"You apparently don't have much experience with Solaris either."
No, dammit, but I am trying.
Trying is fine. Nobody is born with experience. Just tone down the authorative claims like "Solaris stinks" when you even admit that you're just learning it. [I assume that you are also ENOENT, because your writing suggests that you are continuing this conversation rather than jumping in halfway]
Oh, yea, and attempting to install BSD on an Ultra10 I *inhereted*. Read the docs on installing BSD on sparcs...they spell it out as a *FSCKING PITA*.
Doctor, it hurts when I do this?! Solaris is a fine OS so use it. BSD is going to give you nothing except more headaches. Solaris will support the Sparc hardware and it will run stable. BSD is an unknown factor so why introduce it into an already difficult mix!? Cost can't be an issue because Solaris is effectively free.
I suggest if you are on a tight budget that you stick to the "freebie" support that Sun provides. It is as good as the commercial support but you have to do a lot more of the groundwork yourself. Start with
http://docs.Sun.COM/
http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/
http://www.Sun.COM/bigadmin/
http://www.sunfreeware.com/
Solaris has warts. The user interface is certainly a PITA compared to any modern Linux. But you can get pre-packaged Solaris binaries for bash and GNOME and mozilla. Then the only difference is/etc and/sbin, and really there's nothing bad with how Solaris does all that stuff.
If you've read the the other article(s) (how long it takes to perform a memcpy) in this series, it seems he is trying to desparately find holes where he can say "Linux is better".
I strongly disagree. I think the author is making a concerted and honest effort to appraise a specific piece of OS functionality. He meticulously details his methodology, his results, and his conclusions. He's doing this in a well-rounded and repeatable fashion. He doesn't make any grand-standing claims about the relative merits of the respective OSs based on what he finds: he just states the facts regarding the specific OS functionality he investigated.
This strikes me as being a very useful thing to do. After he's done a whole bunch of OS calls I expect to find that Windows is superior for some, Linux for some others, and equal for the remainder. But after he has finished there will be a methodology to go back with and RECHECK the latest releases of Windows against the latest releases of Linux.
You bitching about his results is not constructive and helps noone. If you find flaws in his methodology then you will have done something useful. But I daresay that if you do find flaws then Dr Bradford will revise and rerun his experiments.
I look forward to reading more articles of this sort from Dr Bradford.
Solaris stinks--Sun seems to go out of their way to hide security patches from visitors to their website. I don't have much experience with other platforms
You apparently don't have much experience with Solaris either. Any of the standard Sun maintenance agreements will mean you receive regular SunSolve packs with every patch for every Sun product dating back to the dawn of time. They include an automated patch installation program that will automatically determine your patchlevel and apply outstanding patches related to security, stability and performance.
If you're too cheap to pay the measly amount for a maintenance agreement - in which case I'd like to know why you're using Sun gear in the first place - then this is also all available on the web from http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/. The first page, second link, is Security Patches. The single download will update your system to the latest security level. You just click on it, unpack it, and run the included shell script.
So I really have no idea where you're coming from with your "Solaris is too hard to patch" nonsense.
I'm sure modders are gonna hate me for saying that, but I don't care at all if you don't like the system. If it's your job, it's your job. I hate Oracle, but that doesn't mean I don't use it *right* when I have to. Is it my first choice? No. Am I gonna be a slack-ass about it just because of sour grapes if I have to you it? No.
What are you suggesting? That the recent Code Red plagues are because of malevolent Linux zealots pretending to be Windows admins? Give me a break! Would you also claim that the BIND disasters on UNIX were a result of undercover Windows zealots trying to undermine UNIX? This smacks far too much of conspiracy nonsense for my tastes.
The most likely explanation is that most people are lazy and/or incompetent. There is significantly more demand for quality administrators - UNIX or NT - than there are people to supply. As a result the salaries are inflated and this has attracted the unskilled and incompetent get-rich-quick crowd. This is almost certainly the REAL reason for the incompetently and poorly administered boxen out there.
Now if you want to discuss the relative merits of Windows vs UNIX in terms of security, then come back down to Earth and stop spouting conspiracy nonsense. There are REAL arguments that can be made about the security design of Windows vs UNIX, and some of them are interesting (although admittedly most are not). I personally think that Windows attracts the lazy and the incompetent administrators more-so than UNIX, but maybe you disgree!?
If they use Standard XML I can't see why more people could use StarOffice in a business. As long as they tell people to send the documents in XML format. But that depends on that getting into MSOffice.
XML doesn't define a standard for word processing documents. XML is just a way to store the data. The XML Schema defines how the word processing documents are stored. MSOffice and StarOffice will probably not use the same XML Schema, so despite them both using XML I doubt they'll understand each other's documents.
There are some sites that are serving up default apache pages
My web server has a default apache page, and it's been this way for many years, but it's not because I have an unattended Apache install. I just don't have anything I want to put on a front page. I've had plenty of pages below this root level, including a tomcat server, php pages, some image galleries, online ordering systems, demonstration sites, etc.
My point: finding a default page isn't necessarily proof that the website isn't being used.
Oh, and, of course, Gimp. Gimp does not include colors handling for professional publishing support!!! You can't print magazines with it!!! Waa!!! Boo hoo!!! How many people actually can do professional publishing? What percentage of assholes that repeated all this colors-handling bullshit actually ever made a professional-quality page? In any software?
The most amusing aspect of this complaint is that the professionals already are using GIMP. The film industry has been using GIMP for all manner of things. Studios who worked on X-Men and The Fast And The Furious have been using GIMP.
Linux is attacking from multiple directions. It's infiltrating the CGI houses, although in hindsight this was obvious because of a similar interface to IRIX. It's starting to win friends in embedded markets including NAS equipment (I have seen more than 1 example of this, just in the past week). It's finding itself useful in scientific crunching where the OS is largely an irrelevant nuisance, and I've even helped setup some (minor) boxes in this area. And Linux has always been popular as a web/file/print server.
But "wah wah it doesn't have CMYK support" or "wah wah it doesn't support my WinModem" always seems to be used as "proof" that Linux won't succeed. The word on the street is that Linux has already succeeded.
I have a hard time with the common view around here that:
- The government should stay out of our business
- Unless we happen to be Microsoft
What nonsense. The government is always involved in "your business" when "your business" involves harm to someone else. It doesn't matter if the crime is murder, or rape, or fraud, or defamation, or monopolistic trade practises. The government gets involved to try to make things fairer for everyone (not always successfully).
It's pure bogosity for you to try and equate the rights to personal privacy against the "rights" for Microsoft to use their monopoly to destroy the ideas and incomes of others. Would you support the "rights" of a swindler to steal from the gullible, or the "rights" of a thug to bash and rob the weak?
Maybe I'll lose kharma over that,
Why say this? Did you write this in an attempt to not lose karma?
If you have an opinion then say it, but don't say something "controversial" then poison the moderator's well by implying that any negative moderation will be because of your "controversial" view rather than the rather poor quality of your argument.
If I hadn't replied then I'd have moderated you down. Your argument is exactly the same thing as "slashdot mind-think". You're just one of the trendy new crowd with the Anti-Mind-Think mind-think. You're just as bad as the people you stereotyped.
Whether we like it or not, the Internet is an essential tool for many businesses, organisations and people - it is completely unacceptable that it could take months for register a.org.au.
And businesses should register a.com.au like all the other businesses, using their Business Registration Number that all Australian businesses are required by law to have.
The.org.au domain is for non-profit organisations and Elz has never promised miracles with.org.au. Reasonable requests are usually granted within a time frame that non-profit organisations can accept.
Now, i can see switching to USB to improve compatibility, but to improve speed?! How fast can you really blast IR anyway? Is this mis-informed journalism, or bad marketing, or did i miss the memo about 12Mb IR tranceivers?
FIR (Fast Infra Red) is 4Mbps and fairly common even on older laptops. Even the best PC RS232 ports are only ~220kbps and most people never drive them faster than 112kbps.
It's quite plausible that speed was one of the reasons for moving to USB.
Critics are paid to give an opinion on an almost entirely subjective matter. Everyone's likes and dislikes are different. Critics seem altogether pointless to me.
If the critics you listen to only give their opinion about whether the film was good/bad then you're listening to lousy critics.
Good critics tell you about the film. They might talk about the quality of the filming or lighting or production. They might provide a quick history on the story or staging. They're likely to talk about the screenplay, who wrote it, what other screenplays they've written. They might talk about other films the director has worked on. They might talk about the actors and discuss the quality of their acting.
And at the end, sure, they probably give the film a rating. This is their opinion. But they just spent several minutes giving you facts, so you can form your own opinion.
Good critics are hard to find. There's only one pair of Australian film critics I bother listening to. The other "critics" have no idea what they're doing.
There's a rather good BBC production called The Human Body. One of the episodes looked into the development of ethics. The ethical problem was "should you steal drugs to save your dying <familymember/>".
Children aged 8-9 inevitably said "no". The concept of stealing (to them) was totally wrong and there was no justification for it.
Children aged 12+ were less decisive. In an ethical judgement between death and theft the children agreed that theft is the lesser evil.
So it's depressing to discover how many people here have the ethical development of an 8 year old.
Excellent summary. I'd like to add one more point. OpenGL isn't supported nearly well enough on Windows. Only 3 popular cards (ie, affordable consumer grade) have a decent implementation. But pretty much all Windows cards have a workable Direct3D implementation. It's little wonder that Direct3D is targetted first by games developers.
The OpenGL spec is difficult to write a fully compliant driver against. The state of OpenGL would be immensely boosted if there was an open source direct rendering OpenGL implementation for Windows. Then all video cards from all manufacturers would at least have some minimum quality for their entry level drivers.
I'm not gonna say Gnu/Apache/Perl/BSD/etc/Linux, and neither should anyone else.
If RMS had written "GNU's Linux" or "GNU Linux" then you would have a point. It would be an obvious attempt to claim credit for the Linux kernel.
But RMS wrote "GNU/Linux". This is the same as if someone wrote "Cygwin/Win32" or "Solaris/x86". It's denoting a MERGED system from TWO components.
And this is exactly what GNU/Linux systems are. A merger of the GNU system with the Linux kernel. RMS is showing respect by making Linux part of the name.
You clearly think that "Why not call it
GNU/BSD/XFree/OSF/IBM/Linux" is a witty and unbeatable retort. But this is yet another misinterpretation. You'd call your car a "Ford" even though the parts in your car come from over 500 independent manufacturers. RMS chose "the GNU system" to be a convenient name to represent many parts. There is no GNU entity. Nobody is called GNU. Including a component in the GNU system isn't an evil attempt to steal the component.
It's just a label. RMS wanted to call the whole system "GNU", but the contribution of Linux is so great that it deserves extra special mention, and RMS acknowledges this.
And RMS repeats this (or something much like this) all the bloody time, but it seems people prefer to cry foul.
People spend billions of dollars per year doing non-profitable things, such as watching football. Why? It's entertaining. Space launches are also entertaining. Any other benefit is an additional bonus.
The average game player is the ultimate addict of the consumer culture. They want someone else to hand them entertainment on a silver platter.
The average anybody is like this.
But if you're trying to suggesting that game players are lazy or don't know their tech then I strongly disagree! Hard-core game players push the edge of computing. They demand the fastest systems and they're prepared to learn the latest tech to achieve it. They build their own systems. They keep up to date with drivers. They build and install non-standard hacks/tweaks for an extra 5% framerate.
I believe that games players have a lot in common with open-source developers. Both groups are dissatisfied with being "average" users.
I suppose you've never heard of VNC/PCAnywhere/Terminal Server Client (for those of use running NT/2K Server)
I hope you're not seriously suggesting that VNC or PCAnywhere is a good idea. It's not an application server. You're using *two* computers to get one desktop and nobody else can use either computer at the same time.
VNC is how you turn two computers, one of them local, into one computer with the display bottlenecked by the network.
How very predictable that everyone in here would suggest Knuth. The sad thing about that is that noone has ever read the whole tome. Most of us (no, I haven't either) didn't even make it past the first 100 pages. Partly because it's very dense and difficult, but also partly because it's written in a incredibly dull and uninteresting way.
I have read the whole tome, 2nd edition. I did make it past the first 100 pages. But I also 100% agree with you that it is hard to read, heavy on the maths, and the style of writing is definitely dull.
Knuth can write well (TeXBook proves that) but TAOCP isn't an easy read. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a public library. It is far more appropriate for a specialised library (eg, the university library).
But it's a great way to show people how smart you are, which, I presume, is all you wanted to do.
Amen./. is full of posers. And I'm no role model because I've just been a poser too by admitting to having read all of TAOCP. It's an easy trap to fall into.
Slashdot Mirror
Trying is fine. Nobody is born with experience. Just tone down the authorative claims like "Solaris stinks" when you even admit that you're just learning it. [I assume that you are also ENOENT, because your writing suggests that you are continuing this conversation rather than jumping in halfway]
Doctor, it hurts when I do this?! Solaris is a fine OS so use it. BSD is going to give you nothing except more headaches. Solaris will support the Sparc hardware and it will run stable. BSD is an unknown factor so why introduce it into an already difficult mix!? Cost can't be an issue because Solaris is effectively free.
I suggest if you are on a tight budget that you stick to the "freebie" support that Sun provides. It is as good as the commercial support but you have to do a lot more of the groundwork yourself. Start with
Solaris has warts. The user interface is certainly a PITA compared to any modern Linux. But you can get pre-packaged Solaris binaries for bash and GNOME and mozilla. Then the only difference is /etc and /sbin, and really there's nothing bad with how Solaris does all that stuff.
I strongly disagree. I think the author is making a concerted and honest effort to appraise a specific piece of OS functionality. He meticulously details his methodology, his results, and his conclusions. He's doing this in a well-rounded and repeatable fashion. He doesn't make any grand-standing claims about the relative merits of the respective OSs based on what he finds: he just states the facts regarding the specific OS functionality he investigated.
This strikes me as being a very useful thing to do. After he's done a whole bunch of OS calls I expect to find that Windows is superior for some, Linux for some others, and equal for the remainder. But after he has finished there will be a methodology to go back with and RECHECK the latest releases of Windows against the latest releases of Linux.
You bitching about his results is not constructive and helps noone. If you find flaws in his methodology then you will have done something useful. But I daresay that if you do find flaws then Dr Bradford will revise and rerun his experiments.
I look forward to reading more articles of this sort from Dr Bradford.
You apparently don't have much experience with Solaris either. Any of the standard Sun maintenance agreements will mean you receive regular SunSolve packs with every patch for every Sun product dating back to the dawn of time. They include an automated patch installation program that will automatically determine your patchlevel and apply outstanding patches related to security, stability and performance.
If you're too cheap to pay the measly amount for a maintenance agreement - in which case I'd like to know why you're using Sun gear in the first place - then this is also all available on the web from http://sunsolve.Sun.COM/. The first page, second link, is Security Patches. The single download will update your system to the latest security level. You just click on it, unpack it, and run the included shell script.
So I really have no idea where you're coming from with your "Solaris is too hard to patch" nonsense.
What are you suggesting? That the recent Code Red plagues are because of malevolent Linux zealots pretending to be Windows admins? Give me a break! Would you also claim that the BIND disasters on UNIX were a result of undercover Windows zealots trying to undermine UNIX? This smacks far too much of conspiracy nonsense for my tastes.
The most likely explanation is that most people are lazy and/or incompetent. There is significantly more demand for quality administrators - UNIX or NT - than there are people to supply. As a result the salaries are inflated and this has attracted the unskilled and incompetent get-rich-quick crowd. This is almost certainly the REAL reason for the incompetently and poorly administered boxen out there.
Now if you want to discuss the relative merits of Windows vs UNIX in terms of security, then come back down to Earth and stop spouting conspiracy nonsense. There are REAL arguments that can be made about the security design of Windows vs UNIX, and some of them are interesting (although admittedly most are not). I personally think that Windows attracts the lazy and the incompetent administrators more-so than UNIX, but maybe you disgree!?
XML doesn't define a standard for word processing documents. XML is just a way to store the data. The XML Schema defines how the word processing documents are stored. MSOffice and StarOffice will probably not use the same XML Schema, so despite them both using XML I doubt they'll understand each other's documents.
My web server has a default apache page, and it's been this way for many years, but it's not because I have an unattended Apache install. I just don't have anything I want to put on a front page. I've had plenty of pages below this root level, including a tomcat server, php pages, some image galleries, online ordering systems, demonstration sites, etc.
My point: finding a default page isn't necessarily proof that the website isn't being used.
Prince is very much opposed to the money grubbing machinations of the music industry. Read some of his essays on http://www.npgmusicclub.com/.
Just like OpenGL's interleaved vertex arrays.
Circa ... 1996?
The most amusing aspect of this complaint is that the professionals already are using GIMP. The film industry has been using GIMP for all manner of things. Studios who worked on X-Men and The Fast And The Furious have been using GIMP.
Linux is attacking from multiple directions. It's infiltrating the CGI houses, although in hindsight this was obvious because of a similar interface to IRIX. It's starting to win friends in embedded markets including NAS equipment (I have seen more than 1 example of this, just in the past week). It's finding itself useful in scientific crunching where the OS is largely an irrelevant nuisance, and I've even helped setup some (minor) boxes in this area. And Linux has always been popular as a web/file/print server.
But "wah wah it doesn't have CMYK support" or "wah wah it doesn't support my WinModem" always seems to be used as "proof" that Linux won't succeed. The word on the street is that Linux has already succeeded.
As opposed to the truth, which lies somewhere between these two extremes.
What nonsense. The government is always involved in "your business" when "your business" involves harm to someone else. It doesn't matter if the crime is murder, or rape, or fraud, or defamation, or monopolistic trade practises. The government gets involved to try to make things fairer for everyone (not always successfully).
It's pure bogosity for you to try and equate the rights to personal privacy against the "rights" for Microsoft to use their monopoly to destroy the ideas and incomes of others. Would you support the "rights" of a swindler to steal from the gullible, or the "rights" of a thug to bash and rob the weak?
Why say this? Did you write this in an attempt to not lose karma?
If you have an opinion then say it, but don't say something "controversial" then poison the moderator's well by implying that any negative moderation will be because of your "controversial" view rather than the rather poor quality of your argument.
If I hadn't replied then I'd have moderated you down. Your argument is exactly the same thing as "slashdot mind-think". You're just one of the trendy new crowd with the Anti-Mind-Think mind-think. You're just as bad as the people you stereotyped.
I think that is entirely the problem.
And businesses should register a .com.au like all the other businesses, using their Business Registration Number that all Australian businesses are required by law to have.
The .org.au domain is for non-profit organisations and Elz has never promised miracles with .org.au. Reasonable requests are usually granted within a time frame that non-profit organisations can accept.
FIR (Fast Infra Red) is 4Mbps and fairly common even on older laptops. Even the best PC RS232 ports are only ~220kbps and most people never drive them faster than 112kbps.
It's quite plausible that speed was one of the reasons for moving to USB.
If the critics you listen to only give their opinion about whether the film was good/bad then you're listening to lousy critics.
Good critics tell you about the film. They might talk about the quality of the filming or lighting or production. They might provide a quick history on the story or staging. They're likely to talk about the screenplay, who wrote it, what other screenplays they've written. They might talk about other films the director has worked on. They might talk about the actors and discuss the quality of their acting.
And at the end, sure, they probably give the film a rating. This is their opinion. But they just spent several minutes giving you facts, so you can form your own opinion.
Good critics are hard to find. There's only one pair of Australian film critics I bother listening to. The other "critics" have no idea what they're doing.
There's a rather good BBC production called The Human Body. One of the episodes looked into the development of ethics. The ethical problem was "should you steal drugs to save your dying <familymember/>".
Children aged 8-9 inevitably said "no". The concept of stealing (to them) was totally wrong and there was no justification for it.
Children aged 12+ were less decisive. In an ethical judgement between death and theft the children agreed that theft is the lesser evil.
So it's depressing to discover how many people here have the ethical development of an 8 year old.
Excellent summary. I'd like to add one more point. OpenGL isn't supported nearly well enough on Windows. Only 3 popular cards (ie, affordable consumer grade) have a decent implementation. But pretty much all Windows cards have a workable Direct3D implementation. It's little wonder that Direct3D is targetted first by games developers.
The OpenGL spec is difficult to write a fully compliant driver against. The state of OpenGL would be immensely boosted if there was an open source direct rendering OpenGL implementation for Windows. Then all video cards from all manufacturers would at least have some minimum quality for their entry level drivers.
If RMS had written "GNU's Linux" or "GNU Linux" then you would have a point. It would be an obvious attempt to claim credit for the Linux kernel.
But RMS wrote "GNU/Linux". This is the same as if someone wrote "Cygwin/Win32" or "Solaris/x86". It's denoting a MERGED system from TWO components.
And this is exactly what GNU/Linux systems are. A merger of the GNU system with the Linux kernel. RMS is showing respect by making Linux part of the name.
You clearly think that "Why not call it GNU/BSD/XFree/OSF/IBM/Linux" is a witty and unbeatable retort. But this is yet another misinterpretation. You'd call your car a "Ford" even though the parts in your car come from over 500 independent manufacturers. RMS chose "the GNU system" to be a convenient name to represent many parts. There is no GNU entity. Nobody is called GNU. Including a component in the GNU system isn't an evil attempt to steal the component. It's just a label. RMS wanted to call the whole system "GNU", but the contribution of Linux is so great that it deserves extra special mention, and RMS acknowledges this.
And RMS repeats this (or something much like this) all the bloody time, but it seems people prefer to cry foul.
People spend billions of dollars per year doing non-profitable things, such as watching football. Why? It's entertaining. Space launches are also entertaining. Any other benefit is an additional bonus.
What's so special about downloading software other people made and running "./configure; make install", anyway?
Strawman arguments go nowhere.
The average anybody is like this.
But if you're trying to suggesting that game players are lazy or don't know their tech then I strongly disagree! Hard-core game players push the edge of computing. They demand the fastest systems and they're prepared to learn the latest tech to achieve it. They build their own systems. They keep up to date with drivers. They build and install non-standard hacks/tweaks for an extra 5% framerate.
I believe that games players have a lot in common with open-source developers. Both groups are dissatisfied with being "average" users.
I hope you're not seriously suggesting that VNC or PCAnywhere is a good idea. It's not an application server. You're using *two* computers to get one desktop and nobody else can use either computer at the same time. VNC is how you turn two computers, one of them local, into one computer with the display bottlenecked by the network.
Except families with home computers.
And patrons of public libraries.
And office workers with "hotel" cubicles.
And university students in computer labs.
And residents living in community colleges.
And customers at computer kiosks/cafes.
And ... hell, lots of people.
I have read the whole tome, 2nd edition. I did make it past the first 100 pages. But I also 100% agree with you that it is hard to read, heavy on the maths, and the style of writing is definitely dull.
Knuth can write well (TeXBook proves that) but TAOCP isn't an easy read. I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a public library. It is far more appropriate for a specialised library (eg, the university library).
Amen. /. is full of posers. And I'm no role model because I've just been a poser too by admitting to having read all of TAOCP. It's an easy trap to fall into.
Amen.