and a very cool project. I cant wait to run the latest win32 opengl games on reactOS, as soon as it has a reasonable commandline and complete API. The last time I was so excited by an OS was when I discovered Linux in 1996. ReactOS will be the project to take desktop from Microsoft, and give it to un*x.
I ran the test iso on vmware, wasnt impressed. Plus it crashed a few times. However being a free project its here to stay, and can only grow.
Two projects are bringing Linux and Windows closer, and Linux closer to the conquest of the desktop: Samba and WINE. This was one of the best things in WINE I've seen in months... DirectX now. Once this has been polished up, and made usable enough for most gamers, the windows market can suffer a serious dent.
Jokes aside, a large part of opensource software devleopers have been french, just read the sourcecode and search for.fr email addresses. That means these actions of France will not be politically supportable.
In corporate circles, Bill Gates is admired for being a shrewd businessman, books on him are read by managers and enterpreneurs. However rank-and-file software developers know better and admire good product design.
So what is in GPL3 thats causing all the commotion? All I hear is people saying they'll do this and that and them saying no we wont, and when its out you wont worry. Does anyone even know what differences will be in GPL3?
The only change I'd like to see is " this code cannot be used by Microsoft or SCO or its subsidiaries, or employees in any fasion ". Or better "this code cannot be used by GW Bush to kill innocent people in any country under any circumstances whatsoever" or something to that effect.
Theyre using WindowsNT to drive the battleships anyway.
I was thinking of an indestructible little PDA/clock, that will play lousy MP3s or radio at high volume, and display an arithmetic or algebraic equation to solve. Once the answers been entered, it shuts off.
Thats enough to wake anyone up..
Better idea is a punching bag, which must be punched twice real hard to shut the alarm off. It only makes sense to smack things in the morn, but it wakes you up. Just keep all knives away
Its likely the soft tissue of bugs, bacteria and insects, which dined on the soft tissue of other bugs and insects, which dined on the Rex. Unless the bones were sunk in formaldehide of some sort.
They'll likely clone cockroaches instead.
I think humans and mammoths will be cloned before any dinos. I'm looking forward to wild mammoths though, Canada has plenty of space for that.
We played Monkey Island upto version 3, which was simple, clear and immersive. Sometimes 2D is so much expressive than 3D, especially the faces of the characters. Unless we're talking movie-class 3D, its unrealistic, shiny, roundish and bland, compared to 2D drawing and paintwork. Most 2D art is made either on paper and scanned, or 2d tracking devices for games...
They screwed up Monkey Island, and other adventure games similarly. How about sonic the hedgehog? The only 2d-3d success story I can think of is Duke Nukem, which itself has stalled for different reasons.
But what happens if someone submits obfuscated SCO code? Heck, what happens if someone submits code that used to be proprietary? Noone really checks, and say the code gets printed on T-shirts and the like, and is discovered by the owners, wonder what the consequences will be.
No, but if a bridge is sinking, it will no longer be a bridge. This one sounds like sea buoys connected with rope.
Unless you signed at employment time that you'll warm em 6 weeks ahead, you owe them nothing. I suggest you do look for another job since this one is not looking like it'll turn out very good. They cannot legally withhold your pay if you leave immediately.
As for the bridge, two others have apparently burnt it before, you couldnt do much damage.
Its not just a faster processor. Its a MUCH faster processor than a 1.2GHz G4. It takes many more types of video cards, drives and NICs etc.
I like the whole idea of a cocoa GUI over FreeBSD + microkernel, tried OSX and loved it. Being Apple, it has much better application support than FreeBSD alone commanded.
But for a general purpose machine, both the much faster CPU, and bigger application market are good leverages, makes decisions tough. Thus the 3% of Apple. Otherwise goto any Apple show thousands of people walk around looking and lusting for the machines, and not buying them. Everyone knows Apple macintosh, many swear by it. Others would love to join, if it weren't for the very annoying application lackage. This is a serious problem when youre a gamer.
Mac lovers have told me to just buy a mac and just not deal with software that arent available for the mac. Now thats not so easy, given some of the biggest titles out there are PC-exclusive, heck not even a Linux version (and Linux's market is weaker for the same reason). Should any desktop OS gain the threshold market percentage, about 20% I'd say, software developers will take notice, and the application problem will be less acute. We're just not there yet, better hardware or not, better OS or not.
Hmm... someone might come up with a computer based on an unknown CPU, that runs awesome at 5GHz, beats the pants off Opterons, and the whole thing costs $100. Given not even netbsd runs on it, will you buy it?
I've been eyeing the mini for a while, and trying to justify buying it. I love the interface, and will finally get UNIX with a reasonable GUI. App support is also reasonable...
But two apps stick out, and force me to stay with x86.. halflife, and giants: citizen kabuto. Theyre both games.
Apart from that, another sticking point is simply that on spec.org, you'll find the strongest chip is the Athlon64. I figured I can upgrade my current machine to athlon64 and its motherboard, for $200 USD. Thats less than half of the baseline mini-mac.
These reasons are why apple is within the 3% and not the 97%, and as hard as I try, I can put myself into the 3%, the reasons are too big.
And that is to ignore and avoid companies who wouldnt release drivers. Look at the pressures on nVidia and ATI currently. Most hardware companies which used to release drivers for unixware, solaris, aix, netware etc are giving linux second or third priority to windows and osx. So as long as the developers arent releasing windows-only drivers, they're under pressure to release OSS drivers.
This is problematic since redhat and suse do distribute binary drivers. If they help, and go OSS-only, people will simply not buy such hardware, and those companies will have to give in.
I salvaged Windows 3.11 disks from a pile of floppies getting trashed and tried it on my P4. The speed was enjoyable... but... I kinda expected WINDOWS. Rightclick does practically nothing. I had good memories from those days, but win3.11 gave me practically nothing, except a nice way to launch DOS apps.
I imagine in a few years, Windows 2011 will boot on my Intel Hexium 2mm laptop, in about 1.5 hours.
Our OpenVMS server has been running without issue, unmaintained for the past 3 years. It has survived all kinds of disasters, and shows the legendary resilience that UNIX is actually known for.
On the other hand we have an SCO Unix machine attached to an industrial equipment whose original and supporting companies have both gone under. It hasnt failed us in a decade, no maintenance, no support. TVs dont last that long without maintenance.
Finally Ive seen DOS apps installed in various places. They do get Y2K type problems, their Dbase3 databases overflow, and files get corrupted. The OS stays good till the day the disk dies.
Dont get me wrong, I prefer qmail over sendmail and postfix, been using it for virtualhosts and whatnot, and has impressed me with the efficiency.
But I was referring to the directory placement. Say qmail decides to go into/var. Say bind decides to head for/dev. and X gets installed possibly in/usr/local/tmp, while apache uses/opt/httpd or something. How do you take account of installed software, package managers? How do you assign partitions to various parts of the progs? Can you replace the/etc of one machine with another's, remove all log files in/var and it turns into the other machine?
The/etc can be replaced with smitty. Heck the config files themselves can be databasen, or in a database, or (gasp!) registry.
All that is the windowsizeation of unix. The whole mess of/etc comes from the unparalleled freedom developers enjoy on unix in the first place, no placing intricate structures in some central registry.
The real mess is the difference between/etc,/etc/app.conf/,/usr/local/etc,/opt/etc,/var/etc, ~/.app/etc.... etc etc
Proper hier structures dictate that apps installed as a part of the OS should go into/etc, others should head into/usr/local/etc. End of story. The problem comes when people compile their own apps, and either do not do./configure --prefix=/usr/local, or the app doesnt allow it. Another issue is multiple installations of an app...
All that can be solved by making sure all apps when compiled can accept --prefix, and when in packaged form, can be installed in a different folder root, like/usr/apps/app1/etc.
And to start solving such issues, we should begin by whipping apps like qmail, which go to lengths not to get installed in the proper directories.
Its never been a server OS, and never really aimed to. Even the gnome desktop is due to pressures on solaris to act like a desktop, and due to people comaring solaris to everything else by virtue of its window manager alone.
It has a nice standardized kernel, many commercial drivers out there are designed to plug into its kernel, like the numerous telecom equipment. Solaris also has arguably the best threading implementation, and the kernel works better than most OSes, including Linux, on SMP and massively SMP systems. Like all unixen it was designed to be rock-stable, and has been as stable as BSD in my experiences (Linux crashed only because I fidgetted with the sources, and all the alpha drivers).
Grab a copy of BeOS, install Linspire, and buy a mac, and start comparing desktops. Please do not include Solaris or OpenBSD or minix or PDP/11 in the list.
Do they create a virtual machine of specific number of CPUs, and boot your choice of OS, and let you work on it, or to they take your (gasp!) Java apps and run them? How do you really use a grid?
I had a list of kernel config options to try in Linux, and wanted to compile a kernel for each option. I thought a grid is great for it... maybe 30 CPUs for an hour should do it.. and didnt know if I can get multiple virtual machines too, say 2 of 15 CPUs each. But for Sun, the minimum amount was something like 1000 CPU hours to purchase, and little info was provided on how to run the thing or access it.
Someone should have a poor man's grid, of a bunch of linux-running dual-CPU athlon64 machines, on which you could transfer your files and so whatever... just like dedicated servers, only for much smaller amounts of time.
You know what, this can be the cell-processor equivalent of the playstation 3. Windows Shorttail (tm) 2008, requires 4 CPUs at least.. recommended 16 CPUs. At least one is dedicated to AA fonts, another to graphic effects and GUI responsiveness, another to the kernel and driver routines, another to networking, another to virtual machines like java, one to all software-based hardware like softmodems... the rest distributed among processes.
And when games are run, different parts, like z-buffer, AA, networking code, audio, physics are given to different CPUs.
Now imagine 16x Athlon64 FX-55s in miniITX. Liquid cooled.
Will my 802.11s router run at 5mbps in a busy apartment, lending the remaining bandwidth to forwarding other packets?
Will a wardriver in the parking lot be able to DDoS the mesh?
Will I have to disable mesh and disallow all outside traffic the first time I install the router, if I just want to use the router myself? Will I be able to do that?
The MBA is best had after a few years of working experience. Finding work as a fresh out-of-college BCS is hard enough, one thats overqualified and underexperienced, leading a bunch of technically experienced IT guys will be a hard sell. Work a few years, while working on your certficates.
That said, aiming for niche markets is a good idea, like manufacturing, scientific, accounting, engineering, chemistry even. Dont do political science, history etc, where using both degrees for one job will be difficult.
... I could switch between a build world of netbsd, and Counter Strike real fast!!!.
That makes me wonder if I can share one nic between the OSes, or put in two NICs, assign one for each OS.
Apart from Zen, would be cool to do a complete replace-boot, as in the OS state is frozen and written to harddisk (some laptop bioses do this), and the state of another OS is read... making switching between OSes, as fast as reading the same amount of data as your used up ram.
Heck I'll just buy another machine and use a KVM switch.
Just like a spool of tape, it can be put on a spool of string, and run through a writer/reader just like the audio casette tapes. I can imagine the reader must be really sensitive, but if a hard-drive's head can be engineered into an audio casette recorder, it should be possible.
Now we can look forward to the next iPod getting jammed with spools of hair.
Slashdot Mirror
and a very cool project. I cant wait to run the latest win32 opengl games on reactOS, as soon as it has a reasonable commandline and complete API. The last time I was so excited by an OS was when I discovered Linux in 1996. ReactOS will be the project to take desktop from Microsoft, and give it to un*x.
I ran the test iso on vmware, wasnt impressed. Plus it crashed a few times. However being a free project its here to stay, and can only grow.
Two projects are bringing Linux and Windows closer, and Linux closer to the conquest of the desktop: Samba and WINE. This was one of the best things in WINE I've seen in months... DirectX now. Once this has been polished up, and made usable enough for most gamers, the windows market can suffer a serious dent.
But only if WINE can run: Giants!
And they wonder why.
.fr email addresses. That means these actions of France will not be politically supportable.
Jokes aside, a large part of opensource software devleopers have been french, just read the sourcecode and search for
In corporate circles, Bill Gates is admired for being a shrewd businessman, books on him are read by managers and enterpreneurs. However rank-and-file software developers know better and admire good product design.
So what is in GPL3 thats causing all the commotion? All I hear is people saying they'll do this and that and them saying no we wont, and when its out you wont worry. Does anyone even know what differences will be in GPL3?
The only change I'd like to see is " this code cannot be used by Microsoft or SCO or its subsidiaries, or employees in any fasion ". Or better "this code cannot be used by GW Bush to kill innocent people in any country under any circumstances whatsoever" or something to that effect.
Theyre using WindowsNT to drive the battleships anyway.
I was thinking of an indestructible little PDA/clock, that will play lousy MP3s or radio at high volume, and display an arithmetic or algebraic equation to solve. Once the answers been entered, it shuts off.
Thats enough to wake anyone up..
Better idea is a punching bag, which must be punched twice real hard to shut the alarm off. It only makes sense to smack things in the morn, but it wakes you up. Just keep all knives away
Its likely the soft tissue of bugs, bacteria and insects, which dined on the soft tissue of other bugs and insects, which dined on the Rex. Unless the bones were sunk in formaldehide of some sort.
They'll likely clone cockroaches instead.
I think humans and mammoths will be cloned before any dinos. I'm looking forward to wild mammoths though, Canada has plenty of space for that.
I suspect it will be smaller too.
We played Monkey Island upto version 3, which was simple, clear and immersive. Sometimes 2D is so much expressive than 3D, especially the faces of the characters. Unless we're talking movie-class 3D, its unrealistic, shiny, roundish and bland, compared to 2D drawing and paintwork. Most 2D art is made either on paper and scanned, or 2d tracking devices for games...
They screwed up Monkey Island, and other adventure games similarly. How about sonic the hedgehog? The only 2d-3d success story I can think of is Duke Nukem, which itself has stalled for different reasons.
Ive seen obfuscated DVD decryption code..
But what happens if someone submits obfuscated SCO code? Heck, what happens if someone submits code that used to be proprietary? Noone really checks, and say the code gets printed on T-shirts and the like, and is discovered by the owners, wonder what the consequences will be.
I'll just send my sendmail.cf
No, but if a bridge is sinking, it will no longer be a bridge. This one sounds like sea buoys connected with rope.
Unless you signed at employment time that you'll warm em 6 weeks ahead, you owe them nothing. I suggest you do look for another job since this one is not looking like it'll turn out very good. They cannot legally withhold your pay if you leave immediately.
As for the bridge, two others have apparently burnt it before, you couldnt do much damage.
Its not just a faster processor. Its a MUCH faster processor than a 1.2GHz G4. It takes many more types of video cards, drives and NICs etc.
I like the whole idea of a cocoa GUI over FreeBSD + microkernel, tried OSX and loved it. Being Apple, it has much better application support than FreeBSD alone commanded.
But for a general purpose machine, both the much faster CPU, and bigger application market are good leverages, makes decisions tough. Thus the 3% of Apple. Otherwise goto any Apple show thousands of people walk around looking and lusting for the machines, and not buying them. Everyone knows Apple macintosh, many swear by it. Others would love to join, if it weren't for the very annoying application lackage. This is a serious problem when youre a gamer.
Mac lovers have told me to just buy a mac and just not deal with software that arent available for the mac. Now thats not so easy, given some of the biggest titles out there are PC-exclusive, heck not even a Linux version (and Linux's market is weaker for the same reason). Should any desktop OS gain the threshold market percentage, about 20% I'd say, software developers will take notice, and the application problem will be less acute. We're just not there yet, better hardware or not, better OS or not.
Hmm... someone might come up with a computer based on an unknown CPU, that runs awesome at 5GHz, beats the pants off Opterons, and the whole thing costs $100. Given not even netbsd runs on it, will you buy it?
I've been eyeing the mini for a while, and trying to justify buying it. I love the interface, and will finally get UNIX with a reasonable GUI. App support is also reasonable...
But two apps stick out, and force me to stay with x86.. halflife, and giants: citizen kabuto. Theyre both games.
Apart from that, another sticking point is simply that on spec.org, you'll find the strongest chip is the Athlon64. I figured I can upgrade my current machine to athlon64 and its motherboard, for $200 USD. Thats less than half of the baseline mini-mac.
These reasons are why apple is within the 3% and not the 97%, and as hard as I try, I can put myself into the 3%, the reasons are too big.
Athlon64 it is.
And that is to ignore and avoid companies who wouldnt release drivers. Look at the pressures on nVidia and ATI currently. Most hardware companies which used to release drivers for unixware, solaris, aix, netware etc are giving linux second or third priority to windows and osx. So as long as the developers arent releasing windows-only drivers, they're under pressure to release OSS drivers.
This is problematic since redhat and suse do distribute binary drivers. If they help, and go OSS-only, people will simply not buy such hardware, and those companies will have to give in.
I salvaged Windows 3.11 disks from a pile of floppies getting trashed and tried it on my P4. The speed was enjoyable... but... I kinda expected WINDOWS. Rightclick does practically nothing. I had good memories from those days, but win3.11 gave me practically nothing, except a nice way to launch DOS apps.
I imagine in a few years, Windows 2011 will boot on my Intel Hexium 2mm laptop, in about 1.5 hours.
Our OpenVMS server has been running without issue, unmaintained for the past 3 years. It has survived all kinds of disasters, and shows the legendary resilience that UNIX is actually known for.
On the other hand we have an SCO Unix machine attached to an industrial equipment whose original and supporting companies have both gone under. It hasnt failed us in a decade, no maintenance, no support. TVs dont last that long without maintenance.
Finally Ive seen DOS apps installed in various places. They do get Y2K type problems, their Dbase3 databases overflow, and files get corrupted. The OS stays good till the day the disk dies.
Dont get me wrong, I prefer qmail over sendmail and postfix, been using it for virtualhosts and whatnot, and has impressed me with the efficiency.
/var. Say bind decides to head for /dev. and X gets installed possibly in /usr/local/tmp, while apache uses /opt/httpd or something. How do you take account of installed software, package managers? How do you assign partitions to various parts of the progs? Can you replace the /etc of one machine with another's, remove all log files in /var and it turns into the other machine?
But I was referring to the directory placement. Say qmail decides to go into
The /etc can be replaced with smitty. Heck the config files themselves can be databasen, or in a database, or (gasp!) registry.
/etc comes from the unparalleled freedom developers enjoy on unix in the first place, no placing intricate structures in some central registry.
/etc, /etc/app.conf/, /usr/local/etc, /opt/etc, /var/etc, ~/.app/etc.... etc etc
/etc, others should head into /usr/local/etc. End of story. The problem comes when people compile their own apps, and either do not do ./configure --prefix=/usr/local, or the app doesnt allow it. Another issue is multiple installations of an app...
/usr/apps/app1/etc.
All that is the windowsizeation of unix. The whole mess of
The real mess is the difference between
Proper hier structures dictate that apps installed as a part of the OS should go into
All that can be solved by making sure all apps when compiled can accept --prefix, and when in packaged form, can be installed in a different folder root, like
And to start solving such issues, we should begin by whipping apps like qmail, which go to lengths not to get installed in the proper directories.
Imagine what I felt when they stopped distributing QBASIC. It was the highest form of programming languages.
So I decided that will never happen to me again.
I learned C.
Its never been a server OS, and never really aimed to. Even the gnome desktop is due to pressures on solaris to act like a desktop, and due to people comaring solaris to everything else by virtue of its window manager alone.
It has a nice standardized kernel, many commercial drivers out there are designed to plug into its kernel, like the numerous telecom equipment. Solaris also has arguably the best threading implementation, and the kernel works better than most OSes, including Linux, on SMP and massively SMP systems. Like all unixen it was designed to be rock-stable, and has been as stable as BSD in my experiences (Linux crashed only because I fidgetted with the sources, and all the alpha drivers).
Grab a copy of BeOS, install Linspire, and buy a mac, and start comparing desktops. Please do not include Solaris or OpenBSD or minix or PDP/11 in the list.
Do they create a virtual machine of specific number of CPUs, and boot your choice of OS, and let you work on it, or to they take your (gasp!) Java apps and run them? How do you really use a grid?
I had a list of kernel config options to try in Linux, and wanted to compile a kernel for each option. I thought a grid is great for it... maybe 30 CPUs for an hour should do it.. and didnt know if I can get multiple virtual machines too, say 2 of 15 CPUs each. But for Sun, the minimum amount was something like 1000 CPU hours to purchase, and little info was provided on how to run the thing or access it.
Someone should have a poor man's grid, of a bunch of linux-running dual-CPU athlon64 machines, on which you could transfer your files and so whatever... just like dedicated servers, only for much smaller amounts of time.
Hmmmm... ideas.
You know what, this can be the cell-processor equivalent of the playstation 3. Windows Shorttail (tm) 2008, requires 4 CPUs at least.. recommended 16 CPUs. At least one is dedicated to AA fonts, another to graphic effects and GUI responsiveness, another to the kernel and driver routines, another to networking, another to virtual machines like java, one to all software-based hardware like softmodems... the rest distributed among processes.
And when games are run, different parts, like z-buffer, AA, networking code, audio, physics are given to different CPUs.
Now imagine 16x Athlon64 FX-55s in miniITX. Liquid cooled.
Will my 802.11s router run at 5mbps in a busy apartment, lending the remaining bandwidth to forwarding other packets?
Will a wardriver in the parking lot be able to DDoS the mesh?
Will I have to disable mesh and disallow all outside traffic the first time I install the router, if I just want to use the router myself? Will I be able to do that?
The MBA is best had after a few years of working experience. Finding work as a fresh out-of-college BCS is hard enough, one thats overqualified and underexperienced, leading a bunch of technically experienced IT guys will be a hard sell. Work a few years, while working on your certficates.
That said, aiming for niche markets is a good idea, like manufacturing, scientific, accounting, engineering, chemistry even. Dont do political science, history etc, where using both degrees for one job will be difficult.
... I could switch between a build world of netbsd, and Counter Strike real fast!!!.
That makes me wonder if I can share one nic between the OSes, or put in two NICs, assign one for each OS.
Apart from Zen, would be cool to do a complete replace-boot, as in the OS state is frozen and written to harddisk (some laptop bioses do this), and the state of another OS is read... making switching between OSes, as fast as reading the same amount of data as your used up ram.
Heck I'll just buy another machine and use a KVM switch.
Just like a spool of tape, it can be put on a spool of string, and run through a writer/reader just like the audio casette tapes. I can imagine the reader must be really sensitive, but if a hard-drive's head can be engineered into an audio casette recorder, it should be possible.
Now we can look forward to the next iPod getting jammed with spools of hair.