Rover is the name of the dog (WTF! my dog doesn't rove - what a stupid name etc etc) you are addressing and sit is the command. apt-get is the name of the utility you are addressing and install is the command.
You bring up Windows. Since we're talking command lines here, have you seen the command line needed to install an msi file? What about the command line to run a Windows Update? They make apt-get install look positively intuitive - even though apt-get has waay more features and does all kinds of package management things.
Ahhh you say but the average user on Windows doesn't do that and just double clicks on a package they downloaded. Well yeah, if you download a deb file for your version of Ubuntu and double click it - that will just install too.
It's a chicken and egg situation. Windows never had these features (eg group policy) in the beginning either - but they evolved over many years after their existing customers demanded them. But Windows had the advantage of never having to displace an widespread and entrenched desktop OS that did have this stuff.
If eg Ubuntu had a large base of enterprise desktop customers (and their ongoing support revenue), I'm sure Ubuntu would have a growing list of these features built in. It is also why the commercial solutions for this stuff are so expensive - they just don't have the wide customer base to spread the R&D investment over.
Linux desktop features tend to focus on the needs of their current users and contributors. So until there are lots of enterprise customers those features aren't really needed, and until the features are needed they aren't likely to get developed, and until they get developed.... you get the idea.
I'm sure there are parts of the solution coming together slowly bit by bit - in time it might actually pick up more momentum and become complete enough for some enterprise customers to want.
Heh. Look at the quote - it was talking about succeeding in the Personal Computer revolution. Out of your examples, only Mitch Kapors success stems from that. And his birthdate is the closest to Bill Gates anyway. Maybe Mitch had his own set of lucky breaks (that might not have necessarily seemed lucky at the time) that set him on his path a few years later than Gates did.
And the fact that your examples from the Web revolution are all bunched around the same age and all went to Stanford, practically reinforces Galdwells points about being in the right place at the right time to capitalise on a new revolution.
For example, his central thesis is that our heroic model isn't accurate, that Bill Joy and Gates are more the product of their times than anything having to do with their own skills, and that they just happened to be given the necessary 10,000 hours of training before anyone else had access to them, and since they were born at the right time to capitalize on the digital revolution, that's why they're successful.
I don't think he ever implied that in the book - he stated quite often during the book that it still required plenty of innate talent and hard work to succeed. In that chapter the book practically worships Bill Joy's intellect as well as the hard work it took to gain that 10,000 hours experience.
There are lots of people with talent that work just as hard that don't succeed - the book tries answer why by examining what else is required, and concludes that circumstance plays a significant part.
More to the point, how the TRS-80 got that predominant color: paint. Silver satin paint over, I think, gray ABS.
Yep, I remember the paint wearing off in front of the keyboard on my fathers Model III - must've been due to playing too many games of Cosmic Fighter and Meteor Mission hehe. Under the speckly silver paint it was light grey plastic.
So? If he was a lawyer, would that change his opinions? Or if it didn't change his opinions, would it make the same points more correct somehow?
You might've noticed that there are wide differences in opinion between lawyers anyway (that's probably why there are so many court cases). Are Bruce's opinions going to fall outside that range? If he is saying something that some percentage of lawyers would agree with, does it still matter that he isn't one?
Being that 50% of legal teams end up losing their arguments and what they say mostly depends on who they work for, how much weight would you put on any one lawyers opinion anyway?
I don't quite get the Slashdots communities fixation on constantly pointing out that someone (including themselves) isn't a lawyer. It is obvious, redundant and pointless.
If we aren't involved in the court case ourselves, does it really matter to us that Bruce's opinion on the case is not official legal advice? How many of us would really march into some other future court case armed only with an article Bruce once wrote on a website? Hell nobody would do that even if a lawyer wrote the article.
I know this wasn't what you were getting at, but he didn't say Linux has nothing to worry about (did you read the article?). Even if there isn't much substance behind the patent claims themselves, the article points out there is still plenty to worry about with these kinds of cases.
That is especially so in the context of what Ballmer was talking about. His point in the talk seemed to be that pirated Windows was (by far) their largest competitor, and the one they want to focus most on beating.
When looking at where else all those unlicensed users would go if they didn't become legal Windows users, Apple doesn't really come into it much. People with illegal copies of Windows would typically either be cheapskates or live in a developing country - neither of which are really Apples typical customer base. Linux on the other hand is better placed to pick them up if MS gets too heavy on them.
Because they know that Linux will be never a serious alternative on the desktop. You see, that's why every company that is producing a distribution is trying to get the server market: becuase Linux was and is designed to be a SO for the servers.
That's about as stupid as saying Windows can never be a server because it was and is designed to be an OS for desktops.
Correct me if I'm wrong (quite likely as I'm not an American, and this was a while ago), but wasn't she also involved in trying to censor musicians back in the 80's? Something about Jello Biafra and Public Enemy rings a bell. I think Al Gore's wife was also part of the effort too.
-I want to use a different password and username everywhere. I don't necessarily want somebody on Ars Technica, for example, being able to go "hey, that guy's the same guy I saw on Slashdot!
Minor correction:
An OpenID isn't a user account - it's an identity that can be associated with a user account and you can even associate multiple identities with an account if you want.
So even with the same OpenID, you can still have different user account names on Slashdot and Ars with nobody knowing they are connected to you. OpenID is like your email address - you can use the same address/ID on both sites with different user names and nobody gets to see it unless you show them or the site screws up.
Not only that, but when using a temperature scale that can go below zero it is particularly pointless to talk about percentage changes.
ie: does 30% either side of 100 def F result in the same temp range as 30% either side of 37.8 deg C?
or to put it another way: how much of a percentage drop would it take to go from +1 deg to -1 deg and how did that compare to the percentage drop from +3 to +1?
Only slighty. You can configure (through the standard UI even) a ReadyNAS to use standard Linux software raid (and ext filesystems) rather than their proprietary xraid stuff if you care about that kind of thing. It is still supported and the disks are then portable to another Linux machine.
And they run Debian Sarge - you can ssh in and apt-get all kinds of other stuff onto the box.
Hardly "exactly" like a Drobo.
The main problem with the ReadyNAS (and most similar units) is they are very expensive for the performance level (or lack thereof) you get. rsyncing large amounts of data just crawls.
The difference in power makes sense. The disks are what use the majority of the power in these units. You had a 4 disk unit, they had a 2 disk unit so yours used more power.
As for idle power on the ReadyNAS - some of the desirable disk access options for either performance or reliability (I forget which) are incompatible with spinning down the disks, so the disks can still eat a fair chunk of power even when the unit is idle.
In the case of a bin file extracting to the current directory, the best place is to just extract it in/usr/local or/opt. Don't move the individual parts to places like/usr/bin/lib etc - leave those system dirs to be managed by the distros package manager.
You may need to do stuff like symlinking the browser plugin file(s) into your browsers plugin directory and maybe adding the java bin directory to your $PATH, but that should be about it.
I have no idea how valid that 25x claim is (it sounds way high) and in general I think nuke power is a good thing, but there are factors besides just the day to day running that make it non zero eg:
Construction - eg concrete and steel aren't exactly the most energy or CO2 efficient materials to produce, and nuke plants seem to use a lot of them. Plus you have to get it all on site etc etc. Uranium mining and processing isn't environmentally friendly either. Then there is also building and running of all the other material handling facilities too. One day it will need to be decommissioned as well.
Power plants of all kinds have finite lifespans, so these factors would need to be spread across that time. Factors like these are also how wind and solar plants will have some carbon output and environmental cost as well, even though their day to day running doesn't produce any carbon.
Yeah and if the resulting carbon trioxide starts becoming a problem, we can burn that too. And then when carbon quadoxide levels increase too much, we can burn that too... although I'm not sure what happens when you try burning carbon quinoxide?
I know there are Ruby on Rails camps and Python advocates, however does not PHP still run faster than either? (Take the same programmer, writing code with expert knowledge with all three programming languages, would not his final product , from a strictly performance issue in PHP be faster than Ruby or Pythong?)
Considering that PHP was written with the web in mind and delivering web pages...do you really want anything else from strictly performance issues?
You're mixing languages and platforms up a bit, and it is the implementation that usually has a bigger bearing on speed than the language itself. But don't assume PHP is automatically the fastest.
eg with PHP, a given chunk of PHP code on mod_php is way faster than running the same code as a traditional CGI script which reloads the whole interpreter for every request. And now there are FastCGI implementations etc that can outperform Apache/mod_php a lot of the time. Then you can get into op caches etc. There will be a huge range of performance for that same code depending on how it runs. For the most part though, PHP code gets loaded for each request rather than being processed by a long running process that already has the code in memory ready to run.
Yeah Rails has a reputation as a slow platform, and the current Ruby implementations are also a bit slower than other languages implementations too. But comparing PHP to Rails is an apples to oranges comparison anyway - you'd need to compare a full stack framework written in PHP (eg Cake or Symphony etc) to Rails for a more meaningful comparison.
And Python is also all over the place in terms of implementation performance depending on what it runs on/as. You can run a Python script as a CGI, or using mod_python in Apache. You can run it on a Rails like framework (eg Django etc etc) with long running processes etc etc etc.
Also Ruby and Python have multiple implementations of the language itself - eg IronPython and IronRuby on.NET, Jython and JRuby on Java. These.NET and Java implementations show some promise, and don't have the threading limitations that the native Ruby and Python implementations have. There also seem to be a bunch of other experimental implementations as well.
And then most web app performance usually ends up being limited by the database anyway.
I was under the impression that the Django team don't consider it to be MVC themselves, but they've just given up the losing battle of explaining the difference to the masses who think that MVC is the only good way you can arrange 3 different tiers of an application. So they've shrugged their shoulders and effectively said "Fine. If you want Django to be MVC, it is MVC. Now drop it and let us get back to developing it.".
Just another correction: OpenBSD has nothing to do with Mach or microkernels in general (were you thinking of DragonFly? That has a hybrid kernel). The OpenBSD kernel is about as monolithic as they come these days (it doesn't even really have modules), and descended from NetBSD which descended from the original BSD source code after the famous lawsuit was settled.
You will never see revolutionary kernel designs come from established open source projects. They have enough on their plate as it is. Open source is about releasing frequent evolutionary improvements. Without frequent releases it is very difficult to maintain momentum and attract more users/developers. There just isn't any widespread itch to scratch with revolutionary new kernel designs.
There always have been small breakaway groups or fresh projects that try out revolutionary ideas, but they have an uphill battle getting those ideas into the mainstream and turning them into useable working 'products'. The Hurd was probably full of revolutionary ideas when it first started, but look how far that has got after all these years. Hell even Linux probably required some help from the uncertainty surrounding the BSD lawsuit holding back BSD to get past that growth threshold. I doubt it would've taken off at all if it had been a radical new kernel either - it would've made it harder to attract developers.
And frankly, the rest of the world just doesn't care whether an OS has a revolutionary or evolutionary kernel. Also I disagree about how revolutionary the Windows kernel is, it is still just evolving IMO. Sure that evolution might be faster because it has more resources available.
PS: what made you think adhoc wireless networks were something new in Linux?
If you look at Linux, with its microkernel heritage... ....Also if you look at a classic monolithic kernel design (even with Apple duct tape) the OS X kernel.... ...even Apple has done well with putting bandaids on the monolithic nature of BSD/MACH...
Linux is a microkernel? Mach is monolithic? Since when?
...In fact, every kernel architecture compared in these tests and OS X where deemed to be too primative for even the MS NT team back in 1990... ...and architecture that MS chose to use and abandon the 'in use' kernel concepts of 1990 and instead build NT around kernel technologies that were nothing but a group of theories at the time.
As for NT being a completely new design, it started off as a pretty standard microkernel with an awful lot of its design inspired by (some cynics might even say copied from) VMS and RSX-11 which are roughly the same vintage as Unix, and NT later became more of a hybrid incorporating some monolithic aspects for performance reasons. NT wasn't anywhere near as new or theoretical as you make it sound, it was based on tried and true ideas which is just as well for MS.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that much different really.
Rover is the name of the dog (WTF! my dog doesn't rove - what a stupid name etc etc) you are addressing and sit is the command. apt-get is the name of the utility you are addressing and install is the command.
You bring up Windows. Since we're talking command lines here, have you seen the command line needed to install an msi file? What about the command line to run a Windows Update? They make apt-get install look positively intuitive - even though apt-get has waay more features and does all kinds of package management things.
Ahhh you say but the average user on Windows doesn't do that and just double clicks on a package they downloaded. Well yeah, if you download a deb file for your version of Ubuntu and double click it - that will just install too.
It's a chicken and egg situation. Windows never had these features (eg group policy) in the beginning either - but they evolved over many years after their existing customers demanded them. But Windows had the advantage of never having to displace an widespread and entrenched desktop OS that did have this stuff.
If eg Ubuntu had a large base of enterprise desktop customers (and their ongoing support revenue), I'm sure Ubuntu would have a growing list of these features built in. It is also why the commercial solutions for this stuff are so expensive - they just don't have the wide customer base to spread the R&D investment over.
Linux desktop features tend to focus on the needs of their current users and contributors. So until there are lots of enterprise customers those features aren't really needed, and until the features are needed they aren't likely to get developed, and until they get developed.... you get the idea.
I'm sure there are parts of the solution coming together slowly bit by bit - in time it might actually pick up more momentum and become complete enough for some enterprise customers to want.
Yeah, the way he says it makes it sound like the industry had all this cool online distribution then filesharing came along AFTERWARDS and ruined it.
Heh. Look at the quote - it was talking about succeeding in the Personal Computer revolution. Out of your examples, only Mitch Kapors success stems from that. And his birthdate is the closest to Bill Gates anyway. Maybe Mitch had his own set of lucky breaks (that might not have necessarily seemed lucky at the time) that set him on his path a few years later than Gates did.
And the fact that your examples from the Web revolution are all bunched around the same age and all went to Stanford, practically reinforces Galdwells points about being in the right place at the right time to capitalise on a new revolution.
I don't think he ever implied that in the book - he stated quite often during the book that it still required plenty of innate talent and hard work to succeed. In that chapter the book practically worships Bill Joy's intellect as well as the hard work it took to gain that 10,000 hours experience.
There are lots of people with talent that work just as hard that don't succeed - the book tries answer why by examining what else is required, and concludes that circumstance plays a significant part.
Yep, I remember the paint wearing off in front of the keyboard on my fathers Model III - must've been due to playing too many games of Cosmic Fighter and Meteor Mission hehe. Under the speckly silver paint it was light grey plastic.
So? If he was a lawyer, would that change his opinions? Or if it didn't change his opinions, would it make the same points more correct somehow?
You might've noticed that there are wide differences in opinion between lawyers anyway (that's probably why there are so many court cases). Are Bruce's opinions going to fall outside that range? If he is saying something that some percentage of lawyers would agree with, does it still matter that he isn't one?
Being that 50% of legal teams end up losing their arguments and what they say mostly depends on who they work for, how much weight would you put on any one lawyers opinion anyway?
I don't quite get the Slashdots communities fixation on constantly pointing out that someone (including themselves) isn't a lawyer. It is obvious, redundant and pointless.
If we aren't involved in the court case ourselves, does it really matter to us that Bruce's opinion on the case is not official legal advice? How many of us would really march into some other future court case armed only with an article Bruce once wrote on a website? Hell nobody would do that even if a lawyer wrote the article.
I know this wasn't what you were getting at, but he didn't say Linux has nothing to worry about (did you read the article?). Even if there isn't much substance behind the patent claims themselves, the article points out there is still plenty to worry about with these kinds of cases.
It's about time - the Windows command line has been stuck with more for far too long now. Sometimes you just want to scroll back a page or two.
That is especially so in the context of what Ballmer was talking about. His point in the talk seemed to be that pirated Windows was (by far) their largest competitor, and the one they want to focus most on beating.
When looking at where else all those unlicensed users would go if they didn't become legal Windows users, Apple doesn't really come into it much. People with illegal copies of Windows would typically either be cheapskates or live in a developing country - neither of which are really Apples typical customer base. Linux on the other hand is better placed to pick them up if MS gets too heavy on them.
That's about as stupid as saying Windows can never be a server because it was and is designed to be an OS for desktops.
Blasphemer! How dare you take the Lords name in vain. Repent sinner!
Correct me if I'm wrong (quite likely as I'm not an American, and this was a while ago), but wasn't she also involved in trying to censor musicians back in the 80's? Something about Jello Biafra and Public Enemy rings a bell. I think Al Gore's wife was also part of the effort too.
Minor correction:
An OpenID isn't a user account - it's an identity that can be associated with a user account and you can even associate multiple identities with an account if you want.
So even with the same OpenID, you can still have different user account names on Slashdot and Ars with nobody knowing they are connected to you. OpenID is like your email address - you can use the same address/ID on both sites with different user names and nobody gets to see it unless you show them or the site screws up.
Not only that, but when using a temperature scale that can go below zero it is particularly pointless to talk about percentage changes.
ie: does 30% either side of 100 def F result in the same temp range as 30% either side of 37.8 deg C?
or to put it another way: how much of a percentage drop would it take to go from +1 deg to -1 deg and how did that compare to the percentage drop from +3 to +1?
Only slighty. You can configure (through the standard UI even) a ReadyNAS to use standard Linux software raid (and ext filesystems) rather than their proprietary xraid stuff if you care about that kind of thing. It is still supported and the disks are then portable to another Linux machine.
And they run Debian Sarge - you can ssh in and apt-get all kinds of other stuff onto the box.
Hardly "exactly" like a Drobo.
The main problem with the ReadyNAS (and most similar units) is they are very expensive for the performance level (or lack thereof) you get. rsyncing large amounts of data just crawls.
The difference in power makes sense. The disks are what use the majority of the power in these units. You had a 4 disk unit, they had a 2 disk unit so yours used more power.
As for idle power on the ReadyNAS - some of the desirable disk access options for either performance or reliability (I forget which) are incompatible with spinning down the disks, so the disks can still eat a fair chunk of power even when the unit is idle.
In the case of a bin file extracting to the current directory, the best place is to just extract it in /usr/local or /opt. Don't move the individual parts to places like /usr/bin /lib etc - leave those system dirs to be managed by the distros package manager.
You may need to do stuff like symlinking the browser plugin file(s) into your browsers plugin directory and maybe adding the java bin directory to your $PATH, but that should be about it.
I have no idea how valid that 25x claim is (it sounds way high) and in general I think nuke power is a good thing, but there are factors besides just the day to day running that make it non zero eg:
Construction - eg concrete and steel aren't exactly the most energy or CO2 efficient materials to produce, and nuke plants seem to use a lot of them. Plus you have to get it all on site etc etc.
Uranium mining and processing isn't environmentally friendly either.
Then there is also building and running of all the other material handling facilities too.
One day it will need to be decommissioned as well.
Power plants of all kinds have finite lifespans, so these factors would need to be spread across that time. Factors like these are also how wind and solar plants will have some carbon output and environmental cost as well, even though their day to day running doesn't produce any carbon.
Yeah and if the resulting carbon trioxide starts becoming a problem, we can burn that too. And then when carbon quadoxide levels increase too much, we can burn that too... although I'm not sure what happens when you try burning carbon quinoxide?
Not making unfounded assumptions is always good too.
eg a like completely backwards assumption about what 99% of the responses to this article will be :)
You're mixing languages and platforms up a bit, and it is the implementation that usually has a bigger bearing on speed than the language itself. But don't assume PHP is automatically the fastest.
eg with PHP, a given chunk of PHP code on mod_php is way faster than running the same code as a traditional CGI script which reloads the whole interpreter for every request. And now there are FastCGI implementations etc that can outperform Apache/mod_php a lot of the time. Then you can get into op caches etc. There will be a huge range of performance for that same code depending on how it runs. For the most part though, PHP code gets loaded for each request rather than being processed by a long running process that already has the code in memory ready to run.
Yeah Rails has a reputation as a slow platform, and the current Ruby implementations are also a bit slower than other languages implementations too. But comparing PHP to Rails is an apples to oranges comparison anyway - you'd need to compare a full stack framework written in PHP (eg Cake or Symphony etc) to Rails for a more meaningful comparison.
And Python is also all over the place in terms of implementation performance depending on what it runs on/as. You can run a Python script as a CGI, or using mod_python in Apache. You can run it on a Rails like framework (eg Django etc etc) with long running processes etc etc etc.
Also Ruby and Python have multiple implementations of the language itself - eg IronPython and IronRuby on .NET, Jython and JRuby on Java. These .NET and Java implementations show some promise, and don't have the threading limitations that the native Ruby and Python implementations have. There also seem to be a bunch of other experimental implementations as well.
And then most web app performance usually ends up being limited by the database anyway.
And to finish off here's some probably meaningless benchmarks: PHP vs Python Python vs Ruby Ruby vs PHP
I was under the impression that the Django team don't consider it to be MVC themselves, but they've just given up the losing battle of explaining the difference to the masses who think that MVC is the only good way you can arrange 3 different tiers of an application. So they've shrugged their shoulders and effectively said "Fine. If you want Django to be MVC, it is MVC. Now drop it and let us get back to developing it.".
Just another correction:
OpenBSD has nothing to do with Mach or microkernels in general (were you thinking of DragonFly? That has a hybrid kernel). The OpenBSD kernel is about as monolithic as they come these days (it doesn't even really have modules), and descended from NetBSD which descended from the original BSD source code after the famous lawsuit was settled.
You will never see revolutionary kernel designs come from established open source projects. They have enough on their plate as it is. Open source is about releasing frequent evolutionary improvements. Without frequent releases it is very difficult to maintain momentum and attract more users/developers. There just isn't any widespread itch to scratch with revolutionary new kernel designs.
There always have been small breakaway groups or fresh projects that try out revolutionary ideas, but they have an uphill battle getting those ideas into the mainstream and turning them into useable working 'products'. The Hurd was probably full of revolutionary ideas when it first started, but look how far that has got after all these years. Hell even Linux probably required some help from the uncertainty surrounding the BSD lawsuit holding back BSD to get past that growth threshold. I doubt it would've taken off at all if it had been a radical new kernel either - it would've made it harder to attract developers.
And frankly, the rest of the world just doesn't care whether an OS has a revolutionary or evolutionary kernel. Also I disagree about how revolutionary the Windows kernel is, it is still just evolving IMO. Sure that evolution might be faster because it has more resources available.
PS: what made you think adhoc wireless networks were something new in Linux?
Linux is a microkernel? Mach is monolithic? Since when?
As for NT being a completely new design, it started off as a pretty standard microkernel with an awful lot of its design inspired by (some cynics might even say copied from) VMS and RSX-11 which are roughly the same vintage as Unix, and NT later became more of a hybrid incorporating some monolithic aspects for performance reasons. NT wasn't anywhere near as new or theoretical as you make it sound, it was based on tried and true ideas which is just as well for MS.