Thompson wrote early versions of UNIX. Today's UNIX is a different beast.
Anyway, the real question is what does Thompson know about Linux? So he and a few friends have tried it and found it to be unreliable. Whatever that means. Without references to specific issues, it's impossible to argue with that. In many people's experiences, Linux is as reliable as the hardware allows---which may not be much if the hardware is a PC.
I can understand an *unqualified* rating of ``unreliable'', but when you say that it's worse than Microsoft, that is plain out to lunch, credentials or not. Linux is orders of magnitude more reliable than Microsoft's flagship operating system.
Linux has a 4GB address space. One gigabyte is dedicated to the kernel.
WinNT cannot give 4GB to an application; that is another lie. You need a special configuration of NT server just to have as much memory as what Linux makes available.
Secondly, Linux is a 64 bit operating system on 64 bit machines. It's a pure lie to say that some commercial UNIX can have 128 gigabytes of memory and compare that to Linux on Intel. I mean, for crying out loud, doh!
Wouldn't work with existing Windows user base.
on
Thought Recognition
·
· Score: 1
``No thought detected, switching to point and drool interface. Think of the word OK to continue''.
``Keep a log of what computer has done''
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 1
They may be talking about a journalling filesystem.
It's obvious that the article is the work of a technological nincompoop who is transliterating information obtained from someone else.
Where is the standard which describes the Word format?
For something to be a ``de jure'' standard, there has to be a document which describes it which is approved by ISO and its member bodies throughout the world.
Then there are de-facto standards, like RFC's and so on. Things which are standardized either through an informal document which everyone agreees upon, or in the form of a sample open-source implementation. Some communication protocols would fall into the former category. Things like the X11 window system would be the latter.
The Word document format isn't ANY kind of standard. It's simply whatever the latest version of Microsoft word reads and writes. It's a moving target that is in the sole control of one corporation. I don't know of any programs that are *completely* compatible with Word 97. They are based on reverse engineering, which is far less reliable than following a specification.
A specification, even an ambiguous or informal one, is superior to reverse engineering. At least it gives you something to argue about. People can get together and hash out fixes to a specification and then update their respective implementations.
I mean, using Windows and Word just to stay in touch with the ``culture''? This is sheer lunacy. First of all, Windows has no culture. It has no leading characters that would create a culture. There are guys like Ballmer and Gates, but they have the personalities of squid and next to no technical capabilities. Secondly, familiarity with the kludges of a poor quality operating system doesn't constitute cultural awareness. It's just a form of self-inflicted torture, i.e. masochism.
In the UNIX and free software worlds there is a true culture. There are characters like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, Chris Torek, Keith Bostic, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, David Korn, Stephen Bourne, Alan Cox, Donald Knuth, Bill Joy, etc. I could drop a lot more, these are just names that pop into my head.
As well, the long endurance of software in this culture leads to a true heritage, whereas the historical awareness of a typical Windows user doesn't extend beyond the previous releases of the software packages he or she is using. The legacy behind it all is just disgusting, anyway. MS-DOS, for instance, is just a bad memory for those who used it, and users of modern Windows feel little connection to that time, except for backward compatible kludges whose origin they are hardly aware of.
Whereas people who used early UNIX versions like V6 have fond recollections and stories to tell to new generations of hackers. There is a greater awareness among UNIX users about where it all came from and how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Also, I take exception to the remark that vi takes years to learn. That is just downright silly. I remember I was proficient in about a week to the level that I could do all the things in vi that a lesser editor is barely capable of. I wouldn't say that I'm exceptionally gifted in learning text editors, either. The ``years'' estimate for learning vi might apply to the mentally retarded, but not to the person of average intelligence.
Intel has contributed some patches to GCC in the past. I vaguely remember some contribution from them to add Pentium optimizations some years ago.
I applied the patches but they proved to be defective.
I tried the patched compiler it on PovRay and it crashed. I remember having to use the ordinary compiler for one of the translation units because the patched compiler died.
Linux is a threat to that kind of development that shouldn't commerically exist.
Don't worry, once free software ousts everyone out of the dekstop and small server mass market, you will still be able to find plenty of work working on large, custom enterprise systems. I don't think that anyone will come out with an open source air traffic control system any time soon, or an open source management system for large telecommunication newtorks, and the like.
On the smaller end of the scale, there will also be work on embedded systems which require custom programming, even if they are based on a freeware operating system.
Don't forget customization of the freeware itself. Free software doesn't always do the exact job that someone wants. If someone needs a special customizations or extensions, there are opportunities there.
Then there is business programming. Businesses are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition. This includes the use of new kinds of technological solutions. With free software, businesses can find cost effective to take an existing freeware application that they are using and hire programmers to customize it to do what they want. This is the sort of opportunity that doesn't exist with proprietary software, or exists to a limited extent only---through the kind of extensibility that the proprietary software exposes, which often serves the monopolistic aims commercial vendor more than the needs of the customer.
An easily overlooked fact about free software is that software which is under a free license doesn't have to be released. You can customize, say, a GNU application for some company under the agreement that the changes will not be made available to anyone outside of the company. Of course, if the changes leaked out, nobody could prevent the free copying and distributions in keeping with the license, but the license doesn't require that the changes *must* be published. It only states requirements that must be followed if the act of distribution takes place. By not publshing the changes, the organization can benefit from the use of the unique software, leveraging it go gain some sort of edge over its competitors.
This idiot is so wrong about this. It matters a great deal whether or not some supposed freeware contains proprietary or semi-free code! It's not only about politics or idelogies but about the legal consequences of licensing schemes.
It's unacceptable, to some, to have code that is freely licensed only for non-commercial purposes because it restricts how you can conduct business with that code. There is the threat that the status of the code may revert to one that is purely commercial, which could be devastating to any industry that had spun up around that code base.
This is not ``Left of Leningrad'' thinking at all, whatever that means. (To me, Leningrad symbolizes the suppression of the free exchange of, as well as oppressive government involvement and intervention in the affairs of citizens. What this has to do with free software is beyond me.)
Maybe this sorry-ass Microsoft-pushing motherfucker also thinks that it's ``Left of Leningrad claptrap'' to want to breathe air without paying for it. Someone should put a patent on the process of absorption of oxygen into the blood, and then charge everyone licensing fees for breathing, right?
I found the comments about Word versus the combination of TeX and emacs to be truthful and well-balanced. The author does give credit to the superior user friendliness of Word. Did you read the paragraphs describing the author's experiences in trying to convert ordinary users to emacs? Or did you just skim the essay hurriedly so that you could get back to./ and try to make first poster?
It's true that Word isn't as flexible as software such as emacs or TeX and that its typesetting is atrocious. It's also true that most users don't know anything about nice typesetting, so nice typesetting didn't make it into the list of requirements for Word. Because Word is produced in a non-hacker environment, what isn't on the list of requirements won't appear in the product.
Why shouldn't the author talk about MS Word and emacs, given that the essay is about the differences between the cultures that have given rise to these things?
By the way, does it say ``Anonymous Coward'' on your driver's license too (assuming you are old enough to have one, that is)?
So far, my Linux driver experience is limited to network driver work.
Since I don't have a RIO device yet, it would probably make more sense to write the filesystem module first; that can be nicely tested over other block devices without having an actual rio. I can use your program as a test tool to generate and read disk images; if it's compatible with your program, it's highly likely that it will work with the Rio.
Maybe someone else will end up writing the block device driver in the meantime and then we put the two together. If not, something could probably be hacked (using the ram disk or IDE code as an example perhaps).
My only concern is how much time to take away from the freeware macro preprocessor I'm currently working on (which, although of lesser political value, could be of much more benefit to the hacker community than kernel support for an MP3 player).
Anyway, enough clap-trap, time to look at some code.
There is already a Linux program that can do this; and the URL was already posted to Slashdot some time ago. What's more, the program is open-source.
It turns out that the Rio is in fact a random-access block device with a block size of 32K.
I'm thinking of writing a Linux block device driver that will treat the Rio as yet another hard drive, so you could mount your ext2fs on it. Also, a filesystem module ``riofs'' that would let you mount the RIO file system. This way you could just use good old ``mount'', ``unmount'', ``cp'' and ``rm'' to manage the MP3's in the Rio rather than using some specialized command line program. And of course whatever GUI file manager you may currently use should also be compatible. In other words, the integration of Rio into Linux would be a heck of a lot better. Also the problem of having to run a suid root program would go away.
Given the opportunity, anyone with half a brain could have gotten countless Linux sytems up and running in the months that Katz has been talking about doing it.
If it's meant to be humor, why is it not put in the HUMOR category instead NEWS?
This fails to be newsworthy from just about any point of view, not to mention that it fails to be ``news for nerds'' about ``stuff that matters''.
No, you can't make several valid criticisms of the article, just one: it's a bunch of incredibly lame bullshit.
You do not have to own a Sony Playstation to play the games. All you need is some technology that is capable of interpreting these games to reproduce their performance.
There is no intellectual property violation if you independently create this technology from scratch.
Things like machine instruction sets, programming languages, application interfaces, data formats and communication protocols are not intellectual property, only their implementations are.
Malloc is a *function* (technically it can be also defined as a macro in , but it must also exist as a function), and a call to malloc is an *expression*.
Slashdot Mirror
Thompson wrote early versions of UNIX. Today's UNIX is a different beast.
Anyway, the real question is what does Thompson know about Linux? So he and a few friends have tried it and found it to be unreliable. Whatever that means. Without references to specific issues, it's impossible to argue with that. In many people's experiences, Linux is as reliable as the hardware allows---which may not be much if the hardware is a PC.
I can understand an *unqualified* rating of ``unreliable'', but when you say that it's worse than Microsoft, that is plain out to lunch, credentials or not. Linux is orders of magnitude more reliable than Microsoft's flagship operating system.
Linux has a 4GB address space. One gigabyte is dedicated to the kernel.
WinNT cannot give 4GB to an application; that is
another lie. You need a special configuration of NT server just to have as much memory as what Linux makes available.
Secondly, Linux is a 64 bit operating system on 64 bit machines. It's a pure lie to say that some commercial UNIX can have 128 gigabytes of memory and compare that to Linux on Intel. I mean, for crying out loud, doh!
``No thought detected, switching to point and drool interface. Think of the word OK to continue''.
They may be talking about a journalling filesystem.
It's obvious that the article is the work of a technological nincompoop who is transliterating information obtained from someone else.
Where is the standard which describes the Word format?
For something to be a ``de jure'' standard, there has to be a document which describes it which is approved by ISO and its member bodies throughout the world.
Then there are de-facto standards, like RFC's and so on. Things which are standardized either through an informal document which everyone agreees upon, or in the form of a sample open-source implementation. Some communication protocols would fall into the former category. Things like the X11 window system would be the latter.
The Word document format isn't ANY kind of standard. It's simply whatever the latest version of Microsoft word reads and writes. It's a moving target that is in the sole control of one corporation. I don't know of any programs that are *completely* compatible with Word 97. They are based on reverse engineering, which is far less reliable than following a specification.
A specification, even an ambiguous or informal one, is superior to reverse engineering. At least it gives you something to argue about. People can get together and hash out fixes to a specification and then update their respective implementations.
I mean, using Windows and Word just to stay in touch with the ``culture''? This is sheer lunacy. First of all, Windows has no culture. It has no leading characters that would create a culture. There are guys like Ballmer and Gates, but they have the personalities of squid and next to no technical capabilities. Secondly, familiarity with the kludges of a poor quality operating system doesn't constitute cultural awareness. It's just a form of self-inflicted torture, i.e. masochism.
In the UNIX and free software worlds there is a true culture. There are characters like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Alfred Aho, Chris Torek, Keith Bostic, Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, David Korn, Stephen Bourne, Alan Cox, Donald Knuth, Bill Joy, etc. I could drop a lot more, these are just names that pop into my head.
As well, the long endurance of software in this culture leads to a true heritage, whereas the historical awareness of a typical Windows user doesn't extend beyond the previous releases of the software packages he or she is using. The legacy behind it all is just disgusting, anyway. MS-DOS, for instance, is just a bad memory for those who used it, and users of modern Windows feel little connection to that time, except for backward compatible kludges whose origin they are hardly aware of.
Whereas people who used early UNIX versions like V6 have fond recollections and stories to tell to new generations of hackers. There is a greater awareness among UNIX users about where it all came from and how the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Also, I take exception to the remark that vi takes years to learn. That is just downright silly. I remember I was proficient in about a week to the level that I could do all the things in vi that a lesser editor is barely capable of. I wouldn't say that I'm exceptionally gifted in learning text editors, either. The ``years'' estimate for learning vi might apply to the mentally retarded, but not to the person of average intelligence.
Intel has contributed some patches to GCC in the past. I vaguely remember some contribution from them to add Pentium optimizations some years ago.
I applied the patches but they proved to be defective.
I tried the patched compiler it on PovRay and it crashed. I remember having to use the ordinary compiler for one of the translation units because the patched compiler died.
Linux is a threat to that kind of development that shouldn't commerically exist.
Don't worry, once free software ousts everyone out of the dekstop and small server mass market, you will still be able to find plenty of work working on large, custom enterprise systems. I don't think that anyone will come out with an open source air traffic control system any time soon,
or an open source management system for large telecommunication newtorks, and the like.
On the smaller end of the scale, there will also be work on embedded systems which require custom programming, even if they are based on a freeware operating system.
Don't forget customization of the freeware itself. Free software doesn't always do the exact job that someone wants. If someone needs a special customizations or extensions, there are opportunities there.
Then there is business programming. Businesses are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the competition. This includes the use of new kinds of technological solutions. With free software, businesses can find cost effective to take an existing freeware application that they are using and hire programmers to customize it to do what they want. This is the sort of opportunity that doesn't exist with proprietary software, or exists to a limited extent only---through the kind of extensibility that the proprietary software exposes, which often serves the monopolistic aims commercial vendor more than the needs of the customer.
An easily overlooked fact about free software is that software which is under a free license doesn't have to be released. You can customize, say, a GNU application for some company under the agreement that the changes will not be made available to anyone outside of the company. Of course, if the changes leaked out, nobody could prevent the free copying and distributions in keeping with the license, but the license doesn't require that the changes *must* be published. It only states requirements that must be followed if the act of distribution takes place. By not publshing the changes, the organization can benefit from the use of the unique software, leveraging it go gain some sort of edge over its competitors.
I am KNOT a lawyer!
:)
This idiot is so wrong about this. It matters a great deal whether or not some supposed freeware contains proprietary or semi-free code! It's not only about politics or idelogies but about the legal consequences of licensing schemes.
It's unacceptable, to some, to have code that is freely licensed only for non-commercial purposes because it restricts how you can conduct business with that code. There is the threat that the status of the code may revert to one that is purely commercial, which could be devastating to any industry that had spun up around that code base.
This is not ``Left of Leningrad'' thinking at all, whatever that means. (To me, Leningrad symbolizes the suppression of the free exchange of, as well as oppressive government involvement and intervention in the affairs of citizens. What this has to do with free software is beyond me.)
Maybe this sorry-ass Microsoft-pushing motherfucker also thinks that it's ``Left of Leningrad claptrap'' to want to breathe air without paying for it. Someone should put a patent on the process of absorption of oxygen into the blood, and then charge everyone licensing fees for breathing, right?
click here.
:)
Looks like Teddy got his Ph. D. back in the days when all you had to do was spell the word COMPUTER correctly.
I found the comments about Word versus the ./ and try to make first poster?
combination of TeX and emacs to be truthful and
well-balanced. The author does give credit to
the superior user friendliness of Word. Did you
read the paragraphs describing the author's
experiences in trying to convert ordinary users
to emacs? Or did you just skim the essay hurriedly
so that you could get back to
It's true that Word isn't as flexible as software
such as emacs or TeX and that its typesetting is
atrocious. It's also true that most users don't
know anything about nice typesetting, so nice
typesetting didn't make it into the list of
requirements for Word. Because Word is produced
in a non-hacker environment, what isn't on the
list of requirements won't appear in the product.
Why shouldn't the author talk about MS Word
and emacs, given that the essay is about the
differences between the cultures that have given
rise to these things?
By the way, does it say ``Anonymous Coward'' on
your driver's license too (assuming you are old
enough to have one, that is)?
Say, didn't Katz admit to running Windows earlier?
You are always root in Windows, so what's the big
deal?
;)
So far, my Linux driver experience is limited to network driver work.
Since I don't have a RIO device yet, it would probably make more sense to write the filesystem module first; that can be nicely tested over other block devices without having an actual rio. I can use your program as a test tool to generate and read disk images; if it's compatible with your program, it's highly likely that it will work with the Rio.
Maybe someone else will end up writing the block device driver in the meantime and then we put the two together. If not, something could probably be hacked (using the ram disk or IDE code as an example perhaps).
My only concern is how much time to take away from the freeware macro preprocessor I'm currently working on (which, although of lesser political value, could be of much more benefit to the hacker community than kernel support for an MP3 player).
Anyway, enough clap-trap, time to look at some code.
There is already a Linux program that can do this; and the URL was already posted to Slashdot some time ago. What's more, the program is open-source.
It turns out that the Rio is in fact a random-access block device with a block size of 32K.
I'm thinking of writing a Linux block device driver that will treat the Rio as yet another hard drive, so you could mount your ext2fs on it. Also, a filesystem module ``riofs'' that would let you mount the RIO file system. This way you could just use good old ``mount'', ``unmount'', ``cp'' and ``rm'' to manage the MP3's in the Rio rather than using some specialized command line program. And of course whatever GUI file manager you may currently use should also be compatible. In other words, the integration of Rio into Linux would be a heck of a lot better. Also the problem of having to run a suid root program would go away.
What do you slashdotters think?
Given the opportunity, anyone with half a brain could have gotten countless Linux sytems up and running in the months that Katz has been talking about doing it.
If it's meant to be humor, why is it not put in the HUMOR category instead NEWS?
This fails to be newsworthy from just about any point of view, not to mention that it fails to be ``news for nerds'' about ``stuff that matters''.
No, you can't make several valid criticisms of the article, just one: it's a bunch of incredibly lame bullshit.
So now it's Linux's fault that some computer got delivered damaged. You heard it folks! A broken computer case is analogous to Open Source.
The windbag has written so much about software that he has admittedly never *seen*, not to mention never *used*, it simply *boggles* the mind!
What is next? A book? I can just see it: _Avoiding Linux_, 900 pages of rant with (badly scratched) CD-ROM.
Ugh... music isn't source. And I wouldn't say that recorded music is in its most preferred form for modification.
The closest thing to source code for music would be something like a MIDI track, guitar tablature or a traditional score.
Recorded music is valued because it captures a particular performance by particular people.
I disagree.
/dev/colormanagement device in Linux. Not even a /proc/color/management.
Sure, there is no
However, NT has a way of frequently turning all your graphics into a solid shade of blue, so its color management is arguably far worse.
You do not have to own a Sony Playstation to play the games. All you need is some technology that is capable of interpreting these games to reproduce their performance.
There is no intellectual property violation if you independently create this technology from scratch.
Things like machine instruction sets, programming languages, application interfaces, data formats
and communication protocols are not intellectual property, only their implementations are.
You must be confusing C with BASIC.
Malloc is a *function* (technically it can
be also defined as a macro in , but it
must also exist as a function), and a call to malloc is an *expression*.