A random thought that occurred to me while reading the article: If the telegraph were invented for the first time today, would it have a chance of being successful?
Naturally there would be the big patent fight, with various people and corporations suing back and forth, claiming credit for the invention. But even if that were settled, think of the resistance that there would be to the (new) idea of setting poles with wires strung between them:
There has always been opposition to new ideas and new technologies. The Luddites are the most famous example because they violently opposed the introduction of steam engines. The explorer who introduced the raincoat to England was executed for possessing "Devil's Fabric". And innoculation - one of the great medical discoveries which eventually led to vaccination - was opposed by religious groups and medical doctors.
In and of itself, a 64 bit processor with a 64 bit operation system really doesn't mean better performance. You've really got to have application which leverage that kind of platform. And there aren't many. On my SPARC servers (which all have 64 bit CPUs), going from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS so no real improvement or degradation regarding performance in a wide variety of applications. Going 64 bits for most people mean nothing.
Nonsense.
64-bits means a larger address space. This means clean support for more than 4GB ram. This already affects my work - the ability of software to use exactly 110% of actual RAM must be a physical law of the universe - and I'm hardly working with the top end of equipment. Oh sure, there are nasty hacks in Linux and NT to use more than 4GB RAM, but the kernel guys have been very clear on the matter: if you use more than 4GB ram then you should use a 64-bit CPU.
64-bits also means larger SIMD instructions. More data shovelling. Faster processing. Maybe that won't make your compiler faster, but it is almost certainly going to make for faster encryption and decryption of your emails, more vertex calculations per second for your OpenGL application, and faster image processing for filters in Photoshop.
I strongly disagree with your claim that for "most people" there is no benefit from having 64-bit CPUs. The benefits are there: you just aren't looking hard enough.
You measure it in dreams. This is a dream of humanity - to travel to the stars. It's as old as humanity, but its strength waxes and wanes with the tides of fortune. For thousands of years, humanity dreamed. Then, in the 20th century, they actually did it.
Except they didn't. They didn't travel to the stars. They travelled to our nearest satellite. It was only the first tiny step on the long journey to the stars. That's what makes this even sadder: the dream of reaching the stars is even further from our grasp then before.
And that "best of breed" is not Linux... at least, not yet;)
Distribution incompatibilites, non-compatible tools hand constantly out-of-date or missing documentation are problems that need attending to.
True, but if you focus solely on the Linux kernel then Linux truly is becoming a best-of-breed UNIX. O(1) scheduler. Real time scheduling. Low latency interrupt handlers. Pervasive zero-copy. High speed, standards compliant, feature rich TCP/IP stack. 1-on-1 thread model on the horizon! Reasonable mid-range SMP support. High capacity and high performance filesystems. Fine grained capabilities. Dynamic device numbering.
And everything is fast Fast FAST. Linux has the fastest context switches of any UNIX.
To the Linux fanboys out there - I'd suggest giving one of the BSDs or Solaris a good go
I've been using Solaris since when it was called SunOS. My home computer is an Ultra-2. I do Solaris contracting in my home city. I'm not certified but I could get 95%+ on Solaris Admin Exam 1 and 2 without batting an eyelid. My current contract involves Solaris packaging and administration. But I'm still a Linux fanboy. I honestly think Linux has the potential to be better than every other UNIX. It can't do all of the high-end things yet, but I've no doubt that Linux will soon outpace the "big boys" of UNIX. Especially with IBM and SGI and SUN behind it.
You cannot extend that to music. Are you saying that if people are out, and fancy listening to music, they'll go buy some, when they have the same music at home already?
They already do. Haven't you seen those stacks of top-100 CDs and tapes they sell at petrol stations? On a recent long drive I was sorely tempted to buy a Cake album because I'd gotten sick of the two-dozen CDs I'd brought with me for the trip. The $34.95 (!) price sticker was the only thing that stopped me.
Your clarification is far more reasonable. However I would like to comment on this:
There are outliers that either rarely display this attribute or rarely fail to display it. Most of us are in the middle. But there is a correlation, I think, between the most narrowly focused and the most vocal advocates or critics
Those people who shout the loudest often have the least to say. Ignore them.
This just makes me laugh and laugh and laugh. I mean, to the larger portion of the educated population,
this is so obvious as to be not even worth mentioning.
Of course, it's obvious. I don't see any posts on this channel to suggest otherwise. Pretty much all the posters are saying "well DUH, everybody knew this about 20 years ago". Certainly nobody has warranted your own sarcastic abuse of their practicality.
To a portion of the population-strongly represented here in Slashdot and probably among whom there's an elevated rate of Asperger's Syndrome-this must surely seem heretical.
I don't think the majority "portion" of the Slashdot population is anything like the strawman you have presented. I believe most people are more practical than that. I honestly believe the majority "portion" of the Slashdot population recognises there are Linux shortcomings and they are working to resolve them.
No, I guess it doesn't make sense to people like that. Every time a clearly superior technology doesn't succeed in the market place, it must be the result of insidious forces acting in conspiracy to thwart the will of the smart and rational people.
The best engineers are always the most practical people. Engineers don't ever design things based purely on technical merit. They are holistic designers who consider appearance, maintenance, decommissioning, and all associated costs. That's what distinguishes an engineer from a prima donna coding monkey or a glorified fitter and turner.
Of course, it could be the case that you're just trolling. Otherwise why would you throw in words like "conspiracy" and "insidious forces". If that's the case, why can't you get a life?
There's not a single Linux video viewer (DVD/or otherwise) that approaches what you'd expect to find in so-called "Commercial software."
True, but I'm just happy I've got anything at all.
Two years ago I'd have been lucky to get a jumpy 320x240 MPEG-1 to work with xanim. Synchronised audio? Not a chance in hell.
Now I can play DivX AVI, Sorenson Quicktime, MPEG-2, DVD, VCD, at fullscreen (thanks to Xvideo), with no jumping, nearly no CPU usage, synchronised audio, and GUIs that at least work even if they aren't perfect.
I'm thankful that even though video on Linux isn't perfect it is progressing quickly. My hat is off to the developers who donate their time and skills to these projects. JWZ can go fuck himself for being such a selfish bastard. What a fucktard.
What is it with this anti-TV religion that some people seem to have joined? It's not just that they don't watch TV, they insist that nobody else should watch TV either. If you watch TV you're an inferior person! They interrupt conversations to make sure that everybody knows they don't watch TV. They are insanely PROUD of the fact that they have never seen an episode of Farscape, or didn't watch the 6-o-clock news last night.
At what point did "not watching TV" become such a huge achievement for these people? Is there a similar group of anti-readers? Imagine some nutjob interrupting a conversation about an Asimov novel to make it clear that he never reads novels and in fact doesn't even own any novels! You'd rightfully think a person like that was mentally deranged, yet this bizarre behaviour is proudly proclaimed when the medium is television.
To all you idiots repeating the tired mantras of "I never watch TV!" and "You TV watchers should get lives!", I say that you are the people without lives if you think not watching TV is some sort of achievement.
Say for instance, a bunch of my CDs get scratched and are now unplayable on a couple of my players. So, I just download the whole albums off of Kazaa to replace them. Technically, I am within my rights to do this.
I think you just made that up. I've read a bit of the USA case law on this and I've never seen any decision that "technically" supports what you just claimed.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I suspect you don't have any evidence to support this "right" you claim you have.
You don't need to know about the law because the dealer does. The price-sticker is suitably lowered which makes the SUV more enticing to you. All you think is "more car for my money" because that's the reality of the situation: you're paying less tax. It's a nasty loophole and it should be plugged. It'd stop all the yuppie idiots driving freaking 3 tonne SUVs to and from their office jobs. Your case seems more justified - you actually USE your SUV - and I think people who work on farms, and volunteer fire fighters, and similar jobs, are all fully justified in owning an SUV. As I said, it's the suburban idiot who never leaves the bitumen yet still drives a vehicle that could cross arctic tundra that really annoys me.
... so, what part of All rights reserved. Unathorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws is unclear?
The "Unathorized [sic]" part.
In the US, it has been deemed a person can make an archival copy of items (music, software).
The court case that "decided" this was in fact far more restrictive than you're trying to suggest.
Brighter minds than both of ours combined have debated this problem - without resolution - so I'd claim that it's not solved by your trite single-sentence "solution".
Copying music is legally wrong. It is probably morally and ethically wrong Indeed. But the RIAA's big mistake is that what they are doing (this stupid idea, as well as their worms, etc) is also morally and ethically wrong, and some of it is potentially illegal. Ergo, they lose their "moral high ground". They don't deserve our money, they deserve our contempt.
To coin a cliche: "two wrongs do not make a right".
i agree with you... it's like saying "grocery prices are outrageous... to show my malcontent i'll go rob a grocery store". the legal way to show malcontent is to not purchase the product. if enough ppl do this, things change.
Except he was justifying copyright infringement, not shoplifting and/or robbery.
Copying music is legally wrong. It is probably morally and ethically wrong. It is, however, not the same sort of wrong as theft. The problem is complex enough already: nobody needs your loaded analogies muddying the waters.
I'm going to explain myself more clearly because it's obvious from reading this thread that there is a LOT of confusion out there.
X11 is a protocol. Xlib is a C library that provides an API to the protocol. It is important to understand this distinction. Applications and toolkits do not have to use Xlib - they could generate X11 protocol streams directly, or they could use an Xlib replacement - but as there's nothing really wrong with Xlib nearly everybody uses it.
X11 is by design a client-server protocol. The client opens up a socket (UNIX socket, TCP/IP socket, etc) to the server. The client then sends multi-byte "messages" down the socket to tell the server to do stuff. For example, there is a message to draw a line. Each message has a few bytes to identify the command, then a bunch more bytes describing parameters to the command. The "line" message has one parameter describing which Window to draw to, one paramter for the Graphics Context (colour, line style, etc), and several parameters for the X,Y coordinates of the line.
Now imagine a threaded X11 client. Also imagine for the sake of argument that the client is generating X11 messages directly or is using a non-thread-safe Xlib. The client pseudo-code looks something like this:
Thread A:
while (1) { XDrawLine(); }
Thread B:
while (1) { XDrawArc(); }
Now remember that X11 is a protocol - a byte stream - so what is actually happening is that each thread is generating a sequence of bytes. The bytes look something like this:
Thread A Byte Stream:
LINE Display1 0 0 100 100 LINE Display1 0 0 100 100...
Because these byte streams are both being fed down the same socket, and because the application is not thread safe, the resulting stream looks like this:
Combined Byte Stream:
LINE Display1 ARC 0 0 Display1 0 100 100 0 50 360 LINE Display1 0 0 LINE Display1 0 100 100 0 50 360...
It's an absolute mess! The X server gets very confused - it thinks the client has gone haywire - and so nothing works. There are only two solutions to this problem.
#1 is make all messages ATOMIC. This is simply impossible for sockets. You can make it work by getting rid of sockets and forcing all X11 clients to use a messaging IPC - and this IPC might even use sockets at the lowest layer - but it's impossible to retrofit it to sockets. The messaging approach has been used by Berlin, GDI, and a bunch of other windowing systems.
#2 is to force all multi-threaded X11 clients to impose their own locking. Each thread shares a lock for the protocol stream. Threads cannot proceed until they have gained the lock and for efficiency they should release the lock as quickly as possible. This is the approach that X11R5 (and X11R6) have used. Each thread uses XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay which are two new calls provided by Xlib. The change to the pseudo-code from before is trivial.
Thread A:
while (1) { XLockDisplay(); XDrawLine(); XUnlockDisplay(); }
Thread B:
while (1) { XLockDisplay(); XDrawArc(); XUnlockDisplay(); }
With this simple change in place your multi-threaded X11 client is now perfectly compatible with all X11 servers. The combined protocol stream is not confusing: the ARC and LINE messages are sequential rather than munged together.
Now the reason I think there is confusion here is that people are asking "Why Can't X11 be Multi Threaded?". The question is nonsensical. Socket protocols are not threadable. It's impossible to do this. It is very helpful here to understand that X11 is a LOT like other client-server protocols such as HTTP. In fact the analogies with HTTP are strong. HTTP has a client called the "web browser". HTTP has a server such as "Apache". The client opens a TCP/IP socket to the server. Messages begin with the multi-byte string GET/page HTTP/1.0. Optional bytes can follow describing additional HTTP functionality. The only real difference to HTTP is that X11 is PERSISTENT and has SERVER SIDE STATE. There are also minor differences such as the protocol is binary instead of text.
Now you can have a multi-threaded web browser, and you can also have a multi-threaded X11 client. You can have a multi-threaded web server, and you can also have a multi-threaded X11 server. But you can't have a multi-threaded HTTP protocol stream. Similarly you can't have a multi-threaded X11 protocol stream. It doesn't make any sense to even ask for this. As I showed before, it would be like a web browser requiring two URLs from a single server, but generating an HTTP "request" that looked like this.
GET GET/pag/index.htmle.asp HTTP/HTTP1.1.00
The solution is to serialise the HTTP commands in the web browser. The way to do this is with a serialisation library with locking. This is the same approach used by X11 with Xlib, provided by the XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay primitives.
You can reasonably argue that X11 wouldn't have this problem if it was a messaging protocol instead of a multi-byte stream protocol. That's the design decision that was made for X11, and I personally think it's a non-issue. There are other issues with the X11 protocol - it's quite heavy, many of the messages are limited or outdated, and some of the server-side state is useless - but the fact that is a BYTE STREAM protocol instead of a MESSAGING protocol is I think a non-argument. People seem to focus very heavily on it as the "reason that X11 sucks" but I think these people simply haven't investigated how the alternatives work. Eventually everything becomes a byte stream: it's just a design decision as to how early you make the conversion.
Re:It has been for almost a decade ... not quite
on
Why Isn't X11 Thread-Safe?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Xlib was made thread safe in the X11R6 [uni-bremen.de] release in 1994, but only if you initialize the locks it needs to do it properly via XInitThreads [xfree86.org].
Xlib is thread safe but X11 is not. If your application has multiple threads then they must compete for the "display lock" with XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay. In other words, Xlib is used to solve the thread unsafety of X11. It's a library space (Xlib) solution to a protocol (X11) limitation.
So while you are right - Xlib is thread safe - you weren't answering the original question which is Why Isn't X11 Thread Safe? The answer is that it's not possible. He might as well ask why HTTP isn't thread safe, or why SMTP isn't thread safe. Imagine muxing two HTTP requests into a single request! It'd look like this:
GET/GET/index.htpage.asmlp HTTHTPTP/1./1.00
It's not an issue for the protocol to solve.
This is why it's a non-problem. The questioner is simply confused. You don't make a protocol thread safe. You make the library calls to the protocol thread safe, and as you point out this has been solved with XFree86 for almost a decade.
I've always wondered why, in today's world of gigabytes of memory in personal computers, why such a big deal is made about virtual memory.
Because VM is not just used for swap. It's also used for memory protection, buffer caching, shared libraries, demand paging, and dozens of other performance improvements.
My god, you are an arrogant prick. And this is because, what, you managed to install Lunix? I shudder to think what you'd be like if you had an actual skill.
He's not being an arrogant prick. He's looking at a possible scenario for the future. Linux continues to improve because the users are also the developers. As Linux becomes more "idiot-friendly" there will be more non-developers consuming the time of developers. Development will slow down and possibly stagnate. It's a high cost and so the risk should be evaluated.
I personally don't agree with the argument - I believe that more users will mean more professional services catering for these users, which means more developers and faster growth - but it's still important to understand somebody's argument instead of insulting them.
What a nonsense argument! Linux also supports the MS-DOS filesystem. Was Linux inspired by MS-DOS? Only in the limited sense - the one I already said I would accept - that Linus was frustrated with the lack of functionality in affordable operating systems and had to write his own.
I've just read a book on historical revisionism. It was specifically speaking about those whackos that claim the Holocaust never happened. It's really interesting to watch how these same things are happening with Linux! It's only been a decade and already the young and the ignorant are rewriting history! I've even seen the hyper-ignorant claim Linux was a *fork* of Minix, often using the early reliance on MinixFS as "proof"!
It's quite amazing to watch but it's also depressing because c.o.minix is archived and online so you could easily determine the truth if you were honest to yourselves.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.
Right, so you're STRUGGLING.
As I said, this is the only argument I'd accept, but the only inspiration here is that Minix sucked for real-world use and AST wasn't accepting patches, so Linus was "inspired" to write something new.
Your claim that Minix inspired ideas for the Linux kernel was completely wrong and no amount of sarcastic indignation will make that false claim of yours go away. Remember, this was your claim:
Many of the early ideas for the Linux kernel were inspired by the Minux operating system, published in book form by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Wrong. Completely wrong. Absolutely and mind bogglingly wrong. The Linux design is completely different and the only shared "ideas" are ones that both Linux and Minix ripped off from UNIX. The only "inspiration" from Minix is the one you quoted from AST and I even had to show you that avenue of argument in my previous post!
I know you don't want to be wrong, but you are. You even made the blunder of thinking the demise of Minix had something to do with "drivers and filesystems"! Not even close. It had everything to do with AST's refusal to incorporate patches into Minix (take for example the Minix/386 patches that were in use but AST refused to apply against the main tree).
As I said before, you have a poor understanding of the history.
Linux would be some grad student's pet project were it not for the fact that Linus opened the code for discussion, so to speak. Many of the early ideas for the Linux kernel were inspired by the Minux operating system, published in book form by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.
Many of the early ideas for the Linux kernel were inspired by the UNIX operating system.
And it's spelt M-I-N-I-X.
Why don't we use the Minux kernel? Well for starters, Tanenbaum (at least at the time) was a bit of a minimalist. His goal was to create a toy operating system to teach operating system design with. He didn't want to hear about adding drivers or alternate file systems.
Minix didn't have virtual memory, no shared libraries, no networking stack, no psuedo-ttys, and it had the most user-unfriendly licensing I've ever seen. Andy literally refused to accept any patches that added functionality! The triumph of Linux over Minix had nothing to do with drivers or filesystems.
I don't know where you got the bizarro idea that Linux was INSPIRED by Minix! Of all things, it is the least inspiring operating system there is. It is a very good operating system for first year students because it easy to understand and easy to modify (you could build and relink the kernel entirely within a floppy disk on your 286). But Minix was never a source of ideas for Linux. Your knowledge of the history is completely whacko. I was "lucky" enough to use Minix in 1991 (1992?) for all of 30 minutes before casting it aside and returning to a useful UNIX (Interactive). Some people I knew were more hardcore - sticking it out with Minix/386 - but that just confirms my suspicions that they were all MASOCHISTS.
I suppose, if you were STRUGGLING to prove your point, then the only thing I would possibly agree was an inspiration was when Linus realised that Minix really sucked for real-world work. The inadequacies of Minix "inspired" Linus to write something better. But as I said, you'd have to be STRUGGLING to argue along those lines.
It does matter because it proves that Linux is useful in its own right, rather than being nothing more than a fanciful toy for geeks.
When a major company treats Linux seriously it's a big boost for the open-source and free software communities, and a big slap in the face for the fools claiming that Linux is "useless" or "without value".
Re:counterproductive
on
Ark Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Soft drinks (including juices) are available in tetra packs, glass bottles, plastic bottles, squeeze bottles, cans with ring pulls, cans with button tabs,... etc.
Customers have no trouble learning a new interface. They do it all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
There has always been opposition to new ideas and new technologies. The Luddites are the most famous example because they violently opposed the introduction of steam engines. The explorer who introduced the raincoat to England was executed for possessing "Devil's Fabric". And innoculation - one of the great medical discoveries which eventually led to vaccination - was opposed by religious groups and medical doctors.
Brazil? A bad movie? Are you totally insane?
Nonsense.
64-bits means a larger address space. This means clean support for more than 4GB ram. This already affects my work - the ability of software to use exactly 110% of actual RAM must be a physical law of the universe - and I'm hardly working with the top end of equipment. Oh sure, there are nasty hacks in Linux and NT to use more than 4GB RAM, but the kernel guys have been very clear on the matter: if you use more than 4GB ram then you should use a 64-bit CPU.
64-bits also means larger SIMD instructions. More data shovelling. Faster processing. Maybe that won't make your compiler faster, but it is almost certainly going to make for faster encryption and decryption of your emails, more vertex calculations per second for your OpenGL application, and faster image processing for filters in Photoshop.
I strongly disagree with your claim that for "most people" there is no benefit from having 64-bit CPUs. The benefits are there: you just aren't looking hard enough.
Except they didn't. They didn't travel to the stars. They travelled to our nearest satellite. It was only the first tiny step on the long journey to the stars. That's what makes this even sadder: the dream of reaching the stars is even further from our grasp then before.
True, but if you focus solely on the Linux kernel then Linux truly is becoming a best-of-breed UNIX. O(1) scheduler. Real time scheduling. Low latency interrupt handlers. Pervasive zero-copy. High speed, standards compliant, feature rich TCP/IP stack. 1-on-1 thread model on the horizon! Reasonable mid-range SMP support. High capacity and high performance filesystems. Fine grained capabilities. Dynamic device numbering. And everything is fast Fast FAST. Linux has the fastest context switches of any UNIX.
I've been using Solaris since when it was called SunOS. My home computer is an Ultra-2. I do Solaris contracting in my home city. I'm not certified but I could get 95%+ on Solaris Admin Exam 1 and 2 without batting an eyelid. My current contract involves Solaris packaging and administration. But I'm still a Linux fanboy. I honestly think Linux has the potential to be better than every other UNIX. It can't do all of the high-end things yet, but I've no doubt that Linux will soon outpace the "big boys" of UNIX. Especially with IBM and SGI and SUN behind it.
They already do. Haven't you seen those stacks of top-100 CDs and tapes they sell at petrol stations? On a recent long drive I was sorely tempted to buy a Cake album because I'd gotten sick of the two-dozen CDs I'd brought with me for the trip. The $34.95 (!) price sticker was the only thing that stopped me.
Your clarification is far more reasonable. However I would like to comment on this:
Those people who shout the loudest often have the least to say. Ignore them.
Of course, it's obvious. I don't see any posts on this channel to suggest otherwise. Pretty much all the posters are saying "well DUH, everybody knew this about 20 years ago". Certainly nobody has warranted your own sarcastic abuse of their practicality.
I don't think the majority "portion" of the Slashdot population is anything like the strawman you have presented. I believe most people are more practical than that. I honestly believe the majority "portion" of the Slashdot population recognises there are Linux shortcomings and they are working to resolve them.
The best engineers are always the most practical people. Engineers don't ever design things based purely on technical merit. They are holistic designers who consider appearance, maintenance, decommissioning, and all associated costs. That's what distinguishes an engineer from a prima donna coding monkey or a glorified fitter and turner.
Of course, it could be the case that you're just trolling. Otherwise why would you throw in words like "conspiracy" and "insidious forces". If that's the case, why can't you get a life?
True, but I'm just happy I've got anything at all.
Two years ago I'd have been lucky to get a jumpy 320x240 MPEG-1 to work with xanim. Synchronised audio? Not a chance in hell.
Now I can play DivX AVI, Sorenson Quicktime, MPEG-2, DVD, VCD, at fullscreen (thanks to Xvideo), with no jumping, nearly no CPU usage, synchronised audio, and GUIs that at least work even if they aren't perfect.
I'm thankful that even though video on Linux isn't perfect it is progressing quickly. My hat is off to the developers who donate their time and skills to these projects. JWZ can go fuck himself for being such a selfish bastard. What a fucktard.
What is it with this anti-TV religion that some people seem to have joined? It's not just that they don't watch TV, they insist that nobody else should watch TV either. If you watch TV you're an inferior person! They interrupt conversations to make sure that everybody knows they don't watch TV. They are insanely PROUD of the fact that they have never seen an episode of Farscape, or didn't watch the 6-o-clock news last night.
At what point did "not watching TV" become such a huge achievement for these people? Is there a similar group of anti-readers? Imagine some nutjob interrupting a conversation about an Asimov novel to make it clear that he never reads novels and in fact doesn't even own any novels! You'd rightfully think a person like that was mentally deranged, yet this bizarre behaviour is proudly proclaimed when the medium is television.
To all you idiots repeating the tired mantras of "I never watch TV!" and "You TV watchers should get lives!", I say that you are the people without lives if you think not watching TV is some sort of achievement.
I think you just made that up. I've read a bit of the USA case law on this and I've never seen any decision that "technically" supports what you just claimed.
I'd like to be proven wrong, but I suspect you don't have any evidence to support this "right" you claim you have.
You don't need to know about the law because the dealer does. The price-sticker is suitably lowered which makes the SUV more enticing to you. All you think is "more car for my money" because that's the reality of the situation: you're paying less tax. It's a nasty loophole and it should be plugged. It'd stop all the yuppie idiots driving freaking 3 tonne SUVs to and from their office jobs.
Your case seems more justified - you actually USE your SUV - and I think people who work on farms, and volunteer fire fighters, and similar jobs, are all fully justified in owning an SUV. As I said, it's the suburban idiot who never leaves the bitumen yet still drives a vehicle that could cross arctic tundra that really annoys me.
Steve Wozniak is a teacher. Are you saying he "can't do" stuff?
The "Unathorized [sic]" part.
The court case that "decided" this was in fact far more restrictive than you're trying to suggest.
Brighter minds than both of ours combined have debated this problem - without resolution - so I'd claim that it's not solved by your trite single-sentence "solution".
Indeed. But the RIAA's big mistake is that what they are doing (this stupid idea, as well as their worms, etc) is also morally and ethically wrong, and some of it is potentially illegal. Ergo, they lose their "moral high ground". They don't deserve our money, they deserve our contempt.
To coin a cliche: "two wrongs do not make a right".
Except he was justifying copyright infringement, not shoplifting and/or robbery.
Copying music is legally wrong. It is probably morally and ethically wrong. It is, however, not the same sort of wrong as theft. The problem is complex enough already: nobody needs your loaded analogies muddying the waters.
I'm going to explain myself more clearly because it's obvious from reading this thread that there is a LOT of confusion out there.
X11 is a protocol. Xlib is a C library that provides an API to the protocol. It is important to understand this distinction. Applications and toolkits do not have to use Xlib - they could generate X11 protocol streams directly, or they could use an Xlib replacement - but as there's nothing really wrong with Xlib nearly everybody uses it.
X11 is by design a client-server protocol. The client opens up a socket (UNIX socket, TCP/IP socket, etc) to the server. The client then sends multi-byte "messages" down the socket to tell the server to do stuff. For example, there is a message to draw a line. Each message has a few bytes to identify the command, then a bunch more bytes describing parameters to the command. The "line" message has one parameter describing which Window to draw to, one paramter for the Graphics Context (colour, line style, etc), and several parameters for the X,Y coordinates of the line.
Now imagine a threaded X11 client. Also imagine for the sake of argument that the client is generating X11 messages directly or is using a non-thread-safe Xlib. The client pseudo-code looks something like this:
Now remember that X11 is a protocol - a byte stream - so what is actually happening is that each thread is generating a sequence of bytes. The bytes look something like this:
Because these byte streams are both being fed down the same socket, and because the application is not thread safe, the resulting stream looks like this:
It's an absolute mess! The X server gets very confused - it thinks the client has gone haywire - and so nothing works. There are only two solutions to this problem.
#1 is make all messages ATOMIC. This is simply impossible for sockets. You can make it work by getting rid of sockets and forcing all X11 clients to use a messaging IPC - and this IPC might even use sockets at the lowest layer - but it's impossible to retrofit it to sockets. The messaging approach has been used by Berlin, GDI, and a bunch of other windowing systems.
#2 is to force all multi-threaded X11 clients to impose their own locking. Each thread shares a lock for the protocol stream. Threads cannot proceed until they have gained the lock and for efficiency they should release the lock as quickly as possible. This is the approach that X11R5 (and X11R6) have used. Each thread uses XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay which are two new calls provided by Xlib. The change to the pseudo-code from before is trivial.
With this simple change in place your multi-threaded X11 client is now perfectly compatible with all X11 servers. The combined protocol stream is not confusing: the ARC and LINE messages are sequential rather than munged together.
Now the reason I think there is confusion here is that people are asking "Why Can't X11 be Multi Threaded?". The question is nonsensical. Socket protocols are not threadable. It's impossible to do this. It is very helpful here to understand that X11 is a LOT like other client-server protocols such as HTTP. In fact the analogies with HTTP are strong. HTTP has a client called the "web browser". HTTP has a server such as "Apache". The client opens a TCP/IP socket to the server. Messages begin with the multi-byte string GET /page HTTP/1.0. Optional bytes can follow describing additional HTTP functionality. The only real difference to HTTP is that X11 is PERSISTENT and has SERVER SIDE STATE. There are also minor differences such as the protocol is binary instead of text.
Now you can have a multi-threaded web browser, and you can also have a multi-threaded X11 client. You can have a multi-threaded web server, and you can also have a multi-threaded X11 server. But you can't have a multi-threaded HTTP protocol stream. Similarly you can't have a multi-threaded X11 protocol stream. It doesn't make any sense to even ask for this. As I showed before, it would be like a web browser requiring two URLs from a single server, but generating an HTTP "request" that looked like this.
The solution is to serialise the HTTP commands in the web browser. The way to do this is with a serialisation library with locking. This is the same approach used by X11 with Xlib, provided by the XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay primitives.
You can reasonably argue that X11 wouldn't have this problem if it was a messaging protocol instead of a multi-byte stream protocol. That's the design decision that was made for X11, and I personally think it's a non-issue. There are other issues with the X11 protocol - it's quite heavy, many of the messages are limited or outdated, and some of the server-side state is useless - but the fact that is a BYTE STREAM protocol instead of a MESSAGING protocol is I think a non-argument. People seem to focus very heavily on it as the "reason that X11 sucks" but I think these people simply haven't investigated how the alternatives work. Eventually everything becomes a byte stream: it's just a design decision as to how early you make the conversion.
Xlib is thread safe but X11 is not. If your application has multiple threads then they must compete for the "display lock" with XLockDisplay and XUnlockDisplay. In other words, Xlib is used to solve the thread unsafety of X11. It's a library space (Xlib) solution to a protocol (X11) limitation.
So while you are right - Xlib is thread safe - you weren't answering the original question which is Why Isn't X11 Thread Safe? The answer is that it's not possible. He might as well ask why HTTP isn't thread safe, or why SMTP isn't thread safe. Imagine muxing two HTTP requests into a single request! It'd look like this:
It's not an issue for the protocol to solve. This is why it's a non-problem. The questioner is simply confused. You don't make a protocol thread safe. You make the library calls to the protocol thread safe, and as you point out this has been solved with XFree86 for almost a decade.
Because VM is not just used for swap. It's also used for memory protection, buffer caching, shared libraries, demand paging, and dozens of other performance improvements.
He's not being an arrogant prick. He's looking at a possible scenario for the future. Linux continues to improve because the users are also the developers. As Linux becomes more "idiot-friendly" there will be more non-developers consuming the time of developers. Development will slow down and possibly stagnate. It's a high cost and so the risk should be evaluated.
I personally don't agree with the argument - I believe that more users will mean more professional services catering for these users, which means more developers and faster growth - but it's still important to understand somebody's argument instead of insulting them.
What a nonsense argument! Linux also supports the MS-DOS filesystem. Was Linux inspired by MS-DOS? Only in the limited sense - the one I already said I would accept - that Linus was frustrated with the lack of functionality in affordable operating systems and had to write his own.
I've just read a book on historical revisionism. It was specifically speaking about those whackos that claim the Holocaust never happened. It's really interesting to watch how these same things are happening with Linux! It's only been a decade and already the young and the ignorant are rewriting history! I've even seen the hyper-ignorant claim Linux was a *fork* of Minix, often using the early reliance on MinixFS as "proof"!
It's quite amazing to watch but it's also depressing because c.o.minix is archived and online so you could easily determine the truth if you were honest to yourselves.
Right, so you're STRUGGLING.
As I said, this is the only argument I'd accept, but the only inspiration here is that Minix sucked for real-world use and AST wasn't accepting patches, so Linus was "inspired" to write something new.
Your claim that Minix inspired ideas for the Linux kernel was completely wrong and no amount of sarcastic indignation will make that false claim of yours go away. Remember, this was your claim:
Wrong. Completely wrong. Absolutely and mind bogglingly wrong. The Linux design is completely different and the only shared "ideas" are ones that both Linux and Minix ripped off from UNIX. The only "inspiration" from Minix is the one you quoted from AST and I even had to show you that avenue of argument in my previous post!
I know you don't want to be wrong, but you are. You even made the blunder of thinking the demise of Minix had something to do with "drivers and filesystems"! Not even close. It had everything to do with AST's refusal to incorporate patches into Minix (take for example the Minix/386 patches that were in use but AST refused to apply against the main tree).
As I said before, you have a poor understanding of the history.
Many of the early ideas for the Linux kernel were inspired by the UNIX operating system.
And it's spelt M-I-N-I-X.
Minix didn't have virtual memory, no shared libraries, no networking stack, no psuedo-ttys, and it had the most user-unfriendly licensing I've ever seen. Andy literally refused to accept any patches that added functionality! The triumph of Linux over Minix had nothing to do with drivers or filesystems.
I don't know where you got the bizarro idea that Linux was INSPIRED by Minix! Of all things, it is the least inspiring operating system there is. It is a very good operating system for first year students because it easy to understand and easy to modify (you could build and relink the kernel entirely within a floppy disk on your 286). But Minix was never a source of ideas for Linux. Your knowledge of the history is completely whacko. I was "lucky" enough to use Minix in 1991 (1992?) for all of 30 minutes before casting it aside and returning to a useful UNIX (Interactive). Some people I knew were more hardcore - sticking it out with Minix/386 - but that just confirms my suspicions that they were all MASOCHISTS.
I suppose, if you were STRUGGLING to prove your point, then the only thing I would possibly agree was an inspiration was when Linus realised that Minix really sucked for real-world work. The inadequacies of Minix "inspired" Linus to write something better. But as I said, you'd have to be STRUGGLING to argue along those lines.
It does matter because it proves that Linux is useful in its own right, rather than being nothing more than a fanciful toy for geeks.
When a major company treats Linux seriously it's a big boost for the open-source and free software communities, and a big slap in the face for the fools claiming that Linux is "useless" or "without value".
Soft drinks (including juices) are available in tetra packs, glass bottles, plastic bottles, squeeze bottles, cans with ring pulls, cans with button tabs, ... etc.
Customers have no trouble learning a new interface. They do it all the time.