Yeah, but lets face it, the same functionality is available under linux and myriad other OSes as 'libraries'. The fuzzy area comes in deciding what libaraies are 'OS' and what are 'App'. libc is OS, for example... would libjpeg be part of the OS? Or, in the case of Macs, would libqtime? Some would say yes, others no.
In the end it doesn't matter at all. Same functionality, different name. Of course, we can't sit idly by and let people say that unix isn't an OS, as labels unfortunately do have power in the minds of those who don't know any better. Someone earlier commented offhandedly that 'nothing but windows will be considered an OS'... that might be a bit extreme, but if there's a common conception that unix isn't "really an OS" by the masses, it'd be a difficult meme to overcome.
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The entire article is based around the concept that because people want more in a package (ostensibly called an Operating System) that the circle one draws around where the core OS ends and the Apps start should be expanded.
About the only solid opinion you'll find about what an OS is comes from the unix purists he comments on. They feel that the OS is the kernel, drivers, libraries, and that's it. Ask anyone else with some competancy and they'll draw the line anywhere from the kernel all the way out to whatever comes on a CD from the distributor.
Hey, if he feels that all the 'traditional' stuff, plus whatever new goodies people have come to expect, should be lumped together and considered an OS, then ducky for him. It's a totally relative distinction.
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There is overlap, but Oracle goodies, from the sound of the comments made by the guys who talked at our local users group, can really do entirely without an underlying operating system like NT... part of the reason why they're looking closely at Linux, because they can strip it out to the bare essentials and turn it into OracleOS.
I can't comment with certainty about thier market share, but I'd expect that big business is thier primary consumer, and BB is gonna buy whatever it need to get the job done, MS trash, Oracle, et al.
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You don't see oracle crushing competetors they can't buy or bully. You don't hear people complaining about how oracle works, technically speaking.
Oracle has a damn fine reputation as being the best (or among the best) provider of business solutions (read: big ass data mulinexing) because they make damn fine software. Thier marketshare is based predominantly on merit, and not some massive marketing campaign. In fact, the first time I've recall ever seeing oracle ads on TV was around a year ago.
So given that the company overall has a good attitude and produces great products, then yeah... I'm fully prepared to cut them some slack in the corporate shenangians area. I think doing a dirt dig is a scummy move, but in a way it seems almost poetic justice that they're doing em on the lackeys of Bill, the grand poobah of scummy moves.
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I agree... PHP programming is a snap if you're at all familiar with C or Perl. I literally picked up most of the language symantics and functions inside of a day while on a work trip to L.A. from the documentation online, and in a few days churned out this site, and went on to do this one as an encore.
It could be laid out a little better, but the docs worked fine for me.
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I've had similar happy experiences. In almost every company I've worked for, Cisco has been used as our gateway to the rest of the world. From time to time, problems have arisen (don't they always?) and every call to Cisco was a tech support dream... quick to respond, very comprehensive, and knowledgable.
The Cisco guys seem to take pride in working with their customers (that is, the END USERS, not the distributors or any other middleman) when there's a problem and fixing it as quickly as possible, even going so far as to patch router OSes to accomodate your particular unusual requirements.
I've used linux boxes as routers and such for low-intensity applications, and they work pretty good... but when I need to push big data reliably, Cisco is the only way to go IMO.
With the majority of other admins I know out there having similar experiences and thinking the same way about Cisco, it's not hard to understand how they can be worth as much or more than MS and still have a good PR rep. Perhaps MS could learn a couple things from Cisco and make their customers happier.
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I used to be an avid MST3K fan prior to it going off the air here, so naturally I couldn't resist giving this beast a try...
It may not last more than 15-20 minutes, but it was 15-20 minutes of laughter so concentrated that my lungs now hurt. The original game is so mind-bogglingly crappy it'd probably make one laugh anyways (as a defensive measure for your brain), but the MST3k-ification of it all turns it into an incredible masterpiece. EVERY old school text adventurer should check it out.
Even if you don't have frotz yet, get it and try it out. I'll even make it easy for you:
Funny, I remember bitching about the problems with 2.2.1 when I first plugged it in. Noone claims that linux is perfect, except trolls such as yourself (and then only when claiming that someone else said it).
What's the difference? Well, for one thing, I didn't pay for it. And I won't ever have to... unless you want to factor in the cost of a blank CD.
Of course, a pathetic, whiney little troll like yourself would rather just point fingers and bitch and complain when people don't fall into line with your steaming pile of dogma.
Make that pathetic, whiney little ANONYMOUS troll.
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I've been involved in reasonably large software projects (not MILLIONS of lines of code, but getting up there) and I'm acutely aware that as code complexity and size goes up, so does the bug count... or at least the potential from it.
I wouldn't even go so far as to say win2k is inferior overall. It has its good points and bad points, like any other OS. The reason, I think, that the thing was posted to/. (aside from the fact that/.ers have a lot of fun slapping down MS) is that this announcement came RIGHT on the tail end of the 'commitment to security' announcement, and we do love our ironies.
I'll agree with you on the price thing though... for what they ship, they're definately charging a premium... which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except they also have a tendancy to charge even more for the bug fixes they're supposed to provide FoC. Ah well.
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It is available. The CD has already gone gold and is basically waiting for the 'release date' before going on the shelves. Each new box of Win2k will have a now well-publicized security hole right out of the box, and as we all know very few win2k users will go and get the fixes immediately after install... "I mean, it's brand new, right? Why would you need to get updates to something that's just been released?"
The equivalent, I suppose, would be RedHat investing megabucks in a marketing campain, coming out with RH7.0, and as the CD is being pressed a big ol' bug is shown to exist in a major app that EVERYONE will install (cuz they have no choice). I say app, because very very few kernel based exploits exist. People rewting using stack overflows and such are far more commonplace, and those bugs extend to all platforms which allow stack smashing.
... and if there's "cackling", it's probably mostly motivated by the fact that we were just inundated with mickeysoft's pledge to security. Ah, yeah, right, kay.
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There's a lot of speculation as to whether (weather?;) or not we're having an effect on climate AT ALL. While I don't have the urls to studies on hand, I have come across more than one environmental researcher who adroitly points out that a volcanic eruption pours out enormous amounts SO2, Methane, and other nasty nitrates, hydrates, and just about every other -ates one can think of, not to mention a boatload of particulate matter... some speculate that humans have thus far produced as many of these nasty chemicals in our entire existance as a race on this planet as the equivalent of a couple of pompeii-grade volcanic explosions.
If that's the case, then we're really just along for the ride and the planet's at the wheel. We know the earth has undergone radical climatic changes in her past (egypt was relatively fertile back 6000 years ago, for example). Perhaps our latest climatic changes are just symptomatic of the 'next big swing'.
When it comes to weather on a geological time scale, we are pretty clueless. Good theories may abound, but unless someone can tell us with certainty when the next ice age is coming or when we're gonna go venusian most people will ignore the situation until it's "too late"... particularly when we can't even say with certainty that pollution we generate is the deciding factor in it all. In that case, is there such a thing as "too late" when really you don't have a significant ability to control it anyways?
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Whoop... you're right. I referred to it as beta when I knew specifically that it was in alpha. My bad.
MS never releases completed software. They're in a constant state of 'Public Beta'.;) It's just unfortunate that it's a public beta one has to pay to get in.
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I would imagine that, aside from sucking down excess CO2 from the oxygen here on earth (which I personally can't see being all that effective in comparison to the diverse and highly efficient ways that nature has already developed), there would be other handy uses for this technology.
Basically, they're advocating using CO2 as what amounts to a chemically-based energy storage unit. Methanol may not be the most human or environmentally friendly substance, but it IS easily convertable back into energy, stable and easy to transport, etc. I could see this technology being used (in conjunction with solar or other more convential power systems) as a method of extracting portable energy to fuel rovers and such on Mars, where there's an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere waiting to be harnessed.
All very 'blue sky', of course. I'd expect that there's other fuel source methodologies that would be more efficient than this process too.
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Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the global warming effect. For that reason, a lot of people equate CO2 with global warming. There are, of course, a lot of other atmospheric effects that effect total heat absorbtion and retention, but bringing up details like that tend to confuse people. Easier for the media to use simple words, like "Too much CO2 = Global Warming. Global Warming BAD!" I always thought that a majority of the worlds CO2 gets fixed into Limestone, but it's been a while since I've done geology stuffies. Of course, the difference between calcification and trees is that trees spit out what we need as fast as they take up what we spit out. Gotta love the symmetry of that. Not to mention that most people have had personal contact with trees (skiiers especially;) whereas few people will have the luxury of being up close and personal to, say, the great barrier reef outside of a Jacques Cousteau video rerun. BTW, you CAN use <A HREF=...> tags in your comments, like on that Bad Greenhouse Link.
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I'd like to think that a rather large number of trees and other assorted foliage would disagree with that comment.
Carbon Dioxide is not 'noxious', any more than our exhaled breaths are. The threat it represents is that of a greenhouse gas, effectively operating as a heat retainer for our planet.
Although, now that I think about it, some people's exhalations are pretty noxious...;)
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I didn't try M12 (too busy doing Real Life(tm) stuff), but M13 is certainly in the ballpark of NS4.7 in a lot of things, and appears to be substantially faster in such things as complex table rendering.
P2-333 w. 128mb, Riva TNT video, RH6.1.
There's still some work to be done with certain aspects (scrolling is nice and clean, UNLESS you wiggle the scrollbar up and down... then it gets kinda sluggish. Oh, and the key repeat rate is friggin' painful. Use the mouse to navigate around text entry boxes). It's apparent that it's still in beta, but it's come a *LONG* way.
At the very least it's worth checking out.
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I managed to snarf it just as the comment got posted. I'm glad I got it early.
M13 is definately worthy of being called a browser now. The rendering speed has substantially improved, and there doesn't appear to be suffering any of the old rendering glitchies. Scrolling is finally nice and smooth. Slashdot appears to render pretty much exactly as NS4.7 does it.
I'm quite impressed with the rendering speed of complex tables. A stats matrix I generate as part of a traffic tracking system produces a page with several thousand elements... M13 was able to rip through that in about a second, give or take.5. Verrry nice.
There's still some UI issues... text centering, odd ugliness here and there. For example, it'd be nice to have the mouse switch to a pointy-style when hovering over a scrollbar, rather than staying in the "I" shape (which only occurs periodically, so there's obviously some sort of glitch there). It IS still alpha though, I won't sweat it too much.
Keep up the excellent work Mozilla peeps. You're almost there.
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Agreed. Many's the time when I'm doing some serious coding in text mode and I don't wanna futz around with netscape et al... I'll just fire up w3m and point it at slashdot. Works beautifully, and I never have to wait for those slowass banners to pop up.
(In my experience, most of the slashdot slowdowns I've seen are because of the ad banners taking forever to load).
Java has it's place, but it unfortunately hasn't lived up to its hype in time for it to be the ubiquitously accepted language touted to be. The fact that you have to stop just short of sacrificing your first child to the java gods in order to get IO to implement cleanly doesn't help much either. Yes yes, I know you can get newer versions of Java which "fix all the old problems". Unless you're using it as a language for embedded apps or intranet glue (or other situations where you have direct control over the running environment), you're producing products for the general populace and most people's java availability begins and ends on their webbrowser.
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Slashdot Mirror
In the end it doesn't matter at all. Same functionality, different name. Of course, we can't sit idly by and let people say that unix isn't an OS, as labels unfortunately do have power in the minds of those who don't know any better. Someone earlier commented offhandedly that 'nothing but windows will be considered an OS'... that might be a bit extreme, but if there's a common conception that unix isn't "really an OS" by the masses, it'd be a difficult meme to overcome.
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Yep! ;)
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About the only solid opinion you'll find about what an OS is comes from the unix purists he comments on. They feel that the OS is the kernel, drivers, libraries, and that's it. Ask anyone else with some competancy and they'll draw the line anywhere from the kernel all the way out to whatever comes on a CD from the distributor.
Hey, if he feels that all the 'traditional' stuff, plus whatever new goodies people have come to expect, should be lumped together and considered an OS, then ducky for him. It's a totally relative distinction.
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Heh... with the numbers of chipsets and sockets et al that motherboards in circulation today have, we 're almost at that point already. ;)
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(Yes, I'll take a couple of those 6.0225x10^23 SIMMs, please...)
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I can't comment with certainty about thier market share, but I'd expect that big business is thier primary consumer, and BB is gonna buy whatever it need to get the job done, MS trash, Oracle, et al.
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Oracle has a damn fine reputation as being the best (or among the best) provider of business solutions (read: big ass data mulinexing) because they make damn fine software. Thier marketshare is based predominantly on merit, and not some massive marketing campaign. In fact, the first time I've recall ever seeing oracle ads on TV was around a year ago.
So given that the company overall has a good attitude and produces great products, then yeah... I'm fully prepared to cut them some slack in the corporate shenangians area. I think doing a dirt dig is a scummy move, but in a way it seems almost poetic justice that they're doing em on the lackeys of Bill, the grand poobah of scummy moves.
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It could be laid out a little better, but the docs worked fine for me.
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I couldn't say based on terms of engineering, of course.
You missed PHP in there, which IMO kicks ASP's ass. =)
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"The LINE must be DRAWN HE-AH!"
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The Cisco guys seem to take pride in working with their customers (that is, the END USERS, not the distributors or any other middleman) when there's a problem and fixing it as quickly as possible, even going so far as to patch router OSes to accomodate your particular unusual requirements.
I've used linux boxes as routers and such for low-intensity applications, and they work pretty good... but when I need to push big data reliably, Cisco is the only way to go IMO.
With the majority of other admins I know out there having similar experiences and thinking the same way about Cisco, it's not hard to understand how they can be worth as much or more than MS and still have a good PR rep. Perhaps MS could learn a couple things from Cisco and make their customers happier.
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Win 98 = Win 95 + bugfixes + MSIE + some few odd fiddlybits
Sounds like 'paying for the service packs' to me.
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Ah well. Hopefully someone'll record it and post an archive.
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It may not last more than 15-20 minutes, but it was 15-20 minutes of laughter so concentrated that my lungs now hurt. The original game is so mind-bogglingly crappy it'd probably make one laugh anyways (as a defensive measure for your brain), but the MST3k-ification of it all turns it into an incredible masterpiece. EVERY old school text adventurer should check it out.
Even if you don't have frotz yet, get it and try it out. I'll even make it easy for you:
MST3Kified z-code game 'detective'
FT P Directory with Frotz (Most would want to get the src.rpm)
It's definately worth the time.
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What's the difference? Well, for one thing, I didn't pay for it. And I won't ever have to... unless you want to factor in the cost of a blank CD.
Of course, a pathetic, whiney little troll like yourself would rather just point fingers and bitch and complain when people don't fall into line with your steaming pile of dogma.
Make that pathetic, whiney little ANONYMOUS troll.
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I wouldn't even go so far as to say win2k is inferior overall. It has its good points and bad points, like any other OS. The reason, I think, that the thing was posted to /. (aside from the fact that /.ers have a lot of fun slapping down MS) is that this announcement came RIGHT on the tail end of the 'commitment to security' announcement, and we do love our ironies.
I'll agree with you on the price thing though... for what they ship, they're definately charging a premium... which in and of itself wouldn't be so bad, except they also have a tendancy to charge even more for the bug fixes they're supposed to provide FoC. Ah well.
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It is available. The CD has already gone gold and is basically waiting for the 'release date' before going on the shelves. Each new box of Win2k will have a now well-publicized security hole right out of the box, and as we all know very few win2k users will go and get the fixes immediately after install... "I mean, it's brand new, right? Why would you need to get updates to something that's just been released?"
The equivalent, I suppose, would be RedHat investing megabucks in a marketing campain, coming out with RH7.0, and as the CD is being pressed a big ol' bug is shown to exist in a major app that EVERYONE will install (cuz they have no choice). I say app, because very very few kernel based exploits exist. People rewting using stack overflows and such are far more commonplace, and those bugs extend to all platforms which allow stack smashing.
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If that's the case, then we're really just along for the ride and the planet's at the wheel. We know the earth has undergone radical climatic changes in her past (egypt was relatively fertile back 6000 years ago, for example). Perhaps our latest climatic changes are just symptomatic of the 'next big swing'.
When it comes to weather on a geological time scale, we are pretty clueless. Good theories may abound, but unless someone can tell us with certainty when the next ice age is coming or when we're gonna go venusian most people will ignore the situation until it's "too late"... particularly when we can't even say with certainty that pollution we generate is the deciding factor in it all. In that case, is there such a thing as "too late" when really you don't have a significant ability to control it anyways?
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MS never releases completed software. They're in a constant state of 'Public Beta'. ;) It's just unfortunate that it's a public beta one has to pay to get in.
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Basically, they're advocating using CO2 as what amounts to a chemically-based energy storage unit. Methanol may not be the most human or environmentally friendly substance, but it IS easily convertable back into energy, stable and easy to transport, etc. I could see this technology being used (in conjunction with solar or other more convential power systems) as a method of extracting portable energy to fuel rovers and such on Mars, where there's an abundance of CO2 in the atmosphere waiting to be harnessed.
All very 'blue sky', of course. I'd expect that there's other fuel source methodologies that would be more efficient than this process too.
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Carbon dioxide is a major contributor to the global warming effect. For that reason, a lot of people equate CO2 with global warming. There are, of course, a lot of other atmospheric effects that effect total heat absorbtion and retention, but bringing up details like that tend to confuse people. Easier for the media to use simple words, like "Too much CO2 = Global Warming. Global Warming BAD!" I always thought that a majority of the worlds CO2 gets fixed into Limestone, but it's been a while since I've done geology stuffies. Of course, the difference between calcification and trees is that trees spit out what we need as fast as they take up what we spit out. Gotta love the symmetry of that. Not to mention that most people have had personal contact with trees (skiiers especially ;) whereas few people will have the luxury of being up close and personal to, say, the great barrier reef outside of a Jacques Cousteau video rerun. BTW, you CAN use <A HREF=...> tags in your comments, like on that Bad Greenhouse Link.
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Carbon Dioxide is not 'noxious', any more than our exhaled breaths are. The threat it represents is that of a greenhouse gas, effectively operating as a heat retainer for our planet.
Although, now that I think about it, some people's exhalations are pretty noxious... ;)
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P2-333 w. 128mb, Riva TNT video, RH6.1.
There's still some work to be done with certain aspects (scrolling is nice and clean, UNLESS you wiggle the scrollbar up and down... then it gets kinda sluggish. Oh, and the key repeat rate is friggin' painful. Use the mouse to navigate around text entry boxes). It's apparent that it's still in beta, but it's come a *LONG* way.
At the very least it's worth checking out.
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M13 is definately worthy of being called a browser now. The rendering speed has substantially improved, and there doesn't appear to be suffering any of the old rendering glitchies. Scrolling is finally nice and smooth. Slashdot appears to render pretty much exactly as NS4.7 does it.
I'm quite impressed with the rendering speed of complex tables. A stats matrix I generate as part of a traffic tracking system produces a page with several thousand elements... M13 was able to rip through that in about a second, give or take .5. Verrry nice.
There's still some UI issues... text centering, odd ugliness here and there. For example, it'd be nice to have the mouse switch to a pointy-style when hovering over a scrollbar, rather than staying in the "I" shape (which only occurs periodically, so there's obviously some sort of glitch there). It IS still alpha though, I won't sweat it too much.
Keep up the excellent work Mozilla peeps. You're almost there.
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(In my experience, most of the slashdot slowdowns I've seen are because of the ad banners taking forever to load).
Java has it's place, but it unfortunately hasn't lived up to its hype in time for it to be the ubiquitously accepted language touted to be. The fact that you have to stop just short of sacrificing your first child to the java gods in order to get IO to implement cleanly doesn't help much either. Yes yes, I know you can get newer versions of Java which "fix all the old problems". Unless you're using it as a language for embedded apps or intranet glue (or other situations where you have direct control over the running environment), you're producing products for the general populace and most people's java availability begins and ends on their webbrowser.
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