It wasn't until Microsoft pulled Raschid and other critical researchers out of CMU, and IBM's WorkPlaceOS project failed that the "glow" came off.
Linux was still just a "hack" for the 80386.
At present, Hurd only runs on IA-32, but that hearkens back to the "immense aura of failure" surrounding Mach. Mach has only seen limited maintenance over the last few year.
As for the "inappropriate ordering," be vastly aware that in order to make a kernel self-hostable, you need to have the whole toolchain including compilers, init , BinUtils, FileUtils, and such.
If you have no compiler and no other such tools, you can't build the kernel, you can't run the kernel, you can't use the kernel.
No, they got the order straight.
The problem isn't with RMS trying to steal the glory from Linus for building a kernel; it's not with Linus stealing the glory from RMS when he built a kernel using the tools RMS helped build.
The problem is with the ingrates down the line that don't give credit where it's due.
It is fair to say that just about everything at the layer sitting on top of the Linux kernel "comes from GNU." Between GLIBC (whether version 1 or 2), GCC, and BINUTILS, the layers that make Linux useful all do come from FSF efforts. It certainly does look less than graceful when RMS "demands credit;" that doesn't mean it's an outrageous state of affairs for him to think he can expect some credit.
And the notion that Hurd is the all important be-all end-all project of the FSF is pretty silly; the people that want to participate are participating, and it is not evident that the FSF is spending big bucks or otherwise big efforts into its development...
Pretty cool bit of gear; the fact that the company is reluctant to quote prices is suggestive that it is likely pretty expensive...
Unfortunately, it doesn't do anything to solve the "too many cables and components" problem I was talking about, as it provides the "MP3 server" via introducing about 4 new cables (2 for sound, 1 for power, 1 for Ethernet).
The last time I moved, I arranged my "entertainment centre" so that I essentially have a "walk-in cable closet" for it. It's not quite a fire hazard, but there certainly are a whopping lot of cables.
There most certainly is merit to having some components that integrate a bunch of functions; I am sitting now with two dilemmas; I'd be moderately interested in adding in:
An MP3 player (with "big hard disk"), and
Something like a PlayStation
and the dilemma is that I'm not sure how I'd plug them both in. What with having DVD, VCR, and TiVO, throwing in a PlayStation gives me Yet Another Input Signal, and I'm really not sure how to hook that up.
I am seriously not interested in PS2; it seems severely overpriced, and doesn't do enough to solve any problems I consider I have.
But there certainly would be merit to having something that could combine the functionality of:
TiVo
PlayStation
DVD player
MP3 player
Cut down on the cabling and on the number of boxes (and power supplies and power cables) and that is certainly worth something.
I'm not sure I'd go along with standard non-mainframe DBMS; Oracle seems to fit that bill a bit more closely. I see Oracle used a lot more...
But you are indeed right that page-level locking can be made to work with a sound design when architected by someone that knows how to cope with this.
I'd expect it to work out best if updates are performed via a TP monitor (like Tuxedo) or a message queueing system (ala MQSeries); if updates are grouped together so they are done by a central "update process," then the number of users involved becomes less relevant.
The problem is that page locking mandates having "highly-qualified Sybase experts;" it tends to be easier to keep in stock "somewhat qualified Oracle folk," which means that the assumption of "perpetually good design" is not safe...
A small LUG probably shouldn't try to book "celebrities" like Linus or others that are referred to as TLAs rather than by their names.
You won't accomplish "success" merely by breathing the air that ESR has belched, and the cost of arranging for a "celebrity" will far outweigh the value in most cases.
On the other hand, it is a good idea to pull in people with new and interesting ideas.
There are all sorts of interesting sorts of projects out there that it would be nice to discuss with one of those involved.
People use XFree86; it would be interesting to hear about various aspects of it, whether about the technologies of the components, or about the way the project is organized vis-a-vis licensing, source code control, and "politics."
It doesn't take Dirk Hoendel to discuss that; almost anybody on the team could have useful insights. Other members of the team might actually be on the same continent.
My LUG's last guest speaker was the organizer of LiViD; he spoke on both the technologies involved, as well as the legal wranglings surrounding DeCSS. Most excellent.
If the goal is to feel important because we got Linus to come out, that represents a pretty crummy reason.
If the goal is to learn something, then it most certainly is valuable to get speakers from remote places so that the local group doesn't get overly parochial or provincial.
A good comparison here is with academic institutions where they try to pull in guests for seminars and lectures. This helps "diversify the gene pool of ideas," where the alternatives can tend towards a sort of "academic inbreeding."
(Grumble... I need to put together a topic or three myself; the last time I presented anything locally was my Internet Filtering talk of 1997; I should probably put a couple of generic talks together that could allow me to candidate for this sort of thing... Have laptop, will travel...)
Yes, I surely agree that Access is inadequate for anything involving any substantial degree of complexity.
I've not used Delphi; between it being somewhat pricey, non-ubiquitous, and such, it hasn't been an option. The company I work for got worried a couple years ago over the financial condition of Borland, and basically "nixed" the use of any of Borland's tools for new work. (There used to be quite a lot of Paradox systems.)
If Delphi can't become ubiquitous, it's not too likely to become of great importance, whether renamed to Kylix or not:-).
I keep debating whether or not I should get a copy of Corel Office Deluxe so I can try out Paradox for Linux; it ought to be an option as well.
MS Project may be the bee's knees for managerial types, but for "departmental applications," the close third to MS Word and MS Excel is the database application.
And just as the Classic Failed Project is the one that tries to develop a word processor to compete with Word, the widely useful thing that few have really seriously tried to do is to construct a "multiplexing data access tool" like MS Access.
Access may suck bad as a data repository, and MySQL and PostgreSQL may have it well-beat in that arena. But you can use Access with those DBMSes, thus obviating that demerit. What they don't offer, and nothing else does, either, is a tool that provides pretty/flexible ways of:
Building queries using QBE (Query By Example);
Screen Forms (not entirely unlike HTML Forms);
Reports;
The code that hides between Forms, Queries, and Reports...
This really is a document about XFree86 on Darwin, but there's just a tiny trick to get things working on MacOS X. You should follow all the directions above, but to be able to get X working on MacOS X, you need to quit the MacOS GUI. To do this, log in as console, and it should drop you to a text prompt. From there you can start XFree86 the same as from Darwin.
I'd call this a bit more than a "tiny trick;" it is more than a small matter that you need to quit the MacOS GUI.
That means that you can't, at least not with XFree86-for-Darwin, run MacOS apps concurrently with X-based applications.
It certainly represents a cool hack, but, in that it requires choosing not to use "MacOS," this rather diminishes the merits of having MacOS-X. If you haven't the GUI, how much better can "text mode" MacOS-X be than Linux or *BSD?
... If they put, on that 660MB disk, something of some public merit, this could be regarded as a "Public Service."
As it stands, the last AOL CD that came in sparkled nicely in the microwave, and I was able to rescue a quite nice CD case of the style usually used for DVDs...
It shows that RMS is capable of carrying on dialogue with others; too often, what we see looks merely like demagoguery. (Which may be a "media spin," but I've tried talking with RMS, and found conversation challenging...)
Trying to "nail down" RMS on precisely what he suggests as action is almost always nearly impossible, but it's interesting that the conclusion at the end can be fairly readily read to indicate that he considers the idea of building the "NDA-ed bridge" to be a good idea because it would annoy Sony!
I never touched a key; the only human intervention involved in the process was in the Post process; that was when the ten minutes started ticking.
How Sears configures their systems is none of my business.
Had I done anything more profound than telling the cashier to "just press enter" at the right moment, I might quite legitimately have been considered to be trespassing on Sears' information systems; whatever is slow is their problem. You feel free to walk into a Sears store and start hacking on their systems.
Hi! I'm an MCSE, and I'm here to help!
If security comes to take you away, then be happy; you tuned their application boot-up time by five minutes, and can now Go to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.
I watched the machine boot; it took at least ten minutes to get to the point where the system was actually operating.
I don't care in the slightest what proportion of that time involved:
Doing a memory check
Loading the OS
Doing a "scandisk" because the system went down uncleanly
Connecting to the network and identifying oneself to the corporate environment
Starting up the "cash register" application
The point is that it took ten minutes from the time of pressing the power switch before the cashier was able to Enter My Order, which is, after all, the whole point of having the computer there.
And, as for the "journalling" issue, I have gotten myself a journalling filesystem, at least as far as metadata goes. I've been using ReiserFS for probably the last 18 months, thank you very much...
The "Spot" design (64MB flash, 256MB RAM, StrongARM, CompactFlash slot) is likely to attract some third-party interest for other sorts of embedded applications; that seems to me to be something that they ought to be able to "commercialize for fun and profit."
Consider that the form factor is not all that dissimilar from that of modern PDAs; I don't want to minimize its lack of some of the "extras" a PDA application would look for, but there are enough parallels to make it interesting...
I was at Sears getting passport photos, and wound up having to walk the cashier through a reboot. They're running Windows NT on some fairly nice HP hardware; there is the substantial downside that a reboot takes close to ten minutes.
Unfortunately, the day I was there, the system got confused, and was sitting stuck in the BIOS configuration screen. Had I not told the cashier to "Just press enter when it says to," she was cruising for getting really frustrated watching it cycle through the "Post" routine.
Seeing as how Linux uses UTC as the basis for setting the time, the "time" thing should work out quite a lot better. Using NTP would make this quite a non-issue, and that wouldn't consume terribly much in the way of network resources.
I suppose there might be some concern if motherboard BIOS was set up to be "DST-aware," but if they control the hardware selection, that's not much of an issue.
... And tools like RPM, dpkg, as well as scripting systems like cfengine provide ways of readily deploying upgrades and of otherwise maintaining "system cleanliness." After all, you don't want to have the box go down when a log file fills up, and then need to ship out new hard drives to fix things if they do...
Linux is good at networking... uWink involves networking a whole bunch of game machines together...
Linux licenses are free of charge... Thus making it cheaper to deploy uWink systems...
Linux means that uWink does not need to be dependent on Where Microsoft Is Going Today...
I doubt it involves "free" software in "user space" to any meaningful extent; this proposal sounds pretty much a "poster child" for the scenario where it makes sense to use some sort of "Embedded Linux" to implement a networked graphical system.
Re:Linux is not an OS, either...
on
Is UNIX An OS?
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· Score: 3
This is exactly why the issue isn't cut and dried.
I expect that a whopping lot of people would not consider Linux, The Kernel to be terribly useful for terribly much. After all, it doesn't include:
A shell such as zsh; note that the notion of separating OS from shell was largely due to Multics, where the command language had its commands reference programs.
A C library as an interface to programs, such as GLIBC
... And then the whole set of "user space" stuff, including compilers, text editors, file tools, word processors, and such...
... And if you want to do anything graphical, you'll be using something that is recognizably "not Linux," whether you use SVGAlib or XFree86.
It is entirely true that Linus and friends didn't implement much of this sort of stuff. In order to get anywhere, you have to be using GNU "stuff" of some description.
The question of where the OS "stops," and where "non-OS stuff" starts is incredibly unclear.
It is not an outrageous thing to argue that Linux is "just the kernel;" that certainly does represent something that is recognizably associated with Linux, and most other components such as GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, GCC, and such are decidedly not specific to Linux as they are used with other OSes of whatever provenance.
It is also not an outrageous thing to think that an "operating system" might include a bunch of additional abstractions that make it useful, which could well include GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, and such.
I prefer to live in the "realm of ambiguity:"
I would consider MS-DOS to be, while rather sparse in functionality, providing little more than a CP/M program loader, along with a userspace defined by COMMAND.COM , ANSI.SYS and some other .SYS file whose name escapes me, to indeed be an "operating system."
It is a minimal OS, to be sure; note that you need the program loader, terminal controller, and ( whatever the INIT equivalent is) to have some semblance of a functioning system.
I'm not sure where to draw the line with Linux.
Someone using Linux to build embedded systems might stop the line very shortly past init by implementing a custom userspace.
Someone using Linux to deploy Internet "WebSurfing" Kiosks might consider the "OS" part of the system to include everything below a surface loosely defined by X11; the "application" side being the JavaScript and Java stuff that people might run atop Mozilla.
On that "kiosk," if they used cfengine to clean up the system configuration every time a new user logs on, there's some ambiguity as to whether:
The "operating system" includes cfengine, or
The "operating system" includes cfengine plus the scripts used to clean up "system" stuff.
The author of the magazine article in question obviously holds to a dogma that includes some portion of the "GUI" as part of the "operating system."
I would contend that in a heterogeneous world with computer systems used for different things, there's not a good straight answer to this.
IBM certainly does have some interesting hardware; the Power4 CPU looks likely to be pretty competitive to its Alpha and SPARC competitors...
And IBM certainly has some clue on how to construct high end servers, with the attendant I/O processors and such.
On The Other Hand, Apple's direction has lately been to using convection cooling, not the water cooling that would be necessary for the number of watts the Power4 dissipates.
The reason ReiserFS is not included in 2.4 (yet) is that it wasn't yet quite ready (and yes, there were political disputes over that) when they froze 2.3.x in preparation for 2.4, and New Stuff Doesn't Get Put Into Even Releases.
That being said, the day that 2.5.0 gets released, there will doubtless be a flurry of activity to get ReiserFS in there, as well as to backport it to 2.4.1 or 2.4.2. If there be further political disputes at that time, there will doubtless be considerable flaming. There have been some pretty dramatic flames surrounding ReiserFS already...
As for the focus, or lack thereof, resulting from introducing Tux2 as an additional option, I think this is entirely a healthy thing.
I doubt that all of ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, and Tux2 will prove "totally successful." On the one hand, if one of them became dominant, that would effectively "shut out" the others. On the other hand, it's not likely that all of them will be considered equal, at the end of the process.
Reality is that a couple of them are likely to become very popular, and the others are likely to eventually languish unmaintained.
At first blush, that sounds wasteful. I don't think it is. I think it a very good thing that a bunch of groups are independently trying out some differing approaches to filesystems. This allows any to individually "succeed" or fail without resulting in Disaster For Linux.
As with Gnome versus KDE versus GnuStep versus Berlin, the different systems can learn both from each others' successes and from each others' mistakes.
As with many projects, there would not necessarily be benefit to trying to conglomerate these all into One Big Project; that certainly can lead to unworkable bureaucracy.
I'd rather see five attempts that try radically different approaches to "reliable fast FSes," and see a couple provide tangibly useful results than for them to try to cooperate more than they successfully can, and risk having NO journalling filesystem at all.
Things like PayPal and Kagi offer another option, namely for individuals to make "micropayments" to other individuals.
This is arguably better than having the FSF and others manage funds, from several perspectives:
You get to deploy your money to the efforts you favor.
Multiply this 100,000 ways to have 100,000 agents acting in favor of their interests and you should get some interesting outcomes.
Having a centralized fund means adding in considerable bureaucracy as the managers will be legally responsible for the disposition of funds.
Having a centralized fund manager means that the results are likely to be affected by the manager's own biases.
Thus, while you might want to see some of your money go to (oh, say) KDE, a FSF fund is likely to "bias" in favor of GNOME.
In contrast, if you send $5 to KDE yourself, or perhaps to a specific KDE developer, nobody else gets to gainsay you on that.
Other issues like "licensing biases" also get resolved by this.
Big organizations wind up having to add further bureaucracy to deal with the tax deductibility of contributions.
If you decide to send some developer $5, you may get no tax deduction, but that may be offset if the developer doesn't need to declare it as income for tax purposes because it's a gift...
I'd suggest as an alternative that you consider the option of not making the contribution tax exempt, but rather giving it away as a pure "gift."
This has the demerit that it doesn't buy you a tax deduction, but it may have the corresponding merit of allowing the gift to remain a gift, and NOT be taxable in the recipient's hands.
The point here is that there is little net difference between:
Giving developer a gift of $100, with no involvement of tax authorities after that, and
Donating $140, which, after tax deductibility, costs you $100, and which, being taxable in the recipient's hands, nets them $100, or perhaps less!, and involves greater administrative costs...
After four years in the DFW area, I've not yet been to First Saturday. In some ways, just as well; I gather that the cops lurk not far off, quite ready to arrest people for having bought goods they did not know was stolen.
As you say,
I had to put my system together myself. I had to install the operating system. I had to configure ipfwadm (still using 2.0.35) ALL BY MYSELF WITH NO HELP FROM ANYONE (unless you consider reading man pages and howto's to be help).
Your having 12 machines on your LAN makes you a poor candidate for the "dumb Firewall box."
Your having some clue that ipfwadm is anything other than mistyped gibberish makes you a poor candidate for the "dumb Firewall box."
You're probably not a good candidate for getting a "tiny embedded firewall;" your needs are decidedly more sophisticated, and you can easily enough build something acceptable yourself.
I'd not be shocked if you would be prepared to burn a CD to boot up a customized version of Linux/*BSD that would provide a Remarkably Unhackable configuration.
But life is short; I could probably do much the same, but if I were to get a Cable Modem, it might be more economical of my time and limited space to pick up a LinkSys router.
And I'm not overly concerned about the Unix cognoscenti; y'all can take care of yourselves.
What I would like to see is a "cheap cable modem companion," something that would provide at least some protection for the people that aren't gurus, and (horrors!) might not even be using some form of *nix. That's where the massive vulnerabilities lie; that's where adding a firewall has most merit.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't until Microsoft pulled Raschid and other critical researchers out of CMU, and IBM's WorkPlaceOS project failed that the "glow" came off.
At present, Hurd only runs on IA-32, but that hearkens back to the "immense aura of failure" surrounding Mach. Mach has only seen limited maintenance over the last few year.
If you have no compiler and no other such tools, you can't build the kernel, you can't run the kernel, you can't use the kernel.
No, they got the order straight.
The problem isn't with RMS trying to steal the glory from Linus for building a kernel; it's not with Linus stealing the glory from RMS when he built a kernel using the tools RMS helped build.
The problem is with the ingrates down the line that don't give credit where it's due.
It is fair to say that just about everything at the layer sitting on top of the Linux kernel "comes from GNU." Between GLIBC (whether version 1 or 2), GCC, and BINUTILS, the layers that make Linux useful all do come from FSF efforts. It certainly does look less than graceful when RMS "demands credit;" that doesn't mean it's an outrageous state of affairs for him to think he can expect some credit.
And the notion that Hurd is the all important be-all end-all project of the FSF is pretty silly; the people that want to participate are participating, and it is not evident that the FSF is spending big bucks or otherwise big efforts into its development...
How many architectures does this put Slackware up to?
Unfortunately, it doesn't do anything to solve the "too many cables and components" problem I was talking about, as it provides the "MP3 server" via introducing about 4 new cables (2 for sound, 1 for power, 1 for Ethernet).
There most certainly is merit to having some components that integrate a bunch of functions; I am sitting now with two dilemmas; I'd be moderately interested in adding in:
- An MP3 player (with "big hard disk"), and
- Something like a PlayStation
and the dilemma is that I'm not sure how I'd plug them both in. What with having DVD, VCR, and TiVO, throwing in a PlayStation gives me Yet Another Input Signal, and I'm really not sure how to hook that up.I am seriously not interested in PS2; it seems severely overpriced, and doesn't do enough to solve any problems I consider I have.
But there certainly would be merit to having something that could combine the functionality of:
- TiVo
- PlayStation
- DVD player
- MP3 player
Cut down on the cabling and on the number of boxes (and power supplies and power cables) and that is certainly worth something.But you are indeed right that page-level locking can be made to work with a sound design when architected by someone that knows how to cope with this.
I'd expect it to work out best if updates are performed via a TP monitor (like Tuxedo) or a message queueing system (ala MQSeries); if updates are grouped together so they are done by a central "update process," then the number of users involved becomes less relevant.
The problem is that page locking mandates having "highly-qualified Sybase experts;" it tends to be easier to keep in stock "somewhat qualified Oracle folk," which means that the assumption of "perpetually good design" is not safe...
You won't accomplish "success" merely by breathing the air that ESR has belched, and the cost of arranging for a "celebrity" will far outweigh the value in most cases.
On the other hand, it is a good idea to pull in people with new and interesting ideas.
There are all sorts of interesting sorts of projects out there that it would be nice to discuss with one of those involved.
- People use XFree86; it would be interesting to hear about various aspects of it, whether about the technologies of the components, or about the way the project is organized vis-a-vis licensing, source code control, and "politics."
- My LUG's last guest speaker was the organizer of LiViD; he spoke on both the technologies involved, as well as the legal wranglings surrounding DeCSS. Most excellent.
If the goal is to feel important because we got Linus to come out, that represents a pretty crummy reason.It doesn't take Dirk Hoendel to discuss that; almost anybody on the team could have useful insights. Other members of the team might actually be on the same continent.
If the goal is to learn something, then it most certainly is valuable to get speakers from remote places so that the local group doesn't get overly parochial or provincial.
A good comparison here is with academic institutions where they try to pull in guests for seminars and lectures. This helps "diversify the gene pool of ideas," where the alternatives can tend towards a sort of "academic inbreeding."
(Grumble... I need to put together a topic or three myself; the last time I presented anything locally was my Internet Filtering talk of 1997; I should probably put a couple of generic talks together that could allow me to candidate for this sort of thing... Have laptop, will travel...)
I don't think so.
The point was that Access:
It may do so fairly badly. That does not deny that it does so.
I've not used Delphi; between it being somewhat pricey, non-ubiquitous, and such, it hasn't been an option. The company I work for got worried a couple years ago over the financial condition of Borland, and basically "nixed" the use of any of Borland's tools for new work. (There used to be quite a lot of Paradox systems.)
If Delphi can't become ubiquitous, it's not too likely to become of great importance, whether renamed to Kylix or not :-).
I keep debating whether or not I should get a copy of Corel Office Deluxe so I can try out Paradox for Linux; it ought to be an option as well.
And just as the Classic Failed Project is the one that tries to develop a word processor to compete with Word, the widely useful thing that few have really seriously tried to do is to construct a "multiplexing data access tool" like MS Access.
Access may suck bad as a data repository, and MySQL and PostgreSQL may have it well-beat in that arena. But you can use Access with those DBMSes, thus obviating that demerit. What they don't offer, and nothing else does, either, is a tool that provides pretty/flexible ways of:
That means that you can't, at least not with XFree86-for-Darwin, run MacOS apps concurrently with X-based applications.
It certainly represents a cool hack, but, in that it requires choosing not to use "MacOS," this rather diminishes the merits of having MacOS-X. If you haven't the GUI, how much better can "text mode" MacOS-X be than Linux or *BSD?
As it stands, the last AOL CD that came in sparkled nicely in the microwave, and I was able to rescue a quite nice CD case of the style usually used for DVDs...
Trying to "nail down" RMS on precisely what he suggests as action is almost always nearly impossible, but it's interesting that the conclusion at the end can be fairly readily read to indicate that he considers the idea of building the "NDA-ed bridge" to be a good idea because it would annoy Sony!
How Sears configures their systems is none of my business.
Had I done anything more profound than telling the cashier to "just press enter" at the right moment, I might quite legitimately have been considered to be trespassing on Sears' information systems; whatever is slow is their problem. You feel free to walk into a Sears store and start hacking on their systems.
If security comes to take you away, then be happy; you tuned their application boot-up time by five minutes, and can now Go to Jail. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.
Enjoy.
I don't care in the slightest what proportion of that time involved:
The point is that it took ten minutes from the time of pressing the power switch before the cashier was able to Enter My Order, which is, after all, the whole point of having the computer there.
And, as for the "journalling" issue, I have gotten myself a journalling filesystem, at least as far as metadata goes. I've been using ReiserFS for probably the last 18 months, thank you very much...
Consider that the form factor is not all that dissimilar from that of modern PDAs; I don't want to minimize its lack of some of the "extras" a PDA application would look for, but there are enough parallels to make it interesting...
Unfortunately, the day I was there, the system got confused, and was sitting stuck in the BIOS configuration screen. Had I not told the cashier to "Just press enter when it says to," she was cruising for getting really frustrated watching it cycle through the "Post" routine.
At least there was a regular keyboard...
- Linux is good at networking... uWink involves networking a whole bunch of game machines together...
- Linux licenses are free of charge
... Thus making it cheaper to deploy uWink systems ...
- Linux means that uWink does not need to be dependent on Where Microsoft Is Going Today
...
I doubt it involves "free" software in "user space" to any meaningful extent; this proposal sounds pretty much a "poster child" for the scenario where it makes sense to use some sort of "Embedded Linux" to implement a networked graphical system.I expect that a whopping lot of people would not consider Linux, The Kernel to be terribly useful for terribly much. After all, it doesn't include:
- A shell such as zsh; note that the notion of separating OS from shell was largely due to Multics, where the command language had its commands reference programs.
- A C library as an interface to programs, such as GLIBC
- Some set of initialization controls as with init
... And then the whole set of "user space" stuff, including compilers, text editors, file tools, word processors, and such... ... And if you want to do anything graphical, you'll be using something that is recognizably "not Linux," whether you use SVGAlib or XFree86.
It is entirely true that Linus and friends didn't implement much of this sort of stuff. In order to get anywhere, you have to be using GNU "stuff" of some description.The question of where the OS "stops," and where "non-OS stuff" starts is incredibly unclear.
It is not an outrageous thing to argue that Linux is "just the kernel;" that certainly does represent something that is recognizably associated with Linux, and most other components such as GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, GCC, and such are decidedly not specific to Linux as they are used with other OSes of whatever provenance.
It is also not an outrageous thing to think that an "operating system" might include a bunch of additional abstractions that make it useful, which could well include GLIBC, X11, GNOME, KDE, and such.
I prefer to live in the "realm of ambiguity:"
It is a minimal OS, to be sure; note that you need the program loader, terminal controller, and ( whatever the INIT equivalent is) to have some semblance of a functioning system.
The author of the magazine article in question obviously holds to a dogma that includes some portion of the "GUI" as part of the "operating system."
I would contend that in a heterogeneous world with computer systems used for different things, there's not a good straight answer to this.
On The Other Hand, Apple's direction has lately been to using convection cooling, not the water cooling that would be necessary for the number of watts the Power4 dissipates.
That being said, the day that 2.5.0 gets released, there will doubtless be a flurry of activity to get ReiserFS in there, as well as to backport it to 2.4.1 or 2.4.2. If there be further political disputes at that time, there will doubtless be considerable flaming. There have been some pretty dramatic flames surrounding ReiserFS already...
As for the focus, or lack thereof, resulting from introducing Tux2 as an additional option, I think this is entirely a healthy thing.
I doubt that all of ext3, XFS, JFS, ReiserFS, and Tux2 will prove "totally successful." On the one hand, if one of them became dominant, that would effectively "shut out" the others. On the other hand, it's not likely that all of them will be considered equal, at the end of the process.
Reality is that a couple of them are likely to become very popular, and the others are likely to eventually languish unmaintained.
At first blush, that sounds wasteful. I don't think it is. I think it a very good thing that a bunch of groups are independently trying out some differing approaches to filesystems. This allows any to individually "succeed" or fail without resulting in Disaster For Linux.
As with Gnome versus KDE versus GnuStep versus Berlin, the different systems can learn both from each others' successes and from each others' mistakes.
As with many projects, there would not necessarily be benefit to trying to conglomerate these all into One Big Project; that certainly can lead to unworkable bureaucracy.
I'd rather see five attempts that try radically different approaches to "reliable fast FSes," and see a couple provide tangibly useful results than for them to try to cooperate more than they successfully can, and risk having NO journalling filesystem at all.
This is arguably better than having the FSF and others manage funds, from several perspectives:
Multiply this 100,000 ways to have 100,000 agents acting in favor of their interests and you should get some interesting outcomes.
Thus, while you might want to see some of your money go to (oh, say) KDE, a FSF fund is likely to "bias" in favor of GNOME.
In contrast, if you send $5 to KDE yourself, or perhaps to a specific KDE developer, nobody else gets to gainsay you on that.
Other issues like "licensing biases" also get resolved by this.
If you decide to send some developer $5, you may get no tax deduction, but that may be offset if the developer doesn't need to declare it as income for tax purposes because it's a gift...
This has the demerit that it doesn't buy you a tax deduction, but it may have the corresponding merit of allowing the gift to remain a gift, and NOT be taxable in the recipient's hands.
The point here is that there is little net difference between:
See Free Software (Gift) Exchange Registry - FSEX for a likely-more-coherent presentation.
As you say,
- Your having 12 machines on your LAN makes you a poor candidate for the "dumb Firewall box."
- Your having some clue that ipfwadm is anything other than mistyped gibberish makes you a poor candidate for the "dumb Firewall box."
You're probably not a good candidate for getting a "tiny embedded firewall;" your needs are decidedly more sophisticated, and you can easily enough build something acceptable yourself.I'd not be shocked if you would be prepared to burn a CD to boot up a customized version of Linux/*BSD that would provide a Remarkably Unhackable configuration.
But life is short; I could probably do much the same, but if I were to get a Cable Modem, it might be more economical of my time and limited space to pick up a LinkSys router.
And I'm not overly concerned about the Unix cognoscenti; y'all can take care of yourselves.
What I would like to see is a "cheap cable modem companion," something that would provide at least some protection for the people that aren't gurus, and (horrors!) might not even be using some form of *nix. That's where the massive vulnerabilities lie; that's where adding a firewall has most merit.