That would be true if the plan was to get bladdered. However, I drink because I like the taste or beer, because being slightly drunk is fun and, most of all, because it's a comfortable, social atmosphere in which to speak with people.
That comment did nothing to improve my impression of you damned yanks.
Three pints of Guiness is a quick lunchtime thirst-quencher, certainly nothing like enough to make me have a "rip roarin' good time" if I wasn't already.
Sheesh, three pints of Goodness was my usual lunch during finals..
Watch it, slag. Linus has made a couple of questionable decisions in the past, but he has basically been a very responsible maintainer.
I grepped the CREDITS and MAINTAINERS files for "Anonymous Coward", but found no mention of you - perhaps you have no kernel coding credentials either.
This means SGI, et al, will put in hours to work on Linux' multi-processor capability. It needs to be much more scalable than it is, for the OS to get the most out of the SGI hardware. Doubly so, when SGI produces the 8 processor version.
Kernel 2.3 has the TCP stack made a lot more scalable and the page cache (the primary "disk" cache) now has basically linear scaling.
SGI didn't do this. Sun didn't do this. IBM, SCO and Intel didn't do it. Microsoft certainly didn't do this (though they may have provided some impetus:).
It was designed by Linus and implemented primarily by Mingo (now apparently working for Red Hat).
It's nice that we'll see some cool (and pretty) SGI boxes running Linux, but we don't need them to address out deficiencies for us.
If I were a real kernel hacker (as opposed to just playing with it a bit), I would find the inference that Linux needs "real" Unix companies to address its deficiencies for it rather insulting.
If they were really committed, they'd do some of the more boring work for us, or the stuff which needs big bucks to get involved. They could work on getting us C2 rated, or address some of Linux's POSIX non-conformancies. Or they could have done some decent benchmarking before Microsoft beat us to it.
To be fair to SGI, they do seem to have a few developers doing real and useful work, and I'm glad of that, but I don't see why they should get all the fun jobs, and get paid for it:-)
One last point: when Linux advocates tell you it's free, they are right in every sense of the word, AS LONG AS YOU WANT TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN PROBLEMS. If you want someone else to do your worrying for you, you have to pay for that. That will never change. Linux gives you back control, but you still own your headaches.
You forgot to mention that you can pay Linux people to have headaches for you as well as NT people.
BBC Online are a pretty traditional Apache/Solaris/Oracle shop for most (public facing) things.
They do, however, have some Linux in development positions and a lot of it doing things like file/print/DNS/dhcp.
I was told only a couple of weeks ago that BBC1 would probably be off-air within a few hours of their Linux boxes getting pulled. It may not be powering their Oracle boxes yet, but that still sounds pretty mission-critical to me...
Matthew - just finished a www project with the BBC.
The Linux/SGI people used to call their RH-derived distro Hard Hat, but they had to change it, because Red Hat weren't too happy about it, as I recall.
I hope that they do the Right Thing(tm) and release sources.
Binary-only is fine for those of us who use RedHat on i386 which seems to be a sort of reference platform in some ways, but I'd like to be able to make use of that hardware on other PCI machines (are there non-Intel AGP machines?) or on BSD boxes.
Hmm... I think that most of us are well-versed with the arguments against those benchmark results.
I feel the need to ask why this piece was worthy of "airtime", and can reach only one conclusion: That a refutation can somehow become more valid because it comes from the pen of Eric Raymond.
I'm now happy that Katz periodically contributes his dozen screenfuls of drivel, and I don't have a problem with Eric either, but would I have got a whole item on/., had I summarised the obvious flaws of that ridiculous benchmark? I doubt it.
I'll need a source tarball to start, where do I grab that?
No you won't. And you won't get one, anyway.
Grow up.
Source is nice. We'd all (well, most of us) prefer it if the source for Digital's cc was made free, but that fact that it isn't is entirely unrelated to the fact that it produces much better code than GNU cc (and variants thereof).
Give them some credit, please. A significant amount of the Alpha development budget went into that compiler, and it certainly whips gcc's ass.
It would be nice if it were free (in either sense), but I don't think it's fair to criticise Digcompaqital for not giving away what many see as their best product.
On the OS side, it's rather interesting to see the "big Iron" guys lining up behind Linux &emdash; it seems to me that in many ways they're looking to leave the low-end OS market behind (I doubt there's much money to be made there) so they can concentrate on tuning their OS for big machines (E1Ks, &c), and leave Linux for the lower-end hardware.
This is fine, but I'm a little concerned as what might happen if/when Linux gains more of the enterprise-level features, like partitioning/journalled js/etc.
Dilbert periodically pokes fun at almost every large IT firm, and I don't notice that having been taken down.
I want details, but until they are available, it seems only safe to assume that this is another example of "We can afford expensive lawyers. You can't, so the legality of your actions are irrelevant as we will prevail in any legal action".
I'm no lawyer, but I was led to believe that US law had been shown to protect satirists.
I can easily find bandwidth in the UK for any of those sites taken down if necessary.
they can raise enough outrage amongst the other OEMs that an organized temporary M$ boycott would be in order
Not likely -- the other OEMs would chuckle and pat their fat wallets with glee. "Oh look, Gateway has to bump their PC prices by 50 buck. Should we help them, or take their sales..." I don't think there's much doubt as to which option the others would go with.
I got a copy last week and I'm very impressed. It's sometimes a little long-winded, and for its size, it's maybe a little short on the "Here is DES. This is how is works. This is why is works." that I was looking for, but it's definitely a very worthwhile book.
If anyone has the sources and is willing to become an international arms dealer, could they please email me? I'd rather not have to type in all that stuff..:-)
You'd probably be OK with an el-cheapo WinTV clone assuming you had an OK camera to attach to it. Any card based on a bt848 and most with a bt878 chip should work fine.
Video4Linux in the 2.2 kernels is pretty nice, and there are a fair number of applications. Writing a command-line grabber is child's play, too.
gphoto has drivers for a number of digital cameras, although apparently not yours.
Ask them, and they may help to find out if your camera is compatible with anything else, or they may give you a hand to reverse engineer the protocol used...
Slashdot Mirror
Matthew
- sometimes I drink to forget, though
Three pints of Guiness is a quick lunchtime thirst-quencher, certainly nothing like enough to make me have a "rip roarin' good time" if I wasn't already.
Sheesh, three pints of Goodness was my usual lunch during finals..
Matthew.
I grepped the CREDITS and MAINTAINERS files for "Anonymous Coward", but found no mention of you - perhaps you have no kernel coding credentials either.
Matthew.
Roughly where does it mention Linux?
SGI didn't do this. Sun didn't do this. IBM, SCO and Intel didn't do it. Microsoft certainly didn't do this (though they may have provided some impetus :).
It was designed by Linus and implemented primarily by Mingo (now apparently working for Red Hat).
It's nice that we'll see some cool (and pretty) SGI boxes running Linux, but we don't need them to address out deficiencies for us.
If I were a real kernel hacker (as opposed to just playing with it a bit), I would find the inference that Linux needs "real" Unix companies to address its deficiencies for it rather insulting.
If they were really committed, they'd do some of the more boring work for us, or the stuff which needs big bucks to get involved. They could work on getting us C2 rated, or address some of Linux's POSIX non-conformancies. Or they could have done some decent benchmarking before Microsoft beat us to it.
To be fair to SGI, they do seem to have a few developers doing real and useful work, and I'm glad of that, but I don't see why they should get all the fun jobs, and get paid for it :-)
Matthew.
insert mandatory silicon/silicone joke here
They do, however, have some Linux in development positions and a lot of it doing things like file/print/DNS/dhcp.
I was told only a couple of weeks ago that BBC1 would probably be off-air within a few hours of their Linux boxes getting pulled. It may not be powering their Oracle boxes yet, but that still sounds pretty mission-critical to me...
Matthew
- just finished a www project with the BBC.
Not if it took him three years.
Matthew.
Matthew.
Binary-only is fine for those of us who use RedHat on i386 which seems to be a sort of reference platform in some ways, but I'd like to be able to make use of that hardware on other PCI machines (are there non-Intel AGP machines?) or on BSD boxes.
Matthew.
I feel the need to ask why this piece was worthy of "airtime", and can reach only one conclusion: That a refutation can somehow become more valid because it comes from the pen of Eric Raymond.
I'm now happy that Katz periodically contributes his dozen screenfuls of drivel, and I don't have a problem with Eric either, but would I have got a whole item on /., had I summarised the obvious flaws of that ridiculous benchmark? I doubt it.
Matthew
- what happened to our great meritocracy?
Grow up.
Source is nice. We'd all (well, most of us) prefer it if the source for Digital's cc was made free, but that fact that it isn't is entirely unrelated to the fact that it produces much better code than GNU cc (and variants thereof).
Matthew.
It would be nice if it were free (in either sense), but I don't think it's fair to criticise Digcompaqital for not giving away what many see as their best product.
On the OS side, it's rather interesting to see the "big Iron" guys lining up behind Linux &emdash; it seems to me that in many ways they're looking to leave the low-end OS market behind (I doubt there's much money to be made there) so they can concentrate on tuning their OS for big machines (E1Ks, &c), and leave Linux for the lower-end hardware.
This is fine, but I'm a little concerned as what might happen if/when Linux gains more of the enterprise-level features, like partitioning/journalled js/etc.
I wouldn't like to see them turn on us...
Matthew.
I want details, but until they are available, it seems only safe to assume that this is another example of "We can afford expensive lawyers. You can't, so the legality of your actions are irrelevant as we will prevail in any legal action".
I'm no lawyer, but I was led to believe that US law had been shown to protect satirists.
I can easily find bandwidth in the UK for any of those sites taken down if necessary.
Matthew.
Things are rather different for the rape victim.
Matthew.
Not likely -- the other OEMs would chuckle and pat their fat wallets with glee. "Oh look, Gateway has to bump their PC prices by 50 buck. Should we help them, or take their sales..." I don't think there's much doubt as to which option the others would go with.
Matthew.
Even I can remember that it's Dr Stallman.
If anyone has the sources and is willing to become an international arms dealer, could they please email me? I'd rather not have to type in all that stuff.. :-)
Video4Linux in the 2.2 kernels is pretty nice, and there are a fair number of applications. Writing a command-line grabber is child's play, too.
Alan Cox has a reasonable page o' links.
Ask them, and they may help to find out if your camera is compatible with anything else, or they may give you a hand to reverse engineer the protocol used...
?
Now that I find disturbing :-)
Matthew.
Really? There's a pre-patch for it, but no final release.