I would be happy if the vendors would start shipping certain updates as binary patches.
A recent security recent hole in Mandrake required I download about 40Mb of GLIBC RPMs! Why??? The fix itself was probably a few changed lines in the source code so why not distribute it as a binary patch? The alternative for modem users is a 3 hour download, something only masochists will bother doing.
I don't know of any distribution consisting of exclusively GNU software so I believe RMS should stop prattling on about GNU/Linux as if it will become true if he says it enough.
My Linux distro has a lot of GPL code, but significant and crucial parts fall under the Apache Licence, the MPL, the QPL, the Perl Licence, OpenSLL/SSLeay licence, various BSD licences and plenty of "homebrew" others. Even if stuff uses the GPL for its licence that doesn't make it "GNU" software unless the FSF own it.
If fact every piece of non "GNU" code were thrown out from Linux it would be as boring and pointless as HURD.
In short, RMS looks like a fool to keep insisting on the distinction. The bit about using GNU/Linux to distinguish from Linux the kernel is particularly silly since the context should indicate what is meant and if not then "Linux distro" or "Linux kernel" would suffice to clear things up.
People will complain about anything these days
on
Kernel 2.4.2 Released
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· Score: 3
Looking at some of these other posts you'd think it were a bad thing to have bug fixes and updates in a timely fashion.
NAI treats PGP as mass market consumer software and may think that it will have little impact on ignorant Joe Public whether they release the source or not. Probably they are correct, but it hugely undermimes the reputation that PGP has built up all these years for those that know better. Maybe this is why he left?
I called it a knock-off because it's obviously a knee-jerk reaction to what they saw happening in Mac OS X.
Someone in Microsoft saw Aqua and proclaimed "if they have a space-wasting, memory hogging UI with big buttons and a bunch of stupid effects such as shadows, transparency then we must too". Whether the two UIs behave similarly is moot since its clear where MS got the idea from.
Steve might be a sociopathic tyrant but he's not completely mad. If he were to announce Mac OS X for x86 processors it would be a very, very stupid mistake.
It would be a total white elephant, consuming ungodly amounts of money for a tiny, tiny percentage of the PC OS market, threaten Apple's hardware sales, confuse consumers, shares would go through the floor and would finally get canned by the next CEO to run Apple.
It's not the operating system that matters in all this, it's writing drivers for all the hardware that a x86 port would need to be worth a damn.
And even if all that were done, you'd be the proud owner an operating system that had no software to run on it. Apple might release a few x86 titles, but Microsoft certainly wouldn't and neither would many other software vendors.
"What about all the stuff for Unix?" you might say, but remember OS X is meant for computer illiterates, not people who download and build their software. And if you are one of those people, what's wrong with using Linux or BSD?
Of course its highly unlikely to happen. Hardware is Apple's bottom line so they're hardly likely to undermime their own profits by encouraging people to use an Intel box instead of their gear. Remember they pulled the plug on Apple clones a few years back when this started to happen back then.
I have no idea what the *native* Mac OS X APIs are like but the Carbon APIs are not derivatives of NextStep, they are just cleaned-up Mac APIs without all the legacy cruft.
They should all run fine via Classic, but performance will be no better than on OS 9. If the applications are carbonised, you should notice significant gains in terms of stability and probably performance.
The biggest problem for IE and all "Carbonized" apps is that they were originally written for a fossil OS with half-baked implementations of VM, pre-emption, multi-threading etc. - things other operating systems have taken for granted for years. That means without additional (and substantial) coding the OS X version might run natively, but it won't be significantly different from the same app running on OS 9 - if the app is single-threaded on OS 9, it will be on OS X etc. For that reason I wouldn't get my hopes about IE being that much better on OS X unless Microsoft intend to rip apart their rendering & network stuff to take advantage of threads etc.
Unfortunately for Microsoft IE for Windows and IE for Mac are too Win32/Mac specific to facilitate an easy port to other operating systems. The prior IE port to Unix entailed running the thing through a Win32 emulation layer, hence the reason it was crappy slow, especially over X.
It's possible that somone could write a Carbon API layer on Unix but I imagine that would be just as difficult to do it is for Win32 what with Apple's penchant for changing APIs, lawsuits etc.
STL is certainly a handy set of classes but its templatized nature leads to massive code bloat. If bloat is a consideration don't use STL even if you write the rest of your code in C++.
Another point for usenet spam is that your local news server must delete older, legitimate posts to make room for it. Instead of having a news server which holds a month of articles, you have one that holds only a few days with the rest being clogged up with "Make money FAST!" & "H*O_W_TO_A=T+T*RA-CT_W_O_M-E-N" shit, binary porn spam and the cancels of course. So the server wastes space and must spend a sizable percentage of its time just receiving and filing all the unwanted crap. This all leads to a slower and poorer news service.
Short of blocking all binaries, limiting crossposting and honouring cancels (and hoping they arrive in a timely fashion), there's not much else a server can do.
I have a Mac with 2 CPUs sitting on my desk here and I've yet to see the evidence that MacOS 9 even remotely puts that power to use. Apps still crawl when they're not in the foreground and it's all too easy to lock the whole machine when an errant app crashes. The user interface looks little different from the one used a decade ago and feels remarkably clumsy compared to KDE or W2K.
MacOS X may be a different story, but until that appears, the Mac is stuck with an arcane OS and a pretty but stuck-in-time user interface. Neither of these things would make me compare the Mac to a Ferrari except for the exhorbitant price markup both logos entail.
You can't compare different CPU architectures (and surrounding hardware) and proclaim which is better just by comparing megahertz. Obviously non-technical people might make such comparisons so Apple would be better off to hide all mention of the processor speed or use some other scale.
The biggest problem with the Mac is not the megahertz the machine runs at but the perceived speed that it takes to do stuff. I have an outrageously specced Mac sitting on my desk and the UI acts as slow and retarded as the Mac I used to use at university nealy a decade ago. The single-mouse-button, single menu strip is just painful to use as it was then and Apple haven't picked up on any of the UI advances that other operating systems have made in that time. I don't think the MacOS X UI will be much better but at it will be a real OS under the hood and much more power-user friendly with access to shell prompts etc.
Roll on MacOS X I say. I have a dual CPU 500Mhz G4 with 512Mb of RAM and MacOS 9 makes it run like a dog. Crash protection and multi-threading capabilities are pathetic and the UI looks very arcane compared to other operating systems.
Most fans hope Jar Jar will be savagely eviscerated in the first scene (during a thrilling Jedi battle!) and then forgotten about for the rest of the movie.
This one act alone would raise movie's score by a point.
If anyone is still in doubt that DVDs are ripoff, just consider:
DVDs cost about a buck to make - not much different from a video cassette. And prices are getting cheaper all the time so much so that PC magazines ship DVDs on their covers.
The cost of mastering only adds pennies to the bottom line.
Manufacturers (especially European) save money by printing a single run of DVDs with multiple language and subtitles that can be sold in multiple countries.
DVDs sell for double the price vs the same title on VHS. Some bargain bin VHS titles are a third or a quarter the price of the same title on DVD.
They take up half the floor space in a store vs VHS thus doubling profitability of that space.
They weigh half as much as VHS and their reduced volumn makes them considerably cheaper to ship.
If you account for all these things DVDs should be cheaper that video tapes. Unfortunately consumer ignorance prevailed just like it did with CDs - "DVDs are better quality therefore they must cost more to make and I must pay more!". Now we're stuck with the outrageous scam prices.
Wrong. The problems with Mozilla are factoring and data structure issues, and little to do with whether it supports feature x, y or z. If you don't believe me then read through the footprint bugs yourself. Most of the bloat comes for inefficient data structures, caches that need tuning, the occasional memory leak and packaging of libraries.
Mozilla engineers are working on all these things to reduce the disk and memory footprint without throwing away any functionality. As it stands, it is still a fast browser, *much* better at rendering web pages and more standards compliant than any other browser on Linux.
The PS 2 is so outrageously rip off expensive that the Iraqis would be better off just purchasing some PC motherboards and hooking them together to do what they're after. It's not like their geographic location makes such hardware difficult to come by.
Perhaps a more likely reason they're hording them (assuming the story is true) is to earn some hard currency by selling them to stupid westerners at vastly inflated prices.
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A recent security recent hole in Mandrake required I download about 40Mb of GLIBC RPMs! Why??? The fix itself was probably a few changed lines in the source code so why not distribute it as a binary patch? The alternative for modem users is a 3 hour download, something only masochists will bother doing.
Besides which all you need do is visit somewhere like Netcraft to see your figures are total bullshit.
My Linux distro has a lot of GPL code, but significant and crucial parts fall under the Apache Licence, the MPL, the QPL, the Perl Licence, OpenSLL/SSLeay licence, various BSD licences and plenty of "homebrew" others. Even if stuff uses the GPL for its licence that doesn't make it "GNU" software unless the FSF own it.
If fact every piece of non "GNU" code were thrown out from Linux it would be as boring and pointless as HURD.
In short, RMS looks like a fool to keep insisting on the distinction. The bit about using GNU/Linux to distinguish from Linux the kernel is particularly silly since the context should indicate what is meant and if not then "Linux distro" or "Linux kernel" would suffice to clear things up.
Looking at some of these other posts you'd think it were a bad thing to have bug fixes and updates in a timely fashion.
NAI treats PGP as mass market consumer software and may think that it will have little impact on ignorant Joe Public whether they release the source or not. Probably they are correct, but it hugely undermimes the reputation that PGP has built up all these years for those that know better. Maybe this is why he left?
The chances of a person making themselves a storm trooper outfit of having a sixpack are neglible.
Someone in Microsoft saw Aqua and proclaimed "if they have a space-wasting, memory hogging UI with big buttons and a bunch of stupid effects such as shadows, transparency then we must too". Whether the two UIs behave similarly is moot since its clear where MS got the idea from.
Whistler beta 2 boasts a "skin" called Luna that is a cheap Aqua knock-off. Is that the kind of innovation they're talking about?
All these companies have released open source stuff, sometimes with licences as liberal as the GPL.
You're a very silly man.
It would be a total white elephant, consuming ungodly amounts of money for a tiny, tiny percentage of the PC OS market, threaten Apple's hardware sales, confuse consumers, shares would go through the floor and would finally get canned by the next CEO to run Apple.
And even if all that were done, you'd be the proud owner an operating system that had no software to run on it. Apple might release a few x86 titles, but Microsoft certainly wouldn't and neither would many other software vendors.
"What about all the stuff for Unix?" you might say, but remember OS X is meant for computer illiterates, not people who download and build their software. And if you are one of those people, what's wrong with using Linux or BSD?
Of course its highly unlikely to happen. Hardware is Apple's bottom line so they're hardly likely to undermime their own profits by encouraging people to use an Intel box instead of their gear. Remember they pulled the plug on Apple clones a few years back when this started to happen back then.
I have no idea what the *native* Mac OS X APIs are like but the Carbon APIs are not derivatives of NextStep, they are just cleaned-up Mac APIs without all the legacy cruft.
The biggest problem for IE and all "Carbonized" apps is that they were originally written for a fossil OS with half-baked implementations of VM, pre-emption, multi-threading etc. - things other operating systems have taken for granted for years. That means without additional (and substantial) coding the OS X version might run natively, but it won't be significantly different from the same app running on OS 9 - if the app is single-threaded on OS 9, it will be on OS X etc. For that reason I wouldn't get my hopes about IE being that much better on OS X unless Microsoft intend to rip apart their rendering & network stuff to take advantage of threads etc.
It's possible that somone could write a Carbon API layer on Unix but I imagine that would be just as difficult to do it is for Win32 what with Apple's penchant for changing APIs, lawsuits etc.
STL is certainly a handy set of classes but its templatized nature leads to massive code bloat. If bloat is a consideration don't use STL even if you write the rest of your code in C++.
But as a 'UKian' who visits the US on frequent extended trips let me state with certainty what a load of bollocks you're spouting.
Short of blocking all binaries, limiting crossposting and honouring cancels (and hoping they arrive in a timely fashion), there's not much else a server can do.
MacOS X may be a different story, but until that appears, the Mac is stuck with an arcane OS and a pretty but stuck-in-time user interface. Neither of these things would make me compare the Mac to a Ferrari except for the exhorbitant price markup both logos entail.
The biggest problem with the Mac is not the megahertz the machine runs at but the perceived speed that it takes to do stuff. I have an outrageously specced Mac sitting on my desk and the UI acts as slow and retarded as the Mac I used to use at university nealy a decade ago. The single-mouse-button, single menu strip is just painful to use as it was then and Apple haven't picked up on any of the UI advances that other operating systems have made in that time. I don't think the MacOS X UI will be much better but at it will be a real OS under the hood and much more power-user friendly with access to shell prompts etc.
Roll on MacOS X I say. I have a dual CPU 500Mhz G4 with 512Mb of RAM and MacOS 9 makes it run like a dog. Crash protection and multi-threading capabilities are pathetic and the UI looks very arcane compared to other operating systems.
This one act alone would raise movie's score by a point.
If you account for all these things DVDs should be cheaper that video tapes. Unfortunately consumer ignorance prevailed just like it did with CDs - "DVDs are better quality therefore they must cost more to make and I must pay more!". Now we're stuck with the outrageous scam prices.
Mozilla engineers are working on all these things to reduce the disk and memory footprint without throwing away any functionality. As it stands, it is still a fast browser, *much* better at rendering web pages and more standards compliant than any other browser on Linux.
Perhaps a more likely reason they're hording them (assuming the story is true) is to earn some hard currency by selling them to stupid westerners at vastly inflated prices.