good idea. From the above linked Wired article:
steveha
Similar techniques are being tried also to regrow damaged or missing cartilage.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070906104136.htm
It looks like the current trend is to use stem cells from within a patient's own body. That way there are no ethical issues and no worries about tissue rejection. Researchers are figuring out ways to extract stem cells from a patient's own blood.
http://www.bio-medicine.org/biology-news/Breakthrough-isolating-embryo-quality-stem-cells-from-blood-669-1/
steveha
In my experience the only people who have a strong dislike of NFS are those that only experienced it years ago, or who don't know how to use it properly.
Could you please tell me a book or web site that will teach me how to use modern NFS properly?
I'm a software developer, not a professional sysadmin, but I am the sysadmin for the computers in my home. The one time I tried NFS (years ago) I had trouble with it, got frustrated, and stopped. SAMBA has been working pretty well for me, but I'd like to give NFS a try, because almost all of my computers are running Linux anyway.
steveha
I second the recommendation for Python.
Python will let you focus on the fun and interesting parts. Compare "Hello, world!" in C vs. in Python; in Python you jump right in and print something, whereas in C you need to declare your main() function and import before you can do anything.
I recommend you grab Python 3.0 and use that to teach the kids. It's Python 2.x with a few sharp corners knocked off. For example, integer division is now unsurprising:
print(1 / 2) # prints "0.5"
In older versions of Python, (1 / 2) evaluates to 0 (just like C, C++, Pascal, Ruby, etc.). In recent 2.x versions you can get the new behavior if you want it, but it is not the default.
Here is an essay about why Python 3.0 is better than Python 2.x for teaching.
http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nde/papers/teachpy3.html
P.S. I know that Ruby fans probably think Ruby would be a good choice for teaching. IMHO Python would be a better first language. However it would not be unreasonable to offer Ruby in an advanced class. IMHO, Ruby is not as straightforward and tidy as Python, and it would be needlessly harder for an introductory class. No flames intended, YMMV.
steveha
Moreover, and this is the critical part, a manager who is not an expert can tell if his monkies are keeping up with patches. MS tells him what he need to do. With Linux you can't really tell if the IT guy is doing it all, or if your pants are around your ankles.
I'm not sure this is correct.
With Ubuntu, a little icon lights up on the desktop if there are updates available. If you click it and type the admin password, the updates are installed and the icon goes out.
So, what more do you need than this? The manager can see if the icon is lit up or not. And all the updates, including critical security updates, come through this same updater; so if you are up to date, you are up to date.
It seems to me that it is easier to keep an Ubuntu desktop secured than a Windows desktop. With Ubuntu, you just run the one updater; with Windows, you have the Microsoft updater, the Symantec updater, the Apple updater, the Sun Java updater, etc. etc.
Ubuntu is what I'm most familiar with, but I know Red Hat has "up2date" which is similar, and basically all modern Linux systems have some sort of unified automatic updater.
So all that I'm left with is that there aren't as many trained monkeys with Linux certifications. But you can always get a support contract from Red Hat, Canonical, or someone else.
steveha