By "single" user, I am not just referring to the number of people who can have unique accounts on the machine. I am talking about system security. Without user accounts, you don't have meaningful file permissions. Every process effectively runs as "root." Granted, most Windows users run as admin anyway, but I believe there are still some things a process running as such a user can't do.
Anyway, it is just a bad design. Maybe average users won't care about running as "root," but at some point it is going to kick them in the ass.
Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user. Nobody in their right mind is going to put anything important on a Be box. Maybe single user (and no meaningful file permissions) would pass in the days of Mac OS 9 or Win 95, but the world has moved on. Security is a real issue for everyone. No matter how much developer and hardware support Zeta gets, it will always suffer from that one fatal design flaw.
Does the world really need a single user OS? I understand many of BeOS's merits, but that is a pretty serious limitation that makes it very undesirable in most situations. You wouldn't run your computer as root, right? Isn't that basically what you are doing when yoiu run BeOS?
Also, backups. It really sucks to pay for expensive "open file agents" just to get a complete backup of a running system. I can almost understand locking a file for writing. But reading? Come on. Let me read the damn file so i can backup.
We're seeing this happening with things like "it's vs. its" and "their vs. they're vs. there" in some people's usage as well. Every time the spelling distinction between words breaks down, it becomes significantly more difficult for anything short of a person to get meaning out of a sentence. That's why there are so many spelling/grammar nazis on slashdot. If we don't, in a matter of just a few years, we'll get to the point where nobody can understand anything.
While I am one to appreciate good grammer and spelling, I hardly think that people English will become more difficult for native speakers to understand or use. As long as everyone screws it up in a consensual manner, we'll know what others mean.
There is a difference between a "corrupted drive" and a drive that has been overwritten with new data, e.g. zeros. It is quite unlikely that you would be able to recover any data from a modern drive that has been completely overwritten... even once. That is way beyond your average data recovery professional.
The do-not-call-list has worked great for me. Since I signed up I have gotten zero telemarketers. Just a couple pollsters. After I got VoIP (kept my phone number), I started getting telemarketer calls again and i thought the do-not-call thing wasn't working. Then I learned that any time the service on a number is change in any way (such as going from POTS to VoIP) it gets removed from the list and you have to add it again. I added it again and the calls stopped.
I don't really know why your business is still getting calls. Are you getting called by telemarketers or just cold calls from B2B sales people? Perhaps they are calling one of the numbers in your hunt group and not your main number? Did you add ALL your businesses numbers to the list? Most businesses will have a group of numbers with one "main" number that autoforwards to a free line in a group.
I've been using Linux for almost a decade now. I've settled on the distribution that I prefer (Debian). But I recently started a new sysadmin job where they run mostly FSBD web/mail servers. I had a chance to build a new mail gateway. I resisted the temptation to just go with what I was comfortable with (Debian) and I installed FBSD.
My first impression is that FBSD is like another distribution of Linux. I don't mean pigeonhole FBSD. And I realize it may come as an insult, but after using so many different flavors of Linux, that is what the differences amount to as far as I am concerned. And looking at it as a distribution of Linux, it isn't all that impressive. I dont' particularly care to compile most software from source. Although the ports system does offer some very up to date packages (if you cvsup), if I wanted to to compile everything from source and have bleeding edge versions of stuff, I'd just run Gentoo Linux. The Gentoo portage system is much more refined than the old, clunky BSD ports system. Overall, Debian's packaging system beats all, hands down, IMO.
On a server it isn't such a big deal to compile everything from source because generally you install it and let it run for months or years with only minor updates. But on a workstation it is downright annoying.
Is there any reason why I shouldn't look at FBSD as if it were a flavor of Linux? Yeah, it has a different kernel. I guess FBSD might be a little faster? That is what the benchmarks say, but the difference isn't staggering. I certainly don't notice. Is it more stable? I haven't had many problems with Linux that couldn't be blamed on cheap PC hardware.
Anyway, I'll continue using FBSD where I work if only because there is no compelling reason NOT to use it. I probably could convert it all to Linux if I really wanted to.
The bottom line is that electricity has a certain value. It doesn't matter how it is generated. Currently electricity is valued much higher than chemical (gasoline) energy per kWh. Even before the 12% conversion effiency, using electrcity for cars isn't economical. It can't compete with fossil fuels (yet). Now consider the 12% (in)efficiency of converting and using hydrogen as fuel in cars. It just isn't goign to happen.
You just can't say "oh, just use a cheap source of electricity." It doesn't work that way. If I am a power company who can sell electricity for $0.25/kWh on the retail market, why in the world would I bother converting that to hydrogen which would sell to consumers for a lot less as auto fuel.
Some quick math: A gallon of gasoline contains about 60 kWh or energy. Say gas costs $3/gallon. Even at this relatively high gas price, you're only paying $0.05 per kWh!
If you were to convert electricty (at $.25/kWh) to hydrogen, you would pay $15 for a gallon of gas worth of energy!
There's no reason for us to believe that Mars doesn't have the same minerals as the earth does. And they haven't been exploited like Earth's have, so they're in easily accessible locations.
"No reason to believe that Mars doesn't have..." isn't really good enough, is it? I imagine it would take quite a bit of surveying and study to determine if mining Mars is even feasable at all. Up until now, we've literally only scatched the surface.
Everything that's needed to survive on Mars is already there, except for humans and the machinery they need to survive and thrive.
Gee, is that it? Wow, one wonders why we're not there already.
How expensive is it going to be to launch all that material into space from the martian surface? Maybe a little cheaper than from Earth, but then you have complex and expensive stations and life support to maintain as well. This is a stupid idea. Mining asteroids or something would be a whole lot better. Not that I see any of this happening by 2025, of course. I think we'll be lucky just to have our first human driving around in a buggy by then. Forget about commercial enterprises.
What is the big deal about desktop searching, anyway? Are people REALLY having so much trouble finding files on their own computer? Don't most people just save files to wherever Word wants to put them (My Documents)? Don't people know how to organize their own files so that they can find them without complex search tools? The only time I ever use search tools is to find OS and application files. And how many users do THAT?
Indeed, XP to Vista will be even slower than 2000 -> XP because most home users werent' actually running 2000, they were running 98. 98 to XP was a pretty big upgrade for home users suffering under the burden of a nearly worthless "consumer" OS. XP is really the first decent "consumer" OS that MS has put out. I personally don't think that a few extra features in Vista are enough to get most people to upgrade from XP.
In the case of diamonds on Mars, I imagine Da Beers would leverage their ungodly influence and shut down all Mars exploration to protect the price of diamonds.
Sure, but there were still child labor laws that were passed. And other various labor laws that have made blue collar work far less dangerous and exausting. The point is that businesses are always going to complain about regulations that favor the environment and workers, but they adapt.
What makes you think that the government telling them to work harder or sets some goals will do any good?? It will only cause them more paperwork and more inefficiences as they race to conform to some short-sighted, politically backed goal that is already a comprimise between multiple countries.
Oh, I dunno. Didn't CAFE, for example, do a pretty good job of increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles? Don't emissions regulations keep cars from poluting as much as they would without the regulations? There are plenty of areas where government regulations keep companies in check for the benefit of the environment. There are some things that free markets will not work out on their own. Sometimes it is more profitable to be wasteful and to polute and it needs to be regulated.
Reduce the level of experience required to support the IT infrastructure and you save a fortune. The only problem is that if a real problem occurs, no one knows how to fix it if there is no button on the GUI that says "fix problem".
Right, so you hire a consultant and blow your wage saving out of the water. Or worse, double up on your IT staff to try to compensate for their incompetence. As a consultant, I can't tell youhow many companies I have gone to which had 5 IT people doing the job of 2 or 3 and they STILL needed to bring in consultants.
But they (embedded develoeprs) will fork it because that is how they get it to do what they want. That is the whole point of this article. Proprietary developers WILL fork the code and the advantage BSD offers is that they don't have to release their fork back to the public. It is about licensing, not which one is more "stable."
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By "single" user, I am not just referring to the number of people who can have unique accounts on the machine. I am talking about system security. Without user accounts, you don't have meaningful file permissions. Every process effectively runs as "root." Granted, most Windows users run as admin anyway, but I believe there are still some things a process running as such a user can't do.
Anyway, it is just a bad design. Maybe average users won't care about running as "root," but at some point it is going to kick them in the ass.
-matthew
Heh, and here I was dd'ing my files (incrementing the 'seek' value) to "split" my files. You are a godsend! Thank you!
-matthew
Economies of scale.
Zeta/Be has one serious, and ultimately fatal, flaw. It is single user. Nobody in their right mind is going to put anything important on a Be box. Maybe single user (and no meaningful file permissions) would pass in the days of Mac OS 9 or Win 95, but the world has moved on. Security is a real issue for everyone. No matter how much developer and hardware support Zeta gets, it will always suffer from that one fatal design flaw.
-matthew
Please tell me that you didn't pay $95...
Does the world really need a single user OS? I understand many of BeOS's merits, but that is a pretty serious limitation that makes it very undesirable in most situations. You wouldn't run your computer as root, right? Isn't that basically what you are doing when yoiu run BeOS?
-matthew
Also, backups. It really sucks to pay for expensive "open file agents" just to get a complete backup of a running system. I can almost understand locking a file for writing. But reading? Come on. Let me read the damn file so i can backup.
-matthew
While I am one to appreciate good grammer and spelling, I hardly think that people English will become more difficult for native speakers to understand or use. As long as everyone screws it up in a consensual manner, we'll know what others mean.
-matthew
Is that before or after you proactively synergize with a paradigm shift?
-matthew
There is a difference between a "corrupted drive" and a drive that has been overwritten with new data, e.g. zeros. It is quite unlikely that you would be able to recover any data from a modern drive that has been completely overwritten... even once. That is way beyond your average data recovery professional.
-matthew
The do-not-call-list has worked great for me. Since I signed up I have gotten zero telemarketers. Just a couple pollsters. After I got VoIP (kept my phone number), I started getting telemarketer calls again and i thought the do-not-call thing wasn't working. Then I learned that any time the service on a number is change in any way (such as going from POTS to VoIP) it gets removed from the list and you have to add it again. I added it again and the calls stopped.
I don't really know why your business is still getting calls. Are you getting called by telemarketers or just cold calls from B2B sales people? Perhaps they are calling one of the numbers in your hunt group and not your main number? Did you add ALL your businesses numbers to the list? Most businesses will have a group of numbers with one "main" number that autoforwards to a free line in a group.
-matthew
When does Joe Sixpack even consider backing up *any* data?
-matthew
I've been using Linux for almost a decade now. I've settled on the distribution that I prefer (Debian). But I recently started a new sysadmin job where they run mostly FSBD web/mail servers. I had a chance to build a new mail gateway. I resisted the temptation to just go with what I was comfortable with (Debian) and I installed FBSD.
My first impression is that FBSD is like another distribution of Linux. I don't mean pigeonhole FBSD. And I realize it may come as an insult, but after using so many different flavors of Linux, that is what the differences amount to as far as I am concerned. And looking at it as a distribution of Linux, it isn't all that impressive. I dont' particularly care to compile most software from source. Although the ports system does offer some very up to date packages (if you cvsup), if I wanted to to compile everything from source and have bleeding edge versions of stuff, I'd just run Gentoo Linux. The Gentoo portage system is much more refined than the old, clunky BSD ports system. Overall, Debian's packaging system beats all, hands down, IMO.
On a server it isn't such a big deal to compile everything from source because generally you install it and let it run for months or years with only minor updates. But on a workstation it is downright annoying.
Is there any reason why I shouldn't look at FBSD as if it were a flavor of Linux? Yeah, it has a different kernel. I guess FBSD might be a little faster? That is what the benchmarks say, but the difference isn't staggering. I certainly don't notice. Is it more stable? I haven't had many problems with Linux that couldn't be blamed on cheap PC hardware.
Anyway, I'll continue using FBSD where I work if only because there is no compelling reason NOT to use it. I probably could convert it all to Linux if I really wanted to.
-matthew
The bottom line is that electricity has a certain value. It doesn't matter how it is generated. Currently electricity is valued much higher than chemical (gasoline) energy per kWh. Even before the 12% conversion effiency, using electrcity for cars isn't economical. It can't compete with fossil fuels (yet). Now consider the 12% (in)efficiency of converting and using hydrogen as fuel in cars. It just isn't goign to happen.
You just can't say "oh, just use a cheap source of electricity." It doesn't work that way. If I am a power company who can sell electricity for $0.25/kWh on the retail market, why in the world would I bother converting that to hydrogen which would sell to consumers for a lot less as auto fuel.
Some quick math: A gallon of gasoline contains about 60 kWh or energy. Say gas costs $3/gallon. Even at this relatively high gas price, you're only paying $0.05 per kWh!
If you were to convert electricty (at $.25/kWh) to hydrogen, you would pay $15 for a gallon of gas worth of energy!
-matthew
"No reason to believe that Mars doesn't have..." isn't really good enough, is it? I imagine it would take quite a bit of surveying and study to determine if mining Mars is even feasable at all. Up until now, we've literally only scatched the surface.
Everything that's needed to survive on Mars is already there, except for humans and the machinery they need to survive and thrive.
Gee, is that it? Wow, one wonders why we're not there already.
-matthew
Driving around in a buggy... on mars, that is.
-matthew
How expensive is it going to be to launch all that material into space from the martian surface? Maybe a little cheaper than from Earth, but then you have complex and expensive stations and life support to maintain as well. This is a stupid idea. Mining asteroids or something would be a whole lot better. Not that I see any of this happening by 2025, of course. I think we'll be lucky just to have our first human driving around in a buggy by then. Forget about commercial enterprises.
-matthew
What is the big deal about desktop searching, anyway? Are people REALLY having so much trouble finding files on their own computer? Don't most people just save files to wherever Word wants to put them (My Documents)? Don't people know how to organize their own files so that they can find them without complex search tools? The only time I ever use search tools is to find OS and application files. And how many users do THAT?
-matthew
Indeed, XP to Vista will be even slower than 2000 -> XP because most home users werent' actually running 2000, they were running 98. 98 to XP was a pretty big upgrade for home users suffering under the burden of a nearly worthless "consumer" OS. XP is really the first decent "consumer" OS that MS has put out. I personally don't think that a few extra features in Vista are enough to get most people to upgrade from XP.
-matthew
In the case of diamonds on Mars, I imagine Da Beers would leverage their ungodly influence and shut down all Mars exploration to protect the price of diamonds.
-matthew
I don't think people equate junk mail and spam as much as you think. Here are a few reasons:
- The sender has to pay to send junk mail. In other words, nobody's resources are getting abused.
- It is self limiting. It costs money to print and send junk mail (see above).
- Junk mail is well regulated. I don't think they can send things like porno adverts in the mail.
Sure, but there were still child labor laws that were passed. And other various labor laws that have made blue collar work far less dangerous and exausting. The point is that businesses are always going to complain about regulations that favor the environment and workers, but they adapt.
-matthew
Oh, I dunno. Didn't CAFE, for example, do a pretty good job of increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles? Don't emissions regulations keep cars from poluting as much as they would without the regulations? There are plenty of areas where government regulations keep companies in check for the benefit of the environment. There are some things that free markets will not work out on their own. Sometimes it is more profitable to be wasteful and to polute and it needs to be regulated.
-matthew
Right, so you hire a consultant and blow your wage saving out of the water. Or worse, double up on your IT staff to try to compensate for their incompetence. As a consultant, I can't tell youhow many companies I have gone to which had 5 IT people doing the job of 2 or 3 and they STILL needed to bring in consultants.
-matthew
But they (embedded develoeprs) will fork it because that is how they get it to do what they want. That is the whole point of this article. Proprietary developers WILL fork the code and the advantage BSD offers is that they don't have to release their fork back to the public. It is about licensing, not which one is more "stable."
-matthew