Yes but, the OP is about Ubuntu 9.04. It's an alpha version. It will crash. It will lose your data. It will violate your wife. That is the nature of an alpha release. I understand that we are fundamentally talking about ext4 but, the badness of ext4 is only being brought to light by using an alpha level OS.
2. Bad Operating System development. If an application kills the kernel, it's usually the kernel's fault (drivers and other code operating in priviledged space is obviously not the kernel's fault) -- and this appears to be a crash initiated from code running in user space. Bad kernel, no cookie for you.
I've been an Ubuntu user for years and I'm always amazed at the state of the kernel during the alpha and beta releases (and at times even the final release). I generally run the latest vanilla kernel from kernel.org. It's always just fine. I honestly don't know how they fuck it up. I've custom compiled kernels for years and never had a kernel panic except when I'm running an Ubuntu kernel.
Beyond that, he's essentially advocating the Windows Registry. He's a very smart person but, Unix is about dot files. If you take them away you, take away the "Unixness" of the machine. I don't care if a filesystem isn't pleased by hundreds or thousands of tiny config files. That's how the machine works. Make your filesystem handle it.
Why not instead use a fast machine and test in virtual machines. Not only do you get a performance hit in the VM, you also get a way to test on varying memory configurations and, more importantly, a clean reproducible environment for testing. Honestly, if you are developing end user software these days and not testing it in a virtual machine, you are doing it wrong.
Whose fault is this? When I try to use an alternative OS, like Linux, a lot of scanners, USB devices, video-cards, etc. just do not work, as drivers either non-existent or bad, made by rear-engineering. Because the hardware vendors provide drivers only for 1 and only OS.
Now we blame Russia for DDoS attacks. But what Russian government can do? Can it lower the price on the monopoly OS? Can it write drivers for peripheral devices so that people move away from the mono-OS culture?
If the government were actually interested in fixing this situation they could:
1) Create their own linux distro and mandate that the government use it. They have already said they want to do this and it was previously discussed on Slashdot.
2) Pass a law that says no new computer can be sold without a legitimate operating system on it (It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Russian Linux, OSX. It just must be a legal copy). More importantly, enforce the law. This should at least get most or all new computers pre-installed with the Russian OS just to comply with the law.
3) Refuse to let hardware vendors sell a product in Russia if it doesn't work out of the box or have a verified driver for Russian Linux on the installation CD. Linux generally has better hardware support than Windows these days so, this really isn't too onerous of a requirement on hardware vendors.
I'm probably over simplifying but, normal people don't care about their operating system. They want a button to click that connects to the magical "linksys" wifi network, an icon that says Internet under it and an icon that says Office under it. If you give them those three things, there is little chance they will notice the difference and probably less chance that will care enough to "fix" it with a Windows install. Though, they may start to get a little suspicious when they don't have to re-install every 3 months because, "it's going slow".
Strange. At the end of the article, the BBC actually presented information that made it seem as if they actually understood what The Pirate Bay does. Either the author of the article asked his IT guys to explain it to him or he knows what it does because he uses it to download copyrighted material. Either scenario is amusing I suppose.
Of course if your child is smart enough to boot in single user mode they can pretty much get around anything but at that point they should be capable of not hosing the system and, if they do, being able to recover it.
You can pretty well lock that down on most machines too. Set the BIOS to boot from the disk first and use a BIOS password (that hopefully applies to any "Select temporary boot device" type messages as well). Then you can set passwords on grub that prevent editing entries or booting "(recovery mode)" kernels with a few changes to/boot/grub/menu.lst. Unless they physically remove the disk, that will keep the vast majority of people from getting root access to your box.
If you are running linux and keep your machine on for non-trivial amounts of time, chances are good that are using all of your RAM. It's just that most of it is going to improve the performance of your machine by filling all unused RAM with the disk cache. I'd call getting stuff from RAM and not disk "something useful".
The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.
You were correct until here. This isn't PGO's primary purpose. It may do this to prevent TLB misses but, certainly not to lessen the impact of swapping (which for an average desktop linux user is almost non-existent). Optimization is about making decisions about what is likely to produce the fastest code. If the compiler knows how the code is going to be used, it can make better decisions.
I would imagine that NVidia also has a fairly large patent portfolio where they could find many cases of Intel and AMD/ATI infringing in some way.
Also, how does VIA have a license to make x86 chips? I would imagine they don't have the ability because Intel and AMD decided to be nice to a competitor so, they must have done a patent swapping deal or paid a lot of money.
Actually, Mississippi meets all of your requirements. No open container law, no prohibition of fireworks, and few deed restrictions. In addition, you can vote, and your property can't be taken away without compensation.
Also, in Mississippi, you can do other stuff that you cannot in China, like own an handgun. Or vote.
You can also wear a dirty wife-beater, leave rusted cars on your front lawn and join prestigious organizations that burn crosses.
Or shut the hell up. How does one even want to compete with something that's free. Certainly not with the quality of their own products, the incredible support services or recent history in innovation.
Monopolies don't need to compete. They just need to maintain their monopoly.
8.04 has become the equivalent of Debian stable. It works for the vast majority of people and if there are specific apps you want to upgrade, you can find newer versions that integrate perfectly with your system. My machine has about 3000 packages installed on it. I only care about 15-20. I just hand upgrade those packages and let the reset sit at their stable state.
Yes, if drinking is a priority for you, you are living in the wrong country. In Argentina (specifically Buenos Aires), you are very rarely more than a block away from a store that will sell you any type of alcohol between 8am and 10pm. If it's later than that, you just need to have built some creds with the people that illegally sell it after 10pm or know the phone number/web address of one of the many places that will deliver it to you in 15 minutes with a 10% markup (these places are legal).
In the U.S. I am always carded for my drinks. In Argentina they just don't care. I'm not even sure at what age you can buy smokes/drinks here is. It's probably socially not acceptable to sell to people over 12 and under 18 because it's perfectly reasonable to send your kid to buy smokes or beer here.
My point is that U.S. liquor laws are insane. Making alcohol taboo contributes to alcoholism. In a country where there are essentially no real alcohol laws, the number of alcoholics is very, very small.
That doesn't really preclude heroin though. Just give them a good dose of it and then do whatever you were going to do to them. They probably won't notice.
Compiz is probably the most customizable WM-ish thing there is. If you don't like bling, turn the bling off. But, there are a lot of useful gems in there that are both non-distracting and useful. Plugins like Scale and Expo don't get in your face until you decide to use them. Even window shadows are useful if you are using multiple desktops. The shadows help you acclimate yourself to the window depths faster when you switch desktops (which means you need less bling to understand this concept).
I use mostly text based apps on my machine (mutt/newsbeuter/irssi and Firefox with vimperator) but, I still run gnome with Compiz. The reason is that it offers more and often easier ways to do what I want. Compiz has two main purposes, 1) To do cool things that aren't useful. 2) To do useful things that change the way you use your desktop.
I don't have any buttons on my window frames (no close/min/max buttons) because with compiz (and a good machine), they are pointless. I generally have about 15-20 windows open on a 2x2 desktop. I can see all of them with a single keystroke and select the one I want to view in multiple ways. If I'm using the touchpad during some light browsing, I have screen corners that make it unnecessary to use the keyboard. If I'm coding, I have vi like keybinds that can do the same thing.
Nothing else offers the functionality/configurability of compiz. But, it takes some time to make it work exactly how you want if you are a power user. The real question is, are you willing to accept how people think you should use your machine or are you willing to spend some time tweaking it to your needs. For the latter, there is literally nothing better than compiz.
There are valid reasons to do something like this. In Linux you have/etc/sudoers where you can define that certain applications can be run as root by certain users. It's actually a very useful feature. Though, it's not exactly the same as, "Don't ask again for this application" because you still have to proceed the command by sudo so, you are still aware that you are escalating your privileges.
It sounds to me as if you've never used NoScript. With 10 seconds of configuration, you can make it non-intrusive and blocking all but the top level site. That basically makes all but externally hosted flash apps work fine.
I remember installing Windows 95 from 3.5" floppies many years ago. I remember rebooting after the installation and thinking, "Awesome. What can I do now?" The answer was, "I can boot my computer now." Except for the inclusion of IE, every Windows release since then has left your machine in roughly the same state: Bootable but not useful.
Contrast that to Ubuntu. I installed it on my mothers machine a year ago and, to date, she's never installed another piece of software. She does web/word processing/spreadsheets/ipod syncs/games. With the exception of needing codecs for music/video (which are trivial to install because it almost does it for you), her machine was feature complete upon installation.
Speaking of crime labs, I'm sometimes forced to watch CSI: New York. I sometimes wonder if I'd rather throw myself out the window every time a cut scene of "science" is accompanied by some techno music but, I do recall an episode where there was a murder in a night club. In that episode they detained all the people in the night club and took DNA samples from them. I remember thinking, "If they tried to do that to me, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves and fight the obstruction of justice charge in court".
Shows like this desensitize the public to things like "DNA sample" to the point where they think it's normal and that their information will be treated with care by beautiful and smart people who know a lot about "science". The truth couldn't be further from that.
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Yes but, the OP is about Ubuntu 9.04. It's an alpha version. It will crash. It will lose your data. It will violate your wife. That is the nature of an alpha release. I understand that we are fundamentally talking about ext4 but, the badness of ext4 is only being brought to light by using an alpha level OS.
"The machine crashed" isn't a common situation. In fact, it's a very, very rare situation.
2. Bad Operating System development. If an application kills the kernel, it's usually the kernel's fault (drivers and other code operating in priviledged space is obviously not the kernel's fault) -- and this appears to be a crash initiated from code running in user space. Bad kernel, no cookie for you.
I've been an Ubuntu user for years and I'm always amazed at the state of the kernel during the alpha and beta releases (and at times even the final release). I generally run the latest vanilla kernel from kernel.org. It's always just fine. I honestly don't know how they fuck it up. I've custom compiled kernels for years and never had a kernel panic except when I'm running an Ubuntu kernel.
Wait, are you saying the crashing of an alpha level OS could cause data loss? I find this unfathomable.
Beyond that, he's essentially advocating the Windows Registry. He's a very smart person but, Unix is about dot files. If you take them away you, take away the "Unixness" of the machine. I don't care if a filesystem isn't pleased by hundreds or thousands of tiny config files. That's how the machine works. Make your filesystem handle it.
Cordially,
An ext4 user.
Why not instead use a fast machine and test in virtual machines. Not only do you get a performance hit in the VM, you also get a way to test on varying memory configurations and, more importantly, a clean reproducible environment for testing. Honestly, if you are developing end user software these days and not testing it in a virtual machine, you are doing it wrong.
Only if you buy the Ultimate Edition. The lesser versions don't include SMP support.
Whose fault is this? When I try to use an alternative OS, like Linux, a lot of scanners, USB devices, video-cards, etc. just do not work, as drivers either non-existent or bad, made by rear-engineering. Because the hardware vendors provide drivers only for 1 and only OS.
Now we blame Russia for DDoS attacks. But what Russian government can do? Can it lower the price on the monopoly OS? Can it write drivers for peripheral devices so that people move away from the mono-OS culture?
If the government were actually interested in fixing this situation they could:
1) Create their own linux distro and mandate that the government use it. They have already said they want to do this and it was previously discussed on Slashdot.
2) Pass a law that says no new computer can be sold without a legitimate operating system on it (It doesn't matter if it's Windows, Russian Linux, OSX. It just must be a legal copy). More importantly, enforce the law. This should at least get most or all new computers pre-installed with the Russian OS just to comply with the law.
3) Refuse to let hardware vendors sell a product in Russia if it doesn't work out of the box or have a verified driver for Russian Linux on the installation CD. Linux generally has better hardware support than Windows these days so, this really isn't too onerous of a requirement on hardware vendors.
I'm probably over simplifying but, normal people don't care about their operating system. They want a button to click that connects to the magical "linksys" wifi network, an icon that says Internet under it and an icon that says Office under it. If you give them those three things, there is little chance they will notice the difference and probably less chance that will care enough to "fix" it with a Windows install. Though, they may start to get a little suspicious when they don't have to re-install every 3 months because, "it's going slow".
Yes. Yes it is.
Strange. At the end of the article, the BBC actually presented information that made it seem as if they actually understood what The Pirate Bay does. Either the author of the article asked his IT guys to explain it to him or he knows what it does because he uses it to download copyrighted material. Either scenario is amusing I suppose.
Of course if your child is smart enough to boot in single user mode they can pretty much get around anything but at that point they should be capable of not hosing the system and, if they do, being able to recover it.
You can pretty well lock that down on most machines too. Set the BIOS to boot from the disk first and use a BIOS password (that hopefully applies to any "Select temporary boot device" type messages as well). Then you can set passwords on grub that prevent editing entries or booting "(recovery mode)" kernels with a few changes to /boot/grub/menu.lst. Unless they physically remove the disk, that will keep the vast majority of people from getting root access to your box.
If you are running linux and keep your machine on for non-trivial amounts of time, chances are good that are using all of your RAM. It's just that most of it is going to improve the performance of your machine by filling all unused RAM with the disk cache. I'd call getting stuff from RAM and not disk "something useful".
The idea is for the linker to identify the hot spots in memory, and group as many of them together as possible so they live on common pages. This helps keep those pages from being swapped out of memory to disk due to disuse, which greatly reduces the amount of thrashing your end users will see during normal use. Less thrashing == improved performance.
You were correct until here. This isn't PGO's primary purpose. It may do this to prevent TLB misses but, certainly not to lessen the impact of swapping (which for an average desktop linux user is almost non-existent). Optimization is about making decisions about what is likely to produce the fastest code. If the compiler knows how the code is going to be used, it can make better decisions.
I would imagine that NVidia also has a fairly large patent portfolio where they could find many cases of Intel and AMD/ATI infringing in some way.
Also, how does VIA have a license to make x86 chips? I would imagine they don't have the ability because Intel and AMD decided to be nice to a competitor so, they must have done a patent swapping deal or paid a lot of money.
Actually, Mississippi meets all of your requirements. No open container law, no prohibition of fireworks, and few deed restrictions. In addition, you can vote, and your property can't be taken away without compensation.
Also, in Mississippi, you can do other stuff that you cannot in China, like own an handgun. Or vote.
You can also wear a dirty wife-beater, leave rusted cars on your front lawn and join prestigious organizations that burn crosses.
Mississippi is an all around fantastic place.
Or shut the hell up. How does one even want to compete with something that's free. Certainly not with the quality of their own products, the incredible support services or recent history in innovation.
Monopolies don't need to compete. They just need to maintain their monopoly.
8.04 has become the equivalent of Debian stable. It works for the vast majority of people and if there are specific apps you want to upgrade, you can find newer versions that integrate perfectly with your system. My machine has about 3000 packages installed on it. I only care about 15-20. I just hand upgrade those packages and let the reset sit at their stable state.
Yes, if drinking is a priority for you, you are living in the wrong country. In Argentina (specifically Buenos Aires), you are very rarely more than a block away from a store that will sell you any type of alcohol between 8am and 10pm. If it's later than that, you just need to have built some creds with the people that illegally sell it after 10pm or know the phone number/web address of one of the many places that will deliver it to you in 15 minutes with a 10% markup (these places are legal).
In the U.S. I am always carded for my drinks. In Argentina they just don't care. I'm not even sure at what age you can buy smokes/drinks here is. It's probably socially not acceptable to sell to people over 12 and under 18 because it's perfectly reasonable to send your kid to buy smokes or beer here.
My point is that U.S. liquor laws are insane. Making alcohol taboo contributes to alcoholism. In a country where there are essentially no real alcohol laws, the number of alcoholics is very, very small.
That doesn't really preclude heroin though. Just give them a good dose of it and then do whatever you were going to do to them. They probably won't notice.
Compiz is probably the most customizable WM-ish thing there is. If you don't like bling, turn the bling off. But, there are a lot of useful gems in there that are both non-distracting and useful. Plugins like Scale and Expo don't get in your face until you decide to use them. Even window shadows are useful if you are using multiple desktops. The shadows help you acclimate yourself to the window depths faster when you switch desktops (which means you need less bling to understand this concept).
I use mostly text based apps on my machine (mutt/newsbeuter/irssi and Firefox with vimperator) but, I still run gnome with Compiz. The reason is that it offers more and often easier ways to do what I want. Compiz has two main purposes, 1) To do cool things that aren't useful. 2) To do useful things that change the way you use your desktop.
I don't have any buttons on my window frames (no close/min/max buttons) because with compiz (and a good machine), they are pointless. I generally have about 15-20 windows open on a 2x2 desktop. I can see all of them with a single keystroke and select the one I want to view in multiple ways. If I'm using the touchpad during some light browsing, I have screen corners that make it unnecessary to use the keyboard. If I'm coding, I have vi like keybinds that can do the same thing.
Nothing else offers the functionality/configurability of compiz. But, it takes some time to make it work exactly how you want if you are a power user. The real question is, are you willing to accept how people think you should use your machine or are you willing to spend some time tweaking it to your needs. For the latter, there is literally nothing better than compiz.
There are valid reasons to do something like this. In Linux you have /etc/sudoers where you can define that certain applications can be run as root by certain users. It's actually a very useful feature. Though, it's not exactly the same as, "Don't ask again for this application" because you still have to proceed the command by sudo so, you are still aware that you are escalating your privileges.
It sounds to me as if you've never used NoScript. With 10 seconds of configuration, you can make it non-intrusive and blocking all but the top level site. That basically makes all but externally hosted flash apps work fine.
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I remember installing Windows 95 from 3.5" floppies many years ago. I remember rebooting after the installation and thinking, "Awesome. What can I do now?" The answer was, "I can boot my computer now." Except for the inclusion of IE, every Windows release since then has left your machine in roughly the same state: Bootable but not useful.
Contrast that to Ubuntu. I installed it on my mothers machine a year ago and, to date, she's never installed another piece of software. She does web/word processing/spreadsheets/ipod syncs/games. With the exception of needing codecs for music/video (which are trivial to install because it almost does it for you), her machine was feature complete upon installation.
Speaking of crime labs, I'm sometimes forced to watch CSI: New York. I sometimes wonder if I'd rather throw myself out the window every time a cut scene of "science" is accompanied by some techno music but, I do recall an episode where there was a murder in a night club. In that episode they detained all the people in the night club and took DNA samples from them. I remember thinking, "If they tried to do that to me, I'd tell them to go fuck themselves and fight the obstruction of justice charge in court".
Shows like this desensitize the public to things like "DNA sample" to the point where they think it's normal and that their information will be treated with care by beautiful and smart people who know a lot about "science". The truth couldn't be further from that.