"we are essentially giving first aid to software that is dying (and rightfully so) because of its license". (from the Debian site)
What kind of asshole makes an absurd statement like that? Even Microsoft, who Linuxers love to point to as the world's primary FUD manufacturer, doesn't make statements like that. I've been using FreeBSD for about 3-4 years now, and it's made vast improvements over that time - and it's thriving compared to when I first used it. I'd be very interested to see Debian running on the FreeBSD kernel, if for nothing else than curiosity about how well it would work compared to the Linux kernel.
I think this is a great effort by the Debian folks, but if this is going to cause such a childish licensing battle between Linux and BSD, then just leave it alone, and Linux and BSD users will be happy to segregate themselves further. I certainly don't want to feel that I'm being given 'first aid' by the vastly superior development team of Debian.
Sounds like it's time to start rolling your own routers. Whip one up with OpenBSD, and use IPSEC and SSH for everything possible. Show the industry that if they're intent on building in wiretapping, we won't give them our money.
To look at it from a different angle, though - if wiretapping becomes common, maybe people will have more motivation to develop and implement stronger security and cryptography measures.
Going into technical superiority(which was quite an exaggeration, of course, despite the fact most BSD users I know believe it to be true) requires quite a bit of explanation. If you bop around on the web, I believe there are a few archives of rational arguments on the subject, which probably cover it much better than I could.
As far as self-promotion, though, I don't think a lot of BSD folks are real interested in advocacy, at least not to the degree that Linuxers are. I'm honestly not sure where I stand on the subject of advocacy - on the one hand, it (theoretically) expands the user base, and therefore the demand for applications, but I honestly have most everything I need in BSD, and I don't feel comfortable evangelising.
If I had to take a quick stab at what advantages I think BSD has over Linux, I would say:
1. The TCP/IP stack 2. The less restrictive license 3. The development model 4. The ports tree 5. and possibly the most important, a more sane administration system than svr4, e.g., the BSD/etc.
I don't really feel I'm qualified to explain deeply technical advantages, but as I say, there are a number of sources for such info, including Slashdot itself(although you'll have to do some heavy sifting;).
Point taken. I'm just an average BSD user who started out with 386BSD quite a while ago, and moved primarily to Free. I didn't mean to assume the views BSD users and developers - I was just venting a bit and doing a little self-parody of myself and some of the BSD users I know.
I would like to have corporations develop for FreeBSD, and I regularly (politely) request that commercial developers consider a port - but until they port to Linux, I would guess that the chances of a Free port are slim, so, as you say, a Linux port is a good starting point.
And good point about the 'we need choices' bit. That was one thing that struck me from the original post, the implied 'let's all fight against microsoft, the common enemy' bit, but I wasn't sure exactly how to word it.
Linux is under the GPL. We hate the GPL. Linux is technically inferior to BSD. Linux is an SVR4 clone. It has a poor development model. Just a few reasons why this will never happen.
Furthermore, BSD isn't fragmenting the UNIX community, Linux is. BSD was in widespread usage before Linux. The real UNIX fragmentation problem is the absurd number of Linux distros, which, despite what some Linux folk say, have very significant differences. Also, we're not 'splitting tasks'. Hardly anyone develops specifically for BSD, in fact, we suggest that they develop for Linux, since we can run the binaries natively, and port the source fairly easily.
I'm really getting sick of the Linux mentality that we need a gleaming, one world OS. The world needs different OSes, because every OS sucks at certain things, and they're always going to. The Open Source movement is about MORE decisions, not less, and the more choices we have, the better.
BeOS isn't a heavy server platform? No shit. I might point out, though, that the vast majority of computers spend their time being workstations, not servers.
What I asked for was a comparison between the different journaling filesystems, without saying that any of them was a cure-all.
I remember in 1993 at the International Tesla Convention in Colorado Springs, they took the world's largest Tesla Coil and put into this huge stadium. Everyone brought fluorescent light bulbs to light up when the thing discharged. Now that thing made this coil look like kid stuff.:)
Incidentally, the ITC is a great place to go if you want to meet some of the most bizzare people in scientific fields. That was the place I first met Masahiro Kahata, who went on to found IBVA, which is worth a look if you're interested in brain/computer interfacing.
This brings you one step closer to the power of BeOS;) Seriously, though, it's a good thing. Journaling File Systems are pretty snazzy - stable, and speedy to boot. I'll be looking forward to a BSD port, or maybe a pure BSD implementation, as the core team probably wouldn't incorporate GPL'ed material into such a vital part of the OS.
Does anyone know the comparative advantages between XFS, ext3fs, ReiserFS, and maybe BFS? What's the likelihood of any of the 3 free unix JFS's being incorporated into any Linux distros?
A petabyte, then a hexabyte...and some other things that haven't been settled yet. Check out Data Powers of Ten for more info, and a great comparison of scale.
What, is their web server powered by a hand generator? Someone has to be there to keep it up? Or maybe (unlikely) they're running it on NT somewhere...
I'm love Free and OpenBSD, but I have to say, Open may be easy to configure, but I'm not sure how it's easier than FreeBSD. Installation is very simple if you want to use a whole hard drive, but a pain in the ass if you want to put it on a seperate partition. FreeBSD has/stand/sysinstall, which is great for installation and configuration, especially for beginning users. And the Linux emulation, although much better than 2.3 days, still has a ways to go to catch up to Free.
Like I say, I love them both, but I would have to vote for FreeBSD for ease of use and configuration. Of course, it depends what you started on, much of the time...
Now I can watch Spielbergian cinema-quality video in a 2-inch square, in brilliant mono 22Khz audio! I can marvel as little specks shoot from one side of the square to the other, and shoot monopixel lines at each other! A centimeter tall Jar-Jar Binks will bumble around hilariously at a blazing 3 frames per second! Truly this is a marvelous age we live in.
I use a number of different 'thin client' type protocols on the networks I administer - X is a good protocol, but not very 'thin'. It doesn't work very well over long distances. On our Lan we have a number of X-terms that connect to DGUX servers, all of which can open a windows NT session on a box running Windows NT Terminal Server with Citrix Metaframe(sure, it's Windows, but get over it - users want Windows/Office). Additionally, we have PCs, Macs, and NCD ThinStar WinCE terminals. All can run the same applications, in many cases much faster than they could on their own machine. Plus, it really saves you money in the long run, because most users don't really use all the power a regular PC can offer, except in brief bursts. Maybe 10K for a huge server, and then any piece of crap can connect to it - instead of spending 1K for every person in the office.
Although WTS is a bitch to configure, once it's there, it works really nicely. Citrix ICA is an excellent protocol - it has clients for windows, mac, linux, solaris, java, etc, and can even be used over a modem, with encryption, with acceptable speed. People with the terminals as clients are easy to take care of. They won't screw up their machines, and if something goes wrong with it, we just pop in a new one and they're back online. Of course, Windows Terminal Server is pretty obscure at the moment, Windows 2000 will support terminal serving capabilities as well.
If you want multiplatform thin client capability, the names you need to know are NCD, Citrix, and Microsoft. VNC is an open-source alternative that works fairly well(although it is far slower than citrix), and supports almost every known platform. Although it has no built-in encryption, it can be tunneled through ssh relatively simply. It has fewer requirements than X, and shows good promise for the future. By the way, they needs more good developers - go to the site.
And it takes you to the same page! Seriously, I'm not going to use a search engine that is so insecure that it has to plead you not to use the competition. A manly search engine would bravely give you the link, content with its superiority over it's competitors.
but that's like a year old or so. The only problem i have with goldstein is that he constantly looks really shifty in all his pictures. Doesn't portray a very good image. ah well.
Ok, so the idea here is to find a woman that has no consuming interests of her own, like computers, because she'll have less time to spend taking care of her guy? Because she won't "brush you off" when reading slasdot like you apparently would? Women to take over basic responsibilities like cooking food and running our bathwater? A woman who believes your work is so important and vital to humanity that she'll wait on you hand and foot? Of course, for actual intelligent conversation(about computing, of course), we'll have to go to our male friends, who can comprehend such matters.
There's nothing wrong with geek girls. My girlfriend isn't a hardcore geek, but she knows more about vi than I do, prefers unix to any other OS, and is a reasonably respected geoscientist. I don't have to leave the house to talk about technology, and she doesn't have to leave to talk about science.
How about this. Treat a woman as another human being, not just a complement to yourself, or a vibrator and kitchen appliance. Women have their own interests, needs, and need to have their own shoulders rubbed and food cooked for them sometimes. And their work is just as important as your own. I'm sure you can find a woman who will let you treat her as a second-class human being, but that's not going to lead to a fulfilling relationship. -lx
I put in my handle, which is highly specific. It won't find my page. Almost every other search engine will. It doesn't seem to be a bad search engine, it just doesn't seem to do anything remarkable. And as far as "searching algorithms" go, every search engine has one, and it's always the greatest new technology in searching. Woo.
Is there something special about google that makes it such a hot topic on slashdot? Or is it just that it runs on Linux? I think that's a pretty lame qualification for a search engine, if that's the case.
Slashdot Mirror
"we are essentially giving first aid to software that is dying (and rightfully so) because of its license". (from the Debian site)
What kind of asshole makes an absurd statement like that? Even Microsoft, who Linuxers love to point to as the world's primary FUD manufacturer, doesn't make statements like that. I've been using FreeBSD for about 3-4 years now, and it's made vast improvements over that time - and it's thriving compared to when I first used it. I'd be very interested to see Debian running on the FreeBSD kernel, if for nothing else than curiosity about how well it would work compared to the Linux kernel.
I think this is a great effort by the Debian folks, but if this is going to cause such a childish licensing battle between Linux and BSD, then just leave it alone, and Linux and BSD users will be happy to segregate themselves further. I certainly don't want to feel that I'm being given 'first aid' by the vastly superior development team of Debian.
-lx
And speedy to boot!
-lx
Sounds like it's time to start rolling your own routers. Whip one up with OpenBSD, and use IPSEC and SSH for everything possible. Show the industry that if they're intent on building in wiretapping, we won't give them our money.
To look at it from a different angle, though - if wiretapping becomes common, maybe people will have more motivation to develop and implement stronger security and cryptography measures.
-lx
Going into technical superiority(which was quite an exaggeration, of course, despite the fact most BSD users I know believe it to be true) requires quite a bit of explanation. If you bop around on the web, I believe there are a few archives of rational arguments on the subject, which probably cover it much better than I could.
/etc.
;).
As far as self-promotion, though, I don't think a lot of BSD folks are real interested in advocacy, at least not to the degree that Linuxers are. I'm honestly not sure where I stand on the subject of advocacy - on the one hand, it (theoretically) expands the user base, and therefore the demand for applications, but I honestly have most everything I need in BSD, and I don't feel comfortable evangelising.
If I had to take a quick stab at what advantages I think BSD has over Linux, I would say:
1. The TCP/IP stack
2. The less restrictive license
3. The development model
4. The ports tree
5. and possibly the most important, a more sane administration system than svr4, e.g., the BSD
I don't really feel I'm qualified to explain deeply technical advantages, but as I say, there are a number of sources for such info, including Slashdot itself(although you'll have to do some heavy sifting
-lx
>Who are you?
Point taken. I'm just an average BSD user who started out with 386BSD quite a while ago, and moved primarily to Free. I didn't mean to assume the views BSD users and developers - I was just venting a bit and doing a little self-parody of myself and some of the BSD users I know.
I would like to have corporations develop for FreeBSD, and I regularly (politely) request that commercial developers consider a port - but until they port to Linux, I would guess that the chances of a Free port are slim, so, as you say, a Linux port is a good starting point.
And good point about the 'we need choices' bit. That was one thing that struck me from the original post, the implied 'let's all fight against microsoft, the common enemy' bit, but I wasn't sure exactly how to word it.
-lx
Here's why:
Linux is under the GPL. We hate the GPL.
Linux is technically inferior to BSD. Linux is an SVR4 clone. It has a poor development model. Just a few reasons why this will never happen.
Furthermore, BSD isn't fragmenting the UNIX community, Linux is. BSD was in widespread usage before Linux. The real UNIX fragmentation problem is the absurd number of Linux distros, which, despite what some Linux folk say, have very significant differences. Also, we're not 'splitting tasks'. Hardly anyone develops specifically for BSD, in fact, we suggest that they develop for Linux, since we can run the binaries natively, and port the source fairly easily.
I'm really getting sick of the Linux mentality that we need a gleaming, one world OS. The world needs different OSes, because every OS sucks at certain things, and they're always going to. The Open Source movement is about MORE decisions, not less, and the more choices we have, the better.
-lx
I have problems with netscape 4.7 crashing on everything. I hate to say it, but bring on the IE port for FreeBSD :(
-lx
No kidding. Why doesn't the media ever give any coverage to Linux or something?
-lx
BeOS isn't a heavy server platform? No shit. I might point out, though, that the vast majority of computers spend their time being workstations, not servers.
What I asked for was a comparison between the different journaling filesystems, without saying that any of them was a cure-all.
-lx
I haven't heard of those tools...are they open-source? If you can tell me where to find them, maybe I can see if a port might be possible...
-lx
I remember in 1993 at the International Tesla Convention in Colorado Springs, they took the world's largest Tesla Coil and put into this huge stadium. Everyone brought fluorescent light bulbs to light up when the thing discharged. Now that thing made this coil look like kid stuff. :)
Incidentally, the ITC is a great place to go if you want to meet some of the most bizzare people in scientific fields. That was the place I first met Masahiro Kahata, who went on to found IBVA, which is worth a look if you're interested in brain/computer interfacing.
-lx
This brings you one step closer to the power of BeOS ;) Seriously, though, it's a good thing. Journaling File Systems are pretty snazzy - stable, and speedy to boot. I'll be looking forward to a BSD port, or maybe a pure BSD implementation, as the core team probably wouldn't incorporate GPL'ed material into such a vital part of the OS.
Does anyone know the comparative advantages between XFS, ext3fs, ReiserFS, and maybe BFS? What's the likelihood of any of the 3 free unix JFS's being incorporated into any Linux distros?
-lx
A petabyte, then a hexabyte...and some other things that haven't been settled yet. Check out Data Powers of Ten for more info, and a great comparison of scale.
-lx
That optical recognition software better be pretty damn good. I don't want to wake up in the middle of the night with a robot grabbing Mr. Happy.
-lx
What, is their web server powered by a hand generator? Someone has to be there to keep it up? Or maybe (unlikely) they're running it on NT somewhere...
-lx
A site is going to force me to watch teen porn AND give me mp3s? Ow! Ow! Twist my arm...
If only it were true...
;)
-lx
I'm love Free and OpenBSD, but I have to say, Open may be easy to configure, but I'm not sure how it's easier than FreeBSD. Installation is very simple if you want to use a whole hard drive, but a pain in the ass if you want to put it on a seperate partition. FreeBSD has /stand/sysinstall, which is great for installation and configuration, especially for beginning users. And the Linux emulation, although much better than 2.3 days, still has a ways to go to catch up to Free.
Like I say, I love them both, but I would have to vote for FreeBSD for ease of use and configuration. Of course, it depends what you started on, much of the time...
-lx
Now I can watch Spielbergian cinema-quality video in a 2-inch square, in brilliant mono 22Khz audio! I can marvel as little specks shoot from one side of the square to the other, and shoot monopixel lines at each other! A centimeter tall Jar-Jar Binks will bumble around hilariously at a blazing 3 frames per second! Truly this is a marvelous age we live in.
-lx
I use a number of different 'thin client' type protocols on the networks I administer - X is a good protocol, but not very 'thin'. It doesn't work very well over long distances. On our Lan we have a number of X-terms that connect to DGUX servers, all of which can open a windows NT session on a box running Windows NT Terminal Server with Citrix Metaframe(sure, it's Windows, but get over it - users want Windows/Office). Additionally, we have PCs, Macs, and NCD ThinStar WinCE terminals. All can run the same applications, in many cases much faster than they could on their own machine. Plus, it really saves you money in the long run, because most users don't really use all the power a regular PC can offer, except in brief bursts. Maybe 10K for a huge server, and then any piece of crap can connect to it - instead of spending 1K for every person in the office.
Although WTS is a bitch to configure, once it's there, it works really nicely. Citrix ICA is an excellent protocol - it has clients for windows, mac, linux, solaris, java, etc, and can even be used over a modem, with encryption, with acceptable speed. People with the terminals as clients are easy to take care of. They won't screw up their machines, and if something goes wrong with it, we just pop in a new one and they're back online. Of course, Windows Terminal Server is pretty obscure at the moment, Windows 2000 will support terminal serving capabilities as well.
If you want multiplatform thin client capability, the names you need to know are NCD, Citrix, and Microsoft. VNC is an open-source alternative that works fairly well(although it is far slower than citrix), and supports almost every known platform. Although it has no built-in encryption, it can be tunneled through ssh relatively simply. It has fewer requirements than X, and shows good promise for the future. By the way, they needs more good developers - go to the site.
-lx
And it takes you to the same page! Seriously, I'm not going to use a search engine that is so insecure that it has to plead you not to use the competition. A manly search engine would bravely give you the link, content with its superiority over it's competitors.
-lx
but that's like a year old or so. The only problem i have with goldstein is that he constantly looks really shifty in all his pictures. Doesn't portray a very good image. ah well.
-lx
Ok, so the idea here is to find a woman that has no consuming interests of her own, like computers, because she'll have less time to spend taking care of her guy? Because she won't "brush you off" when reading slasdot like you apparently would? Women to take over basic responsibilities like cooking food and running our bathwater? A woman who believes your work is so important and vital to humanity that she'll wait on you hand and foot? Of course, for actual intelligent conversation(about computing, of course), we'll have to go to our male friends, who can comprehend such matters.
There's nothing wrong with geek girls. My girlfriend isn't a hardcore geek, but she knows more about vi than I do, prefers unix to any other OS, and is a reasonably respected geoscientist. I don't have to leave the house to talk about technology, and she doesn't have to leave to talk about science.
How about this. Treat a woman as another human being, not just a complement to yourself, or a vibrator and kitchen appliance. Women have their own interests, needs, and need to have their own shoulders rubbed and food cooked for them sometimes. And their work is just as important as your own. I'm sure you can find a woman who will let you treat her as a second-class human being, but that's not going to lead to a fulfilling relationship.
-lx
I put in my handle, which is highly specific. It won't find my page. Almost every other search engine will. It doesn't seem to be a bad search engine, it just doesn't seem to do anything remarkable. And as far as "searching algorithms" go, every search engine has one, and it's always the greatest new technology in searching. Woo.
-lx
Ok, so the slashdot crowd tends to be largely against frivolous software patents - why is it ok that Google is patenting such an obvious idea?
-lx
Is there something special about google that makes it such a hot topic on slashdot? Or is it just that it runs on Linux? I think that's a pretty lame qualification for a search engine, if that's the case.
-lx