They say tar has its limitations. I really dont understand.
Ive worked with different unixen and Linux distros, so I just dont want to be dependant on something that isnt installed by default everywhere. tar already has a VERY well known format and execution parameters.
Ive lost my fair share of data to buggy harddrives and dumb mistakes like pulling off the ide cable while the system is running. So cron does daily backups using tar cfj using a file that has a list of other files to be backed up. This way I dont have to backup the whole partition. To restore a certain file, just tar xvfj backup2.tar.bz2/pathtofile --root=/
The cron setup renames backup.bz2 to backup2.bz2 and removes backup2.bz2 so I have the data for the past two days. Beside incremental backup which I dont need due to this setup, what else could I need? And by the way the backup.bz2 is copied off onto an NFS share elsewhere incase my whole RAID setup crashes, or the XFS filesystem bombs out. This setup can be replicated onto FreeBSD Solaris and many others.
OK Thats nothing, I used to work in the tech department of my university, and an art professor used to call with all his problems. Favorite one:
I can see all the files with the As and Bs but nothing else.
Solution: Walk over to his department and teach him how to scroll.
OK now that Ive warmed you up, heres the real story of a computa fixa: I'm originally from central Afghanistan. People there have kids plentiful because they dont have to pay rent or send them off to college. I had 22 uncles and aunts from my fathers side (from 3 grandmothers) and 11 from my mothers side. I have over 100 first cousins...
Now being popular as the only geek around in this family isnt fun. Add to this the fact that everyone needs a computer for emails, homeworks and offical documents, and that everyone likes to pay less than what the brand names ask for, so they would like to assemble their own systems.
Guess who they call when they get a virus? Guess who they blame the toast power supply on? Now you really see the scale of this equation? The place where I buy the computer parts, the sellers become a good friend of mine, I'm his biggest business. I've assembled up to 10 systems in a week. I'm scheduled to build 2 this weekend.. and I'm not even in my home town. I'm in Toronto where I work at a manufacturing company fixing guess what? and in the evenings I head for a real estate firm where I have a contract to fix and maintain guess whats?
I'm halfway through college, and really interested into embedded computer design, far away from hardware maintenance and microsoft. I'm too busy and poor to study right now. Busy fixing computers.
I would be extremely skeptical of the Linux useage statistics if I'd ever have to consider it. In my circle of friends and family, Linux gets used on and off depending on the situation. Some friends are running or ran at some time, Linux webservers, fileservers etc. I am currently using Win98 on desktop computers at home, while two servers are Redhat and SuSE. In history Ive used Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD on the servers and tried Linux on some of the desktops for some time, even BeOS and FreeBSD.
So at any time am I a Linux user if I'm running 2 Linux servers but a win98 desktop? Is my friend a Linux user if he's using one for a firewall but doesnt know it? If I'm using Linux part-time when not playing games? Certainly other free OSes will not be counted...
Beside these, too many other friends have requested Linux CDs from me, and received Knoppix. Since I dont know the status and useage of those CDs, they can neither all be counted or discounter. The linux useage counter is basically a counter of all who have run into that site.
SunOS was originally taken from BSD if I'm correct. Adding Java to FreeBSD, and porting over maybe jboss would be a boost to the FreeBSD platform. BSD stability, java portability, opensource security, makes for a unique combination, and I'm sure some smart IT directors or consultants would recommend it for critical operations. But first, Java on BSD should be stabilized and left out in the sun to mature.
I'm deeply troubled to have payers see stories first. Theres something wrong there. After all, its the readers mostly who submit stories, not the people who get paid.
Then again I know the economy is bad, but this idea might not sound nice to all slashdotters. This has been a very free site for us with very little ads. Slashdot might later increase ads and maybe popups if the economy goes down with the war, to push more geeks to pay.
Ideally, slashdot sort of things should be paid for by taxpayers, grants from the government. Turning this into a business model does not appeal to me. Hey readers! whats the next best thing to slashdot??
The Linux defect rate was 0.1 defects per 1,000 lines of code, Reasoning found. </i>
So they DID find errors. Did they submit bugreports??
<i> The rate for the general-purpose operating systems--two of them versions of Unix--was between 0.6 and 0.7 per 1,000 lines of code. </i>
Linux is a general-purpose operating system. You cant really be more general-purpose than Linux. From desktop and gaming platforms to PDAs and serverfarms and vector-processor crays. Windows is comparatively a narrow-market OS.
Nice article. I just dont quite understand what they mean by quality of code beside statistically taking performance and stability. And I do mean statistically. For a one-day test, any OS will run fine and fast. Try a 6-month marathon with at least a 50% load average and 100 processes, both with heavy paging and without it. Stress-testing brings out real qualitities.
To begin with, its hard to portray a heroic engineer. To show an engineer's abilities, you have to teach the audience his work, to show a really cool coder, remove the hot chick from beside his desk, the sixpack, the on-the-go attitude, and describe parts of Linux, and why building a new Virtual memory manager for SMP systems is VERY cool. The office is dull. The computer a measly Pentium2 or Duron, the coder a scrawny hunched guy maybe with a little pot belly, but not the fat job in Jurassic Park. Oh, and by the way hes very antisocial. Think John Carmack's monotonic speech.
In his work environment, hes bombarded with bugs to fix, more than groundbreaking projects to start. For God's sake dont show large text in the middle of the screen 'Youve Got Mail'. Real Geeks check their emails every 5 mintes, some use mesg in the shell.
I remember seeing one TV series in which the coder actually waited till his windows98 system booted, then powered up VC++. By the way, they werent trying to portray a COOL coder.
Well said. Applies equally to J2EE. I asked some techies a while ago how cant ANSI C/C++ code, if programmed skillfully, be better than J2EE. Use standard portable libs and you have portable code.
However J2EE is based on a huge pool of Compsci grads weaned on Java in their second year. J2EE is also quite mature and compliant with other companies and plays well with opensourced projects..NET isnt. Players like IBM and Oracle are working to optimise their J2EE platforms, Microsoft alone couldnt compete there, least due to their software quality.
and nothing to get angry about. A small section of world's developers will learn and use it, and the bigger smarter percent will use standardized portable tools. API companies like trolltech and SUNs Java will win in the end. The best and the brightest will continue to use ANSI C '99 with ANSI C++ sparingly.
Microsoft can release RPG.NET, Java.NET Ruby.NET Perl.NET or whatever and it wont do any good to them or their reputation. Theyve already attracted the bottom of the barrel among developers, implied by Bill Goates when he said Microsoft has learned rallying the developer community from Linux. He was bullsh*tting. They havent learned a thing.
I've assembled many systems for value-conscious people around, most being Duron 700-950. Nowadays the Duron 1200-1600 are nice bets since any higher clock would push the price by a bigger margin.
The vast majority of customers, both OEM and custom-assembled, really couldnt care about the psychological 1GHz or 2GHz bump, or getting the very latest processor. The real competition is the number of processors sold, and everyone can see the Athlon has always outperformed the Pentium4 in price/performance competitions. Give the new power ratings, with the Athlon chugging lesser watts while pushing the cache for a more reasonable performance figure, I'd say AMD will come out the winner.
Most customers quite simply dont want a $3000 system with the latest and greatest parts. Sure such a market exists, but theyre a loud minority. There are parents buying systems for their kids, their offices and college guys for their collegework. There are ordiniary people who want ordiniary computers that just do the job reliably, you know, use MS Word, browse the net, maybe watch a DVD. You dont even need a processor clocked over 1GHz for this, a Duron 800 with 256MB RAM and a Geforce2MX card can hold its own even in todays market. Remember very few are really buying Windows XP right now.
In planning for the future, AMD should not ignore the FSB for the Hammer, nor should they ignore the power ratings. The price has always been their edge, but having the only 32/64-bit processor, they could even afford to jack it up a little assuming Intels 64-bit doesnt do too well with 32-bit code. What bothers Intel and Microsoft right now is that people are perfectly happy with a low-end machine, and will continue to be for a while. The whole North Amerian market is coming closer to saturation, and poorer countries would have a bell curve centered much closer to the very low end of America's computer buying bell curve. All this points to the next boom in extreme value systems, where AMD again has kept their edge over Intel, only to compete with transmeta and the C3.
If we had one standard packaging mechanism, standardized desktops, and windowing environments, Linux would be doing much better. Rather than looking at the differences between distros and KDE and GNOME, developers would make simple but important things like the resolution changer. If they can get the guarantee the API will remain constant across distros for the window system, paths will not change etc, they could build layers that integrate tigher.
But alas the Lack of Standards (tm) will remain and Linux will be much weaker than Microsoft, MaxOSX and BEOS in desktop strength. I dont see these layers standardizing anytime soon, and they will divide the precious developer pool.
Think of ASCII art artists. They have limited resources, but combined in nice ways to achieve far more effects. Think Atari 2600 and Commodore 64's memory and disk areas. They only had some outputs for video and sound and generally the system was very simple. In Atari there was no OS (or an extremely simplified cartridge prog runner) and in Commodore, the V2 Basic didnt really provide any software provisions for use to the game code. One programmer could understand the entire Atari 2600 datasheet and make the best use of it, and be creative with it. He could also end up being an expert with his sources and development tools.
Today we have the entire development process so heavily bloated, even the OS needs teams to work on its various parts. The resulting code is therefore neither optimized to the MAX, nor too stable. Gaming aside, the computer industry is in a bad shape. Think of all the layers in an application server like Websphere, or an ERP system with say Oracle as a backend database. We cut the process in so many different layers and standardized the communication between the layers to try and achieve that kind of stability, but each layer is worked on by whole teams on a repository.
So the largest amount of time is shared between learning something new, some standard, protocol or language, exploring huge code repositories till you come across what you need, or debugging, which is all the more complicated. Theres so such thing as creativity among programmers anymore. Theres plenty of space, so just code according to the algorithm.
Free software programmers are exempt from this rule generally. They take their time, make sure they know the language theyre working on, and get creative, free from the control of a project manager or deadline.
I think this is worse a problem than it seems. FreeBSD has constantly gained the reputation of an elitist team, shadowed only by its reputation of robust operation. Even FreeBSD fans and users have constantly fought online battles with Linux hackers arguing who's superior.
These core members with this attitude should really think on what this is all about. Not who can come to the tree house. If a developer has made so many contributions, and is causing 'trouble', you dont humiliate him and 'bar' him out. You at least dont use the language used above. Dillons code runs on our servers everywhere managing the memory and many other things.
I was looking around for a webmail, and all I could find was IMP and squirrelmail. Believe me theyre both not quite mature, although I saw IMP running for years at Plattsburgh State. Installation of either is a ROYAL pain and not standardized, so you have to design your server, OS and other settings for the webmail system. for eg, for Squirrelmail you have to use courier imap and either courier mta or qmail. For IMP, you need certain versions of PHP with certain compile flags plus install HORDE. Last year this was complicated dont know now..
I made my own webmail for the site Hazara.org and Changezi.info in PHP4. Took maybe a weeks worth part time work and I got it a perfect fit (except for downloading attachments). I tried to make a custom C-compiled CGI-based webmail system for qmail using XML, but had a tough time looking up docs for the c-client libs to be able to read Maildirs directly. Gave up on it after trying to use the IMAP method, still on the lookout for c-client docs now.
The certainly sound like grabbing an opportunity at a bad time, its really too early to think about the next flight, its time to ponder over the investigation and space flight in general.
To begin with, I would like to say that the crew that died this morning have made contributions to mankind that are great. They not only offered their lives to science and knowledge in general as they accepted the risks involved, they offered their lifetimes of education, training and experience.
However, their loss should not put a lid on a science that they gave so much to, to push forward. I believe nationalistic feelings, and the Russians' opportunistic behavior aside, it is worth looking at the Soyuz design. They lost the cold war race and lost in the competition over government systems, but they did make their mark over science in profound ways, and the robust low-maintenance Soyuz spacecraft design is a part of that. No matter how advanced the technology and the new materials, entering the atmosphere at 20.9 mach (holy faeces), takes a unique proven design to survive. The Soyuz has taken is fair share of crashes, which is why I'm not pushing it absolutely, I'm just saying nationalistic feelings shouldnt come in the way.
If only for security, the NASA should take a long serious look at an already designed and proven spacecraft before launching expensive contracts with Boeing and others, at a time when the presidency is unreasonable cuttin down taxes and scientific funding, and wasting money over an unreasonable war. Making sure the next spaceflight does not take the three years delay that the last crash took, should become a priority.
Someone who might have joined Microsoft in 1989, and enjoyed the 90s overwhelmingly, and expected their monopoly to remain indefinitely would certainly despise Linux, FreeBSD and other Opensource software. See, monopoly can get very comfortable and later, its loss might feel just wrong despite its associated political correctness.
See, this planet as a whole is basically an extremely competitive place. Combine that with the fact that there now seems to be more population than natural resources, competition at every level becomes a matter of life and death for individuals and nations. In any competitive environment, monopoly exists for sure. But rules that break monopoly makes things interesting and takes the competition to a different level.
The western hemisphere grabbed that monopoly about 500 years ago, just like Microsoft did with Windows 3.1. Of course, the western civilization did very well indeed, which is why its going strong 5 centuries on, compared to Microsoft which is showing weaknesses. Other regions, Asia, Africa etc did try to push on with their own older economies and societies, but just as Microsoft grabbed the market share, the western civilization found the Scientific Method which was a far superior way of gaining knowledge than anything else out there. Asia for one has given way now. Many indians speak, read and write english and the chinese by the millions are glued to english written O'Reilly books. This is not too different from Linus copying UNIX ideas to make a UNIX clone.
Now the turf levels up. Globalization initially will make life tough for the nations that own the top 50% of the world's economy. However, Bill Goats was wrong. Linux will not destroy competition and bring down the whole software market to a halt. Wonderful things will happen as people will have options they didnt have in the past decade. The world's overall economies will surely boom, with the percentage of the world's population under the poverty line decreasing.
You know what that means dont you? Frustration that drove the 19 Pakistanis and Saudis to fly Jumbos into NewYork buildings, and millions to cheer their acts will disappear. Where nations can compete economically, they will not have to resort to extreme methods. We will see Operating Systems from Finland, Iran, Malaysia, Kenya, Apps from Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Korea, Chile and Processors from Ukraine, United States, India, Taiwan. Imagine the competition. Imagine the prices. Imagine the quality!
Many years after the start of such large-scale globalization, an american geek can logon to dice.com and search jobs, and will recieve far more offerings in many more countries than just his. And one country's dot-com bust will not bring the global tech economy down.
you do mean 'an order of magnitude more' don't you?
I wonder what happened to the Joint European Torus project that was so much hyped, but couldnt produce sustained energy after many trials across years. Instead of doing everything America vs Europe vs Japan, they could so join the europeans for reduced costs and better maintenance across years, unless theres weapons technology involved of course.
I also wonder if its at all possible to locate the reactor close to other Big Science labs and create larger science community centres, maybe at BNL or LANL or Fermilab. Sharing ground and resources with other Big Science labs will help cut costs, and considering the fact that alot of construction/computer/other materials used for accelerators can also be used for the torus so uniting the location will make sense. Am I wrong?
At least in one state they should build large multiple torii if this succeeds. The abundance of energy will allow the government to enforce a clean-fuel-only vehicles law, which will really make a practical difference.
What has been tested is simply the number of concurrent connections. More practical would be simple retrieving of say 1kb data from a database and printing it out on a very simple HTML, and checking the maximum number of THESE connections. In effect trying to really httpblast DDoS style the FreeBSD with sheer number of connections. The box will have to be massive with 4GB RAM at least (we're testing OS here not hardware) and the connection maybe (multiple?) gigabit ethernet. The result would theoretically be lower than 1.6 million but we need to show FreeBSD can scale in practical tests like these. Results from a test like that will have the power to change vendors' minds from trying to run IIS and MS SQL for a high volume site.
What would really be interesting is if non intel hardware could also be emulated. I sure wouldnt mind an Ultra5, RS/6000 and hammer systems networked together with ipv6 on token ring.. all on my BeOS desktop. BeOS is supported isnt it?
Funny how the site www.internettrafficreport.com is being slashdotted right now. In the last 5 min alone, the global traffic index went from 85 to 65, apparently a new wave of attacks as the worm discovers new ground. My 5-domain webserver hasnt received a packet yet, but Im keeping my eye on it. Glad to be using Postgres with its ports blocked from the Internet.
Holy cow! Israel is completely down according to the site.. all routers with 100% packet loss.
Slashdot Mirror
They say tar has its limitations. I really dont understand.
Ive worked with different unixen and Linux distros, so I just dont want to be dependant on something that isnt installed by default everywhere. tar already has a VERY well known format and execution parameters.
Ive lost my fair share of data to buggy harddrives and dumb mistakes like pulling off the ide cable while the system is running. So cron does daily backups using tar cfj using a file that has a list of other files to be backed up. This way I dont have to backup the whole partition. To restore a certain file, just tar xvfj backup2.tar.bz2
The cron setup renames backup.bz2 to backup2.bz2 and removes backup2.bz2 so I have the data for the past two days. Beside incremental backup which I dont need due to this setup, what else could I need? And by the way the backup.bz2 is copied off onto an NFS share elsewhere incase my whole RAID setup crashes, or the XFS filesystem bombs out. This setup can be replicated onto FreeBSD Solaris and many others.
OK Thats nothing, I used to work in the tech department of my university, and an art professor used to call with all his problems. Favorite one:
I can see all the files with the As and Bs but nothing else.
Solution: Walk over to his department and teach him how to scroll.
OK now that Ive warmed you up, heres the real story of a computa fixa:
I'm originally from central Afghanistan. People there have kids plentiful because they dont have to pay rent or send them off to college. I had 22 uncles and aunts from my fathers side (from 3 grandmothers) and 11 from my mothers side. I have over 100 first cousins...
Now being popular as the only geek around in this family isnt fun. Add to this the fact that everyone needs a computer for emails, homeworks and offical documents, and that everyone likes to pay less than what the brand names ask for, so they would like to assemble their own systems.
Guess who they call when they get a virus? Guess who they blame the toast power supply on? Now you really see the scale of this equation? The place where I buy the computer parts, the sellers become a good friend of mine, I'm his biggest business. I've assembled up to 10 systems in a week. I'm scheduled to build 2 this weekend.. and I'm not even in my home town. I'm in Toronto where I work at a manufacturing company fixing guess what? and in the evenings I head for a real estate firm where I have a contract to fix and maintain guess whats?
I'm halfway through college, and really interested into embedded computer design, far away from hardware maintenance and microsoft. I'm too busy and poor to study right now. Busy fixing computers.
I would be extremely skeptical of the Linux useage statistics if I'd ever have to consider it. In my circle of friends and family, Linux gets used on and off depending on the situation. Some friends are running or ran at some time, Linux webservers, fileservers etc. I am currently using Win98 on desktop computers at home, while two servers are Redhat and SuSE. In history Ive used Solaris, FreeBSD, NetBSD on the servers and tried Linux on some of the desktops for some time, even BeOS and FreeBSD.
So at any time am I a Linux user if I'm running 2 Linux servers but a win98 desktop? Is my friend a Linux user if he's using one for a firewall but doesnt know it? If I'm using Linux part-time when not playing games? Certainly other free OSes will not be counted...
Beside these, too many other friends have requested Linux CDs from me, and received Knoppix. Since I dont know the status and useage of those CDs, they can neither all be counted or discounter. The linux useage counter is basically a counter of all who have run into that site.
SunOS was originally taken from BSD if I'm correct. Adding Java to FreeBSD, and porting over maybe jboss would be a boost to the FreeBSD platform. BSD stability, java portability, opensource security, makes for a unique combination, and I'm sure some smart IT directors or consultants would recommend it for critical operations. But first, Java on BSD should be stabilized and left out in the sun to mature.
I'm beginning to think slash should include a spell checker, and warn before committing a story.
Or even BitchX. Maybe you login to bitch!
I'm deeply troubled to have payers see stories first. Theres something wrong there. After all, its the readers mostly who submit stories, not the people who get paid.
Then again I know the economy is bad, but this idea might not sound nice to all slashdotters. This has been a very free site for us with very little ads. Slashdot might later increase ads and maybe popups if the economy goes down with the war, to push more geeks to pay.
Ideally, slashdot sort of things should be paid for by taxpayers, grants from the government. Turning this into a business model does not appeal to me. Hey readers! whats the next best thing to slashdot??
The Linux defect rate was 0.1 defects per 1,000 lines of code, Reasoning found.
</i>
So they DID find errors. Did they submit bugreports??
<i>
The rate for the general-purpose operating systems--two of them versions of Unix--was between 0.6 and 0.7 per 1,000 lines of code.
</i>
Linux is a general-purpose operating system. You cant really be more general-purpose than Linux. From desktop and gaming platforms to PDAs and serverfarms and vector-processor crays. Windows is comparatively a narrow-market OS.
Nice article. I just dont quite understand what they mean by quality of code beside statistically taking performance and stability. And I do mean statistically. For a one-day test, any OS will run fine and fast. Try a 6-month marathon with at least a 50% load average and 100 processes, both with heavy paging and without it. Stress-testing brings out real qualitities.
To begin with, its hard to portray a heroic engineer. To show an engineer's abilities, you have to teach the audience his work, to show a really cool coder, remove the hot chick from beside his desk, the sixpack, the on-the-go attitude, and describe parts of Linux, and why building a new Virtual memory manager for SMP systems is VERY cool. The office is dull. The computer a measly Pentium2 or Duron, the coder a scrawny hunched guy maybe with a little pot belly, but not the fat job in Jurassic Park. Oh, and by the way hes very antisocial. Think John Carmack's monotonic speech.
In his work environment, hes bombarded with bugs to fix, more than groundbreaking projects to start. For God's sake dont show large text in the middle of the screen 'Youve Got Mail'. Real Geeks check their emails every 5 mintes, some use mesg in the shell.
I remember seeing one TV series in which the coder actually waited till his windows98 system booted, then powered up VC++. By the way, they werent trying to portray a COOL coder.
loose = lose;
Well said. Applies equally to J2EE. I asked some techies a while ago how cant ANSI C/C++ code, if programmed skillfully, be better than J2EE. Use standard portable libs and you have portable code.
However J2EE is based on a huge pool of Compsci grads weaned on Java in their second year. J2EE is also quite mature and compliant with other companies and plays well with opensourced projects.
and nothing to get angry about. A small section of world's developers will learn and use it, and the bigger smarter percent will use standardized portable tools. API companies like trolltech and SUNs Java will win in the end. The best and the brightest will continue to use ANSI C '99 with ANSI C++ sparingly.
Microsoft can release RPG.NET, Java.NET Ruby.NET Perl.NET or whatever and it wont do any good to them or their reputation. Theyve already attracted the bottom of the barrel among developers, implied by Bill Goates when he said Microsoft has learned rallying the developer community from Linux. He was bullsh*tting. They havent learned a thing.
I've assembled many systems for value-conscious people around, most being Duron 700-950. Nowadays the Duron 1200-1600 are nice bets since any higher clock would push the price by a bigger margin.
The vast majority of customers, both OEM and custom-assembled, really couldnt care about the psychological 1GHz or 2GHz bump, or getting the very latest processor. The real competition is the number of processors sold, and everyone can see the Athlon has always outperformed the Pentium4 in price/performance competitions. Give the new power ratings, with the Athlon chugging lesser watts while pushing the cache for a more reasonable performance figure, I'd say AMD will come out the winner.
Most customers quite simply dont want a $3000 system with the latest and greatest parts. Sure such a market exists, but theyre a loud minority. There are parents buying systems for their kids, their offices and college guys for their collegework. There are ordiniary people who want ordiniary computers that just do the job reliably, you know, use MS Word, browse the net, maybe watch a DVD. You dont even need a processor clocked over 1GHz for this, a Duron 800 with 256MB RAM and a Geforce2MX card can hold its own even in todays market. Remember very few are really buying Windows XP right now.
In planning for the future, AMD should not ignore the FSB for the Hammer, nor should they ignore the power ratings. The price has always been their edge, but having the only 32/64-bit processor, they could even afford to jack it up a little assuming Intels 64-bit doesnt do too well with 32-bit code. What bothers Intel and Microsoft right now is that people are perfectly happy with a low-end machine, and will continue to be for a while. The whole North Amerian market is coming closer to saturation, and poorer countries would have a bell curve centered much closer to the very low end of America's computer buying bell curve. All this points to the next boom in extreme value systems, where AMD again has kept their edge over Intel, only to compete with transmeta and the C3.
Theres a good reason for this. Its called:
Lack of Standards (tm)
If we had one standard packaging mechanism, standardized desktops, and windowing environments, Linux would be doing much better. Rather than looking at the differences between distros and KDE and GNOME, developers would make simple but important things like the resolution changer. If they can get the guarantee the API will remain constant across distros for the window system, paths will not change etc, they could build layers that integrate tigher.
But alas the Lack of Standards (tm) will remain and Linux will be much weaker than Microsoft, MaxOSX and BEOS in desktop strength. I dont see these layers standardizing anytime soon, and they will divide the precious developer pool.
Think of ASCII art artists. They have limited resources, but combined in nice ways to achieve far more effects. Think Atari 2600 and Commodore 64's memory and disk areas. They only had some outputs for video and sound and generally the system was very simple. In Atari there was no OS (or an extremely simplified cartridge prog runner) and in Commodore, the V2 Basic didnt really provide any software provisions for use to the game code. One programmer could understand the entire Atari 2600 datasheet and make the best use of it, and be creative with it. He could also end up being an expert with his sources and development tools.
Today we have the entire development process so heavily bloated, even the OS needs teams to work on its various parts. The resulting code is therefore neither optimized to the MAX, nor too stable. Gaming aside, the computer industry is in a bad shape. Think of all the layers in an application server like Websphere, or an ERP system with say Oracle as a backend database. We cut the process in so many different layers and standardized the communication between the layers to try and achieve that kind of stability, but each layer is worked on by whole teams on a repository.
So the largest amount of time is shared between learning something new, some standard, protocol or language, exploring huge code repositories till you come across what you need, or debugging, which is all the more complicated. Theres so such thing as creativity among programmers anymore. Theres plenty of space, so just code according to the algorithm.
Free software programmers are exempt from this rule generally. They take their time, make sure they know the language theyre working on, and get creative, free from the control of a project manager or deadline.
if I've gained anything from these posts, from all sides, its that you're all behaving like kids, not professional grown-ups.
This has to be the maturest post ever. I have so many things to learn from you.
ditto
You sound like George Bush.
I think this is worse a problem than it seems. FreeBSD has constantly gained the reputation of an elitist team, shadowed only by its reputation of robust operation. Even FreeBSD fans and users have constantly fought online battles with Linux hackers arguing who's superior.
These core members with this attitude should really think on what this is all about. Not who can come to the tree house. If a developer has made so many contributions, and is causing 'trouble', you dont humiliate him and 'bar' him out. You at least dont use the language used above. Dillons code runs on our servers everywhere managing the memory and many other things.
I was looking around for a webmail, and all I could find was IMP and squirrelmail. Believe me theyre both not quite mature, although I saw IMP running for years at Plattsburgh State. Installation of either is a ROYAL pain and not standardized, so you have to design your server, OS and other settings for the webmail system. for eg, for Squirrelmail you have to use courier imap and either courier mta or qmail. For IMP, you need certain versions of PHP with certain compile flags plus install HORDE. Last year this was complicated dont know now..
I made my own webmail for the site Hazara.org and Changezi.info in PHP4. Took maybe a weeks worth part time work and I got it a perfect fit (except for downloading attachments). I tried to make a custom C-compiled CGI-based webmail system for qmail using XML, but had a tough time looking up docs for the c-client libs to be able to read Maildirs directly. Gave up on it after trying to use the IMAP method, still on the lookout for c-client docs now.
Please post any free solutions you come up with.
The certainly sound like grabbing an opportunity at a bad time, its really too early to think about the next flight, its time to ponder over the investigation and space flight in general.
To begin with, I would like to say that the crew that died this morning have made contributions to mankind that are great. They not only offered their lives to science and knowledge in general as they accepted the risks involved, they offered their lifetimes of education, training and experience.
However, their loss should not put a lid on a science that they gave so much to, to push forward. I believe nationalistic feelings, and the Russians' opportunistic behavior aside, it is worth looking at the Soyuz design. They lost the cold war race and lost in the competition over government systems, but they did make their mark over science in profound ways, and the robust low-maintenance Soyuz spacecraft design is a part of that. No matter how advanced the technology and the new materials, entering the atmosphere at 20.9 mach (holy faeces), takes a unique proven design to survive. The Soyuz has taken is fair share of crashes, which is why I'm not pushing it absolutely, I'm just saying nationalistic feelings shouldnt come in the way.
If only for security, the NASA should take a long serious look at an already designed and proven spacecraft before launching expensive contracts with Boeing and others, at a time when the presidency is unreasonable cuttin down taxes and scientific funding, and wasting money over an unreasonable war. Making sure the next spaceflight does not take the three years delay that the last crash took, should become a priority.
Someone who might have joined Microsoft in 1989, and enjoyed the 90s overwhelmingly, and expected their monopoly to remain indefinitely would certainly despise Linux, FreeBSD and other Opensource software. See, monopoly can get very comfortable and later, its loss might feel just wrong despite its associated political correctness.
See, this planet as a whole is basically an extremely competitive place. Combine that with the fact that there now seems to be more population than natural resources, competition at every level becomes a matter of life and death for individuals and nations. In any competitive environment, monopoly exists for sure. But rules that break monopoly makes things interesting and takes the competition to a different level.
The western hemisphere grabbed that monopoly about 500 years ago, just like Microsoft did with Windows 3.1. Of course, the western civilization did very well indeed, which is why its going strong 5 centuries on, compared to Microsoft which is showing weaknesses. Other regions, Asia, Africa etc did try to push on with their own older economies and societies, but just as Microsoft grabbed the market share, the western civilization found the Scientific Method which was a far superior way of gaining knowledge than anything else out there. Asia for one has given way now. Many indians speak, read and write english and the chinese by the millions are glued to english written O'Reilly books. This is not too different from Linus copying UNIX ideas to make a UNIX clone.
Now the turf levels up. Globalization initially will make life tough for the nations that own the top 50% of the world's economy. However, Bill Goats was wrong. Linux will not destroy competition and bring down the whole software market to a halt. Wonderful things will happen as people will have options they didnt have in the past decade. The world's overall economies will surely boom, with the percentage of the world's population under the poverty line decreasing.
You know what that means dont you? Frustration that drove the 19 Pakistanis and Saudis to fly Jumbos into NewYork buildings, and millions to cheer their acts will disappear. Where nations can compete economically, they will not have to resort to extreme methods. We will see Operating Systems from Finland, Iran, Malaysia, Kenya, Apps from Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Korea, Chile and Processors from Ukraine, United States, India, Taiwan. Imagine the competition. Imagine the prices. Imagine the quality!
Many years after the start of such large-scale globalization, an american geek can logon to dice.com and search jobs, and will recieve far more offerings in many more countries than just his. And one country's dot-com bust will not bring the global tech economy down.
and then sometimes and order of magnitude
you do mean 'an order of magnitude more' don't you?
I wonder what happened to the Joint European Torus project that was so much hyped, but couldnt produce sustained energy after many trials across years. Instead of doing everything America vs Europe vs Japan, they could so join the europeans for reduced costs and better maintenance across years, unless theres weapons technology involved of course.
I also wonder if its at all possible to locate the reactor close to other Big Science labs and create larger science community centres, maybe at BNL or LANL or Fermilab. Sharing ground and resources with other Big Science labs will help cut costs, and considering the fact that alot of construction/computer/other materials used for accelerators can also be used for the torus so uniting the location will make sense. Am I wrong?
At least in one state they should build large multiple torii if this succeeds. The abundance of energy will allow the government to enforce a clean-fuel-only vehicles law, which will really make a practical difference.
What has been tested is simply the number of concurrent connections. More practical would be simple retrieving of say 1kb data from a database and printing it out on a very simple HTML, and checking the maximum number of THESE connections. In effect trying to really httpblast DDoS style the FreeBSD with sheer number of connections. The box will have to be massive with 4GB RAM at least (we're testing OS here not hardware) and the connection maybe (multiple?) gigabit ethernet. The result would theoretically be lower than 1.6 million but we need to show FreeBSD can scale in practical tests like these. Results from a test like that will have the power to change vendors' minds from trying to run IIS and MS SQL for a high volume site.
What would really be interesting is if non intel hardware could also be emulated. I sure wouldnt mind an Ultra5, RS/6000 and hammer systems networked together with ipv6 on token ring.. all on my BeOS desktop. BeOS is supported isnt it?
Funny how the site www.internettrafficreport.com is being slashdotted right now. In the last 5 min alone, the global traffic index went from 85 to 65, apparently a new wave of attacks as the worm discovers new ground. My 5-domain webserver hasnt received a packet yet, but Im keeping my eye on it. Glad to be using Postgres with its ports blocked from the Internet.
Holy cow! Israel is completely down according to the site.. all routers with 100% packet loss.