It is simple really. Features vs Fixes. With every release of software companies feel compelled to release new features in there software.
Look at Microsoft. (No I am not bashing them). There window 95 OS for instance, had a new look compared to teh windows 3.1 look. It was 32 bit as opposed to 16, and there were man new features in it. People loved all the new features, yet there were many new bugs. Plug and play for example. This was a new feature. In theory it was good, but in practice it became plug and prey. Prey the OS recognized your devices. Pray that there were not conflicts between devices either.
There are problems even in the Linux system too. They add new features to a stable kernel and then bugs creap in. They do get fixed, but more features are added in at the same time.
Most people see a peice of software and they suddenly seem to have visions of what this could be. They take the package and then add to it. They add more and more, until they have hacked the system to a state where it is no longer a good implementation it is just a querky working peice of software. In some cases they rewrite parts of the code (this happens in the Linux kernel). Thsi is good. It keeps the features and allows for better implementation of the system. However in other cases the code has been thru so many hands that it is almost impossible to rewrite in the time that corporations allot.
This is the difference. In the corporate world you have clients, deadlinesm and deliverables. This is pressure to release a peice of software, even if it has bugs. The bug fixes are hacks, to make things work.
Personally I am not into software that has that many features, after all how many features in Word does the average user use? I use either a simple text editor or HTML editor. Other than that I only use word when others need to send me word docs. Or when I have to do a design doc for work. Even then I could get away with an HTML editor if they'd let me.
Honestly I think you may be better off using Qt or Java or as someooone mentioned OpenGL. Here is why:
Java is a fairly easy language to learn. I had a 3 week course and feel I know it about as well as C. There are many predefined methods in Java and it does lots of clean up for you, and allows you to concentrate on your programming more rather than malloc/free like C/C++. Java does threads better than C++ also, as threads are built in. Also if you stick with the JDK 1.2 you can write your code once and then run it anywhere.
If you want more speed then there is Qt. Qt is a cross platform C++ programming API. I have not done any programming with it, but KDE is based on Qt so that right there shoudl tell you how powerful it is if you have ever used kde. While I am on the subject of kde, kde also have libs of its own that you can use to port programs to also. (kdelibs)
Mesa/OpenGL. Be careful here as I am not sure but Mesa is not exactly the same as OpenGL, so if you use OpenGL you should be able to compile on Mesa, but you may have some debugging there.
Gtk+/Gtk-: You can use Gtk+ to program in C for Lilnux and other Unix flavors. I have use it and found it to be quite decent. There are a few things that it does need work on thou, in particular its text widget. It is easy to learn thou. There is also Gnome libs, which adds to Gtk.
Well this looks like another step in the unification of Unix versions. Assuming that companies like IBM with there AIX adopt cups at some point, as well SUN and there Solaris. It will be interesting to see how many *NIX flavors adopt cups in the next 6 months. It will also be interesting to see how many printer manufactures use this system to make printer drivers for *NIX flavors.
I just said that yesterday.. except the SCSL is a bit restrictive. (IMHO). Are they afraid that Linux is getting to much hype and are they grasping at air? It will be interesting to see the response of this, not only from the Linux community, but the UNIX community.
There are more file formats supported with the G2 version than the old Rplayer 5.0. I was able tio visit more web sites with the last Alpha verison. THe quality was a bit better (IMHO) too, but I did not do any benchmarks. Video still has a way to go, but that will come when bandwidth increases.
I got a developer version of Solaris OS. It is the whole OS. It cost about $15 including shipping and handling which is about $5 more than what I paid for my RH cdrom. It is the full Solaris 7 OS. I can use it for personal use.
However here are the differences:
With Linux I get the source to the kernel and all the packages.
Linux runs more hardware than Solaris.
If Solaris were free free, it would have to be Linux free. Not just free but open source, and not hhe Java 'open source' license.
Having the cdrom I have used Solaris, and could easily switch from one to the other, but Solaris woudl have a lot of work to make a Solaris distribution worth switching to from Linux. However I personally find that Linux is friendlier than Solaris.
Although I have not read the article I have recently started to do some Java programming. I have found that Java is pretty cool. The GUI is a bit slow, but command line is not that bad for the most part. There is one thing that I do want to caution you about Java if you are not aware, and that is its implementation of threads.
To share memory in Java you use a method called synchronized. This locks the memory that you want to share between threads. However the thread will continue to try to get this lock forever unlike C where you give it a value to 'time out'. There is no time limit in Java that you set or any way of makeing it time out. Thus if a thread already has a lock on memmory and another thread tries to get that memory it will wait and wait and wait forever until the app is killed possible causeing a dead lock situation. Other than that I have found going from C to Java a real thrill. It is very easy to learn once you understand what an object is as everything in Java is an object.
Cool that there will be faster virtual machines thou. This and the faster computers will surely make Java a more likeable programming language.
Question: Isn't deletion a form of modification? If I were to open the file and delete its contents wouldn't that be modification?(Yes) So deleting a file that I do not have modification privilages to can be considered a bug. IMHO. It just does does not sound right.
Question: Isn't deletion a form of modification? If I were to open the file and delete its contents wouldn't that be modification?(Yes) So deleting a file that I do not have modification privilages to can be considered a bug. IMHO. It just does
There were a few parts of the article that I did agree with:
Sun is as deep into control as Microsoft
I'd have to agree with this. I'd be willing to bet that Sun will eventually discontinue support for Star Office for Linux. They did so with wabi.
Just ask yourself this what exactly has Sun ever done to help the Linux community? If your answer is lxrun, then your are wrong that was just to help Sun.
I did not origonaly sign up for mindspring they kind of swallowed my previous ISP contracts.
Some of the Mindspring connectios are busy that depends on the area. They usually have many numbers for several areas, and since the recently merged with Earthlink, I imagine that they will possible have to ahve more numbers.
They also have limited support for Linux, they will point you in the right direction to the faq or howto, and they have some stuff like that. They also have stuff for windows users, that is quite a nice package althoguh a little memory intensive last time I tried it (over a year ago).
They have very good technical support and a good tech staff. I guess you woudl call me a satisfied customer.
I pay $20 a month for unlimited access, plus email, an d5 Megs of web space. THe only limit I have is on my Web SITE's bandwidth. I am only allowed 225Megs transfer a month thru my web site. NOTE this has nothing to do with my web surfing it is the amount of bandwidth theat someone else consumes when they visit MY web site. They ahve a @6.95 a month deal which allows for 10 Megs of web space, 3 email accounts, and also 450 Megs of web site bandwidth.
The only complaint I have had with them is the limitation on web site bandwidth, as there have been occasions that I have accually come close to have it consumed up.
All in all I rate them pretty well. Having never used Quest I cannot say. It sounds good, but ask them if there are any advertisements that you are going to get stuck seeing, also ask them what software they give you when you sign up. Mindspring will send you a cdrom for Win or Mac if you need it with all the software bundled on it.
I think the article missed the point of why people are moving from Microsoft and UNIX to Linux. I think it has more to do with cost and performance.
Linux costs a lot less than any commercial version of UNIX and NT.
Linux offeres many of the same features that most commericial version of UNIX have: sed/awk/perl/NFS and has many of the same commands as a commercial UNIX chmod, ls, etc, as it was designed originally to be a UNIX like system to run on Intel. Linux however costs less. Alot less. If you went out and bought a Solaris for Intel cdrom, for a commercial server you'd have to pay the commercial price which last I heard was around $500 (??). Yes it would give you a system that would be very stable, but it would also be very expensive. Solaris also does not support all the 'Intel' hardware that Linux does.
As far as NT goes, if you needed to get NT Workstation the cost is around $300 a copy. again Linux cost less at $50 a copy (or free).
Each system is about equal in performace. Some are beter in some areas and some in others. One can argue that one system is more stable than another and some can argue about uptimes, and crashes, but the fact is that the more you pay the less you get. A ~$34 dollar SuSE distribution gives you the distro and all the Office tools too, where as Solaris, and NT these office tools are Extra.
You decide for your self, don't let the FUD get you, just make an intelligent decision.
Figure a new examiner has about 4 cases to do a week, and 40 hours in that week. 10 hours to do a search, write a summary of findings, and understand an application is not always engough. Some applications are only a few pages, while some are over 100 page applications. Not only do they have to understand the application, but they must also make sure that they are correct. Drawings and all. There is much work involved. Maybe a system that was designed on a case by case basis. Ie each case was given a level of difficulty, before it was examined, base on many factors, from size, and comlexity, as well as abstractness. Ie if you can physically see something it would be easier, where as if it was something like cache hit/miss improvements or improving cacheing over a network or someting was given a harder degree of complexity, and allowed more time.
There is also much law involved and law is abstract and subjective.
Being a former patent examiner I'd have to agree that the patent system needs to be redone.
As a former examiner I can say that it is not the examiers fault, as patent examiners have quotas to meet. These quotas prevent many new examiers from doing a proper search. Meny of the topics that are sent to the patent office are not easily understood either. I had to deal with patents on many different topics, from input devices to display adapters.
It was difficult to even attempt to become an expert in the field. In programming you usually concentrate on one or two languages, or a efw related languages. In patents you have a lot of informnation that you have to deal with and much of the time it is info that you may never have heard of.
I did have some friends that were dealing with researching patents that delt with software, and it is very hard to reject these patents. There are no good sources of information for them, and many of then do not have programming backgrounds.
The GUI was written with the java swing widgets, so I guess it would work under Windows too. All I really need is a good syntax highlightening tool, something that does perl, C/C++, Java, HTML, tcl/tk, JavaScript, and works the way I like it to. Maybe modify this thing to have these features:-)
I am more interested in faster system overall then cpu. Except for computation, 2Gig CPU is useless if there is only a 200Mhz bus. I hope that the bus specifications are atleast 1GigHz by then, with faster memory. If they become affordable and graphics and internet connections are fast enough then maybe we'll finally move to video conferencing to the average user.
If they need it transulated maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to run the documentation thru Bablefish or something like that, and transulate all of it, or use some form of unicode document interface so that it can be read by them. Not being from Brazil, I can't say how good the transulations are or even if they exist.
I have installed several distributions: Redhat, Slackware, SuSE, debian, and TurboLinux. TurboLinux and debian were the more difficult for me. To install them you really aught to know what programs you want to install and know more about your Linux distribution, other wise you'll either go thru lots of dependance resolving or miss dependancies and have problems, if you ignore the dependancies.
I personally thought that the GUI for Redhat was not that difficult to use. Caldera is supposed to have a GUI, and SuSE was rather easy to me also.
I also think in time it will get easier to install. The documentation will get to be better, there will be more apps. I hope that this does not turn people who have used Linux for a while off thou.
The fact is that English seems to be the 'accepted default language'. Yes developers devlop all around the world, but both Linus and Alan do stuff in English. Yes Linus is Finnish, but he lives in the US now I believe. Thus most of the kernel is going to be in English. There is Geman docs out there and I am sure SuSE helps out there. There are other languages supported by some of the distributions, but I think that until there is a distribution that actually comes from Brazil they may end up suffering. Even the web site there was in English.
This may be good for Linux. If they do what SGI is doing and start moving towards Linux there could be some more drivers for Linux, and they could add in the stability and security of the kernel. Who knows maybe they work on the port of Linux to the Merced instead.
As I have said before, and Richard Stallman also has said: it looks like Linux is uniting the various *NIX flavors. lxrun under Solaris, the ports under FreeBSD, SGI dropping IRIX, and moving to LInux, (Compaq moving towards Linux it seems).
If the *NIX flavors unite administratino of the various *NIX system will be easier. IE rather than have to learn the AIX way, the Solaris way, the Linux way, the BSD way, there will be one unified administration method. Yes I realize that the systems are nto that different, but they are different enought that there is a learnign curve for administrators moving from one to the next. By a unified administration method there would be no learning curve, or a very minimal one.
I tried Bablefish, and it did this, but I had to do it paragraph by paragraph so I posted it here. If you find it helpful yeah, if not oh well.
France Telecom Paris: Intranet under Linux.
Alcove could obtain this market as much by the quality of its technical response that by a very professional offer of services. Through this service, France Telecom Paris becomes the 500ème customer of Alcove.
Project PHENIX (Platform of Standardized HEbergement of the Intranet under linuX) of France Telecom Paris: Each unit and the state major of France Telecom Paris (6300 people on the whole) develops their own sites Intranet, and of the possible interfaces with data bases. These sites are lodged today on heterogeneous servers (Windows NT and Linux) and mainly developed with the FrontPage software. The dynamic pages or those with access to the data bases are created using ASP/VBSript or Perl.
France Telecom Paris wishes to make migrate the whole of these sites Intranet towards a Linux platform, supporting all the existing functionalities or to come. The objective is to improve comfort of the users, to allow a better evolutionarity, and to ensure a simplified exploitation and an administration induced by the recognized stability of the system.
The technical proposal of Alcove: For the Linux platform, the distribution Debian GNU/Linux was retained. The Web server turns under Apache with support of Perl, PHP (more flexible and more powerful than its functional equivalent ASP/VBScript), and of the FrontPage extensions. The DBMS selected is PostgreSQL (software free in conformity with standard SQL 92), whose driver ODBC allows a transparent use of the DBMS from stations customers under Windows. For the updates of documents, Alcôve chose to implement software ftp ProFTPD, at the same time powerful and made safe.
An offer of services complete and very professional: The contract signed by France Telecom Paris and Alcôve is an annual engagement. It integrates the follow-up of the whole of the project by an officer project, consulting in Free Data processing, of the days of consulting, the interventions on site for and the configuration installation of the servers, the days of formation and a contract of technical aid.
For Small Lucien, chairman of Alcove: " This very beautiful project at France Telecom as well as the strategic partnership tied lately with SGI confirm our place of leader of the services in Free Data processing. Our positioning, with the interface of the community of the free developers of software and the world of the company, enables us to fully satisfy waitings of our customers large accounts and our partners. It is besides to meet more precisely still their needs than we currently work with the proposal for contracts of assistance 24/7. "
I am currently running FreeBSD in vmware with a 600Meg partition. I have 3.2 and just got it installed last week. args! I wonder if there is really a reason for me to upgrade to 3.3 from 3.2, since I do not use it as my primary system. I am going to use this to learn FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a little different in setup and configuration, than Linux, not that there is anything wrong with that, it is just going to take me time to adjust and get used to the way they do things. So while I do I still want my system to function the way it is now. When I learn FreeBSD I may swithc from Linux to it, or maybe not, I am not sure. Depends if FreeBSD will run vmware to run NT:-).
As I have always said each OS has its plusses and minuses. I just happen to use each OS to reap the benifits of differing systems.
The default shells are different and that is what makes one easier for ME and less UNIX like. Solaris -.ksh Linux -> bash FreeBSD -> sh AIX -> csh
Yes you can change the shells, but the sites that I have been at do not do so.
I feel that bash is an easier to use shell than the other shells. Just working with the bash default shell set up under Linux the arrow up and down make navigating thru history easier for me, especially coming from a DOS world to UNIX. Yes you have history in the other shells, but !47 (csh) is less friendly. I do have color xterms to, which makes color ls for me a good thing in X. I guess I like the features that have been added to Linux and would love to see them become defaults in other UNIX es
they are still a minority in the group thou
on
Girls Like Linux Too
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· Score: 1
I'd be willing to bet that they are still a tiny minority, which I feel is a shame.
I have seen this with other 'hobbies' and technology in general. "Not that I am saying that Linux is a hobbie", but I have noticed that there are certain things that are considered 'male' and certain things that are considered 'female'. Now don't take this out of context, I don't agree that tech is male, but the fact is that not many women got into tech until the last 20 years it seems. In my engineering classes there were 3 women, as opposed to 50 men.
I watch Star Trek Voyager, religiously every wednesday. Many people don't watch it because the captian is a woman. I do. I think it portrays our future as rather 'mature'. A future where woman can be captians of star ships, engineers, and lets not forget 7 of 9;-).
I think that the fact that there are women in Linux or Linuxchix is actually a precursor of things to come.
The future is technology. We cannot deny this if we are to survive as a species.
Without technology many people would have died from hurricane Floyd that were given time to evacuate. This is a fact folks. Tech is good.
Tech brings people together. However we as a species still need to learn to 'control' tech and not abuse the power that it gives us like certain companies do just to make money.
This is just my opinion on the subject. I am a male not a female. So send all flame and hate mail to >/dev/null.:-)
I am stating my opinion on Linux. I like it but am not a purist. If you do not noone is forcing you to like it. I am not bickering I use both FreeBSD and LInux on my systems. As I said they both have there plusses and minuses.
You seem to contridict your self in your first and third paragraph. Linux is thrown together.. then you say it is easier to install... As for the stability issue. you aren't running 2.2.12 are you. I am and I have to reboot it cause of a memory leak in the Tcp/Ip stack.
Most standard *NIX es do not include color ls as part of the install. So far all Linux distrinutions that I have tried, Slackware, Redhat, SuSE, TurboLinux include this, and install it by default. This makes dirictory navigating (IMHO) easier. Well you can install color ls in FreeBSD and probably other *NIXes it is not installed by default. There are many other things that make Linux, a friendlier to use system than most other *UNX systems, this is what seperates Linux from other *NIX systems. I am not saying Linus is the best OS I am not a Linux purist. Linux does not feel like *NIX to me. FreBSD feels more like a traditional *NIX. I believe that part of the reason for my feeling this way is that I have used SUN. Although Sun today is much different than FreeBSD, I believe that the Sun OS had its roots in BSD. (correct me if I am wrong). FreeBSD had its root from BSD so SUN and FreeBSD have similar ancesstory. Linux on the other hand only inherited some of the directory structure and that even depends on the distribution you try. THis is just my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
It is simple really. Features vs Fixes. With every release of software companies feel compelled to release new features in there software.
Look at Microsoft. (No I am not bashing them). There window 95 OS for instance, had a new look compared to teh windows 3.1 look. It was 32 bit as opposed to 16, and there were man new features in it. People loved all the new features, yet there were many new bugs. Plug and play for example. This was a new feature. In theory it was good, but in practice it became plug and prey. Prey the OS recognized your devices. Pray that there were not conflicts between devices either.
There are problems even in the Linux system too. They add new features to a stable kernel and then bugs creap in. They do get fixed, but more features are added in at the same time.
Most people see a peice of software and they suddenly seem to have visions of what this could be. They take the package and then add to it. They add more and more, until they have hacked the system to a state where it is no longer a good implementation it is just a querky working peice of software. In some cases they rewrite parts of the code (this happens in the Linux kernel). Thsi is good. It keeps the features and allows for better implementation of the system. However in other cases the code has been thru so many hands that it is almost impossible to rewrite in the time that corporations allot.
This is the difference. In the corporate world you have clients, deadlinesm and deliverables. This is pressure to release a peice of software, even if it has bugs. The bug fixes are hacks, to make things work.
Personally I am not into software that has that many features, after all how many features in Word does the average user use? I use either a simple text editor or HTML editor. Other than that I only use word when others need to send me word docs. Or when I have to do a design doc for work. Even then I could get away with an HTML editor if they'd let me.
Honestly I think you may be better off using Qt or Java or as someooone mentioned OpenGL. Here is why:
Java is a fairly easy language to learn. I had a 3 week course and feel I know it about as well as C. There are many predefined methods in Java and it does lots of clean up for you, and allows you to concentrate on your programming more rather than malloc/free like C/C++. Java does threads better than C++ also, as threads are built in. Also if you stick with the JDK 1.2 you can write your code once and then run it anywhere.
If you want more speed then there is Qt. Qt is a cross platform C++ programming API. I have not done any programming with it, but KDE is based on Qt so that right there shoudl tell you how powerful it is if you have ever used kde. While I am on the subject of kde, kde also have libs of its own that you can use to port programs to also. (kdelibs)
Mesa/OpenGL. Be careful here as I am not sure but Mesa is not exactly the same as OpenGL, so if you use OpenGL you should be able to compile on Mesa, but you may have some debugging there.
Gtk+ /Gtk-: You can use Gtk+ to program in C for Lilnux and other Unix flavors. I have use it and found it to be quite decent. There are a few things that it does need work on thou, in particular its text widget. It is easy to learn thou. There is also Gnome libs, which adds to Gtk.
Well this looks like another step in the unification of Unix versions. Assuming that companies like IBM with there AIX adopt cups at some point, as well SUN and there Solaris. It will be interesting to see how many *NIX flavors adopt cups in the next 6 months. It will also be interesting to see how many printer manufactures use this system to make printer drivers for *NIX flavors.
I just said that yesterday.. except the SCSL is a bit restrictive. (IMHO). Are they afraid that Linux is getting to much hype and are they grasping at air? It will be interesting to see the response of this, not only from the Linux community, but the UNIX community.
YES.
There are more file formats supported with the G2 version than the old Rplayer 5.0. I was able tio visit more web sites with the last Alpha verison. THe quality was a bit better (IMHO) too, but I did not do any benchmarks. Video still has a way to go, but that will come when bandwidth increases.
I got a developer version of Solaris OS. It is the whole OS. It cost about $15 including shipping and handling which is about $5 more than what I paid for my RH cdrom. It is the full Solaris 7 OS. I can use it for personal use.
However here are the differences:
If Solaris were free free, it would have to be Linux free. Not just free but open source, and not hhe Java 'open source' license.
Having the cdrom I have used Solaris, and could easily switch from one to the other, but Solaris woudl have a lot of work to make a Solaris distribution worth switching to from Linux. However I personally find that Linux is friendlier than Solaris.
Although I have not read the article I have recently started to do some Java programming. I have found that Java is pretty cool. The GUI is a bit slow, but command line is not that bad for the most part. There is one thing that I do want to caution you about Java if you are not aware, and that is its implementation of threads.
To share memory in Java you use a method called synchronized. This locks the memory that you want to share between threads. However the thread will continue to try to get this lock forever unlike C where you give it a value to 'time out'. There is no time limit in Java that you set or any way of makeing it time out. Thus if a thread already has a lock on memmory and another thread tries to get that memory it will wait and wait and wait forever until the app is killed possible causeing a dead lock situation. Other than that I have found going from C to Java a real thrill. It is very easy to learn once you understand what an object is as everything in Java is an object.
Cool that there will be faster virtual machines thou. This and the faster computers will surely make Java a more likeable programming language.
Question: Isn't deletion a form of modification? If I were to open the file and delete its contents wouldn't that be modification?(Yes) So deleting a file that I do not have modification privilages to can be considered a bug. IMHO. It just does does not sound right.
Question: Isn't deletion a form of modification? If I were to open the file and delete its contents wouldn't that be modification?(Yes) So deleting a file that I do not have modification privilages to can be considered a bug. IMHO. It just does
There were a few parts of the article that I did agree with:
I'd have to agree with this. I'd be willing to bet that Sun will eventually discontinue support for Star Office for Linux. They did so with wabi.
Just ask yourself this what exactly has Sun ever done to help the Linux community? If your answer is lxrun, then your are wrong that was just to help Sun.
Just my 2 cents...........
Mindspring.
I did not origonaly sign up for mindspring they kind of swallowed my previous ISP contracts.
Some of the Mindspring connectios are busy that depends on the area. They usually have many numbers for several areas, and since the recently merged with Earthlink, I imagine that they will possible have to ahve more numbers.
They also have limited support for Linux, they will point you in the right direction to the faq or howto, and they have some stuff like that. They also have stuff for windows users, that is quite a nice package althoguh a little memory intensive last time I tried it (over a year ago).
They have very good technical support and a good tech staff. I guess you woudl call me a satisfied customer.
I pay $20 a month for unlimited access, plus email, an d5 Megs of web space. THe only limit I have is on my Web SITE's bandwidth. I am only allowed 225Megs transfer a month thru my web site. NOTE this has nothing to do with my web surfing it is the amount of bandwidth theat someone else consumes when they visit MY web site. They ahve a @6.95 a month deal which allows for 10 Megs of web space, 3 email accounts, and also 450 Megs of web site bandwidth.
The only complaint I have had with them is the limitation on web site bandwidth, as there have been occasions that I have accually come close to have it consumed up.
All in all I rate them pretty well. Having never used Quest I cannot say. It sounds good, but ask them if there are any advertisements that you are going to get stuck seeing, also ask them what software they give you when you sign up. Mindspring will send you a cdrom for Win or Mac if you need it with all the software bundled on it.
Just my 2 cents.
I think the article missed the point of why people are moving from Microsoft and UNIX to Linux. I think it has more to do with cost and performance.
Linux costs a lot less than any commercial version of UNIX and NT.
Linux offeres many of the same features that most commericial version of UNIX have: sed/awk/perl/NFS and has many of the same commands as a commercial UNIX chmod, ls, etc, as it was designed originally to be a UNIX like system to run on Intel. Linux however costs less. Alot less. If you went out and bought a Solaris for Intel cdrom, for a commercial server you'd have to pay the commercial price which last I heard was around $500 (??). Yes it would give you a system that would be very stable, but it would also be very expensive. Solaris also does not support all the 'Intel' hardware that Linux does.
As far as NT goes, if you needed to get NT Workstation the cost is around $300 a copy. again Linux cost less at $50 a copy (or free).
Each system is about equal in performace. Some are beter in some areas and some in others. One can argue that one system is more stable than another and some can argue about uptimes, and crashes, but the fact is that the more you pay the less you get. A ~$34 dollar SuSE distribution gives you the distro and all the Office tools too, where as Solaris, and NT these office tools are Extra.
You decide for your self, don't let the FUD get you, just make an intelligent decision.
There is also much law involved and law is abstract and subjective.
They do. If a patent gets issued that shouldn't there are lawsuits to determine the rightful owner.
Being a former patent examiner I'd have to agree that the patent system needs to be redone.
As a former examiner I can say that it is not the examiers fault, as patent examiners have quotas to meet. These quotas prevent many new examiers from doing a proper search. Meny of the topics that are sent to the patent office are not easily understood either. I had to deal with patents on many different topics, from input devices to display adapters.
It was difficult to even attempt to become an expert in the field. In programming you usually concentrate on one or two languages, or a efw related languages. In patents you have a lot of informnation that you have to deal with and much of the time it is info that you may never have heard of.
I did have some friends that were dealing with researching patents that delt with software, and it is very hard to reject these patents. There are no good sources of information for them, and many of then do not have programming backgrounds.
The GUI was written with the java swing widgets, so I guess it would work under Windows too. All I really need is a good syntax highlightening tool, something that does perl, C/C++, Java, HTML, tcl/tk, JavaScript, and works the way I like it to. Maybe modify this thing to have these features :-)
I am more interested in faster system overall then cpu. Except for computation, 2Gig CPU is useless if there is only a 200Mhz bus. I hope that the bus specifications are atleast 1GigHz by then, with faster memory. If they become affordable and graphics and internet connections are fast enough then maybe we'll finally move to video conferencing to the average user.
If they need it transulated maybe what needs to happen is someone needs to run the documentation thru Bablefish or something like that, and transulate all of it, or use some form of unicode document interface so that it can be read by them. Not being from Brazil, I can't say how good the transulations are or even if they exist.
I have installed several distributions: Redhat, Slackware, SuSE, debian, and TurboLinux. TurboLinux and debian were the more difficult for me. To install them you really aught to know what programs you want to install and know more about your Linux distribution, other wise you'll either go thru lots of dependance resolving or miss dependancies and have problems, if you ignore the dependancies.
I personally thought that the GUI for Redhat was not that difficult to use. Caldera is supposed to have a GUI, and SuSE was rather easy to me also.
I also think in time it will get easier to install. The documentation will get to be better, there will be more apps. I hope that this does not turn people who have used Linux for a while off thou.
The fact is that English seems to be the 'accepted default language'. Yes developers devlop all around the world, but both Linus and Alan do stuff in English. Yes Linus is Finnish, but he lives in the US now I believe. Thus most of the kernel is going to be in English. There is Geman docs out there and I am sure SuSE helps out there. There are other languages supported by some of the distributions, but I think that until there is a distribution that actually comes from Brazil they may end up suffering. Even the web site there was in English.
This may be good for Linux. If they do what SGI is doing and start moving towards Linux there could be some more drivers for Linux, and they could add in the stability and security of the kernel. Who knows maybe they work on the port of Linux to the Merced instead.
As I have said before, and Richard Stallman also has said: it looks like Linux is uniting the various *NIX flavors. lxrun under Solaris, the ports under FreeBSD, SGI dropping IRIX, and moving to LInux, (Compaq moving towards Linux it seems).
If the *NIX flavors unite administratino of the various *NIX system will be easier. IE rather than have to learn the AIX way, the Solaris way, the Linux way, the BSD way, there will be one unified administration method. Yes I realize that the systems are nto that different, but they are different enought that there is a learnign curve for administrators moving from one to the next. By a unified administration method there would be no learning curve, or a very minimal one.
France Telecom Paris: Intranet under Linux.
Alcove could obtain this market as much by the quality of its technical response that by a very professional offer of services. Through this service, France Telecom Paris becomes the 500ème customer of Alcove.
Project PHENIX (Platform of Standardized HEbergement of the Intranet under linuX) of France Telecom Paris: Each unit and the state major of France Telecom Paris (6300 people on the whole) develops their own sites Intranet, and of the possible interfaces with data bases. These sites are lodged today on heterogeneous servers (Windows NT and Linux) and mainly developed with the FrontPage software. The dynamic pages or those with access to the data bases are created using ASP/VBSript or Perl.
France Telecom Paris wishes to make migrate the whole of these sites Intranet towards a Linux platform, supporting all the existing functionalities or to come. The objective is to improve comfort of the users, to allow a better evolutionarity, and to ensure a simplified exploitation and an administration induced by the recognized stability of the system.
The technical proposal of Alcove: For the Linux platform, the distribution Debian GNU/Linux was retained. The Web server turns under Apache with support of Perl, PHP (more flexible and more powerful than its functional equivalent ASP/VBScript), and of the FrontPage extensions. The DBMS selected is PostgreSQL (software free in conformity with standard SQL 92), whose driver ODBC allows a transparent use of the DBMS from stations customers under Windows. For the updates of documents, Alcôve chose to implement software ftp ProFTPD, at the same time powerful and made safe.
An offer of services complete and very professional: The contract signed by France Telecom Paris and Alcôve is an annual engagement. It integrates the follow-up of the whole of the project by an officer project, consulting in Free Data processing, of the days of consulting, the interventions on site for and the configuration installation of the servers, the days of formation and a contract of technical aid.
For Small Lucien, chairman of Alcove: " This very beautiful project at France Telecom as well as the strategic partnership tied lately with SGI confirm our place of leader of the services in Free Data processing. Our positioning, with the interface of the community of the free developers of software and the world of the company, enables us to fully satisfy waitings of our customers large accounts and our partners. It is besides to meet more precisely still their needs than we currently work with the proposal for contracts of assistance 24/7. "
I am currently running FreeBSD in vmware with a 600Meg partition. I have 3.2 and just got it installed last week. args! I wonder if there is really a reason for me to upgrade to 3.3 from 3.2, since I do not use it as my primary system. I am going to use this to learn FreeBSD. FreeBSD is a little different in setup and configuration, than Linux, not that there is anything wrong with that, it is just going to take me time to adjust and get used to the way they do things. So while I do I still want my system to function the way it is now. When I learn FreeBSD I may swithc from Linux to it, or maybe not, I am not sure. Depends if FreeBSD will run vmware to run NT :-).
As I have always said each OS has its plusses and minuses. I just happen to use each OS to reap the benifits of differing systems.
The default shells are different and that is what makes one easier for ME and less UNIX like. .ksh
Solaris -
Linux -> bash
FreeBSD -> sh
AIX -> csh
Yes you can change the shells, but the sites that I have been at do not do so.
I feel that bash is an easier to use shell than the other shells. Just working with the bash default shell set up under Linux the arrow up and down make navigating thru history easier for me, especially coming from a DOS world to UNIX. Yes you have history in the other shells, but !47 (csh) is less friendly. I do have color xterms to, which makes color ls for me a good thing in X. I guess I like the features that have been added to Linux and would love to see them become defaults in other UNIX es
I'd be willing to bet that they are still a tiny minority, which I feel is a shame.
I have seen this with other 'hobbies' and technology in general. "Not that I am saying that Linux is a hobbie", but I have noticed that there are certain things that are considered 'male' and certain things that are considered 'female'. Now don't take this out of context, I don't agree that tech is male, but the fact is that not many women got into tech until the last 20 years it seems. In my engineering classes there were 3 women, as opposed to 50 men.
I watch Star Trek Voyager, religiously every wednesday. Many people don't watch it because the captian is a woman. I do. I think it portrays our future as rather 'mature'. A future where woman can be captians of star ships, engineers, and lets not forget 7 of 9 ;-).
I think that the fact that there are women in Linux or Linuxchix is actually a precursor of things to come.
Without technology many people would have died from hurricane Floyd that were given time to evacuate. This is a fact folks. Tech is good.
Tech brings people together. However we as a species still need to learn to 'control' tech and not abuse the power that it gives us like certain companies do just to make money.
This is just my opinion on the subject. I am a male not a female. So send all flame and hate mail to > /dev/null. :-)
You seem to contridict your self in your first and third paragraph. Linux is thrown together .. then you say it is easier to install... As for the stability issue. you aren't running 2.2.12 are you. I am and I have to reboot it cause of a memory leak in the Tcp/Ip stack.
Most standard *NIX es do not include color ls as part of the install. So far all Linux distrinutions that I have tried, Slackware, Redhat, SuSE, TurboLinux include this, and install it by default. This makes dirictory navigating (IMHO) easier. Well you can install color ls in FreeBSD and probably other *NIXes it is not installed by default. There are many other things that make Linux, a friendlier to use system than most other *UNX systems, this is what seperates Linux from other *NIX systems. I am not saying Linus is the best OS I am not a Linux purist. Linux does not feel like *NIX to me. FreBSD feels more like a traditional *NIX. I believe that part of the reason for my feeling this way is that I have used SUN. Although Sun today is much different than FreeBSD, I believe that the Sun OS had its roots in BSD. (correct me if I am wrong). FreeBSD had its root from BSD so SUN and FreeBSD have similar ancesstory. Linux on the other hand only inherited some of the directory structure and that even depends on the distribution you try. THis is just my opinion.