Comparisons across machines make little sense: your "way faster" PC may, for many reasons, have much slower graphics than your Macintosh.
But we don't have to compare across machines, since Linux runs on Macintosh hardware. From my iMac and my Powerbook, I can tell you that Linux+X11+Gnome is much more responsive on the same hardware than OS X.
Ahh. that's because of the superior hardware.:-) I was comparing my Mac to a Dell, d00d.
I haven't screwed with Linux on a Mac since I had a G3 running OS 9 (at first I used MKLinux on a 7600...hey, can I start a microkernel flame war here? Is Linus or Tannenbaum reading?).
Now, I don't see any need whatsoever with OS X. Linux doesn't bring anything to my Mac party now.
Or so you SAY! Just like i say you're full of crap. Personally, though, I ported "KDE/Mozilla" to my Cray SX-6 in my closet, and it STILL runs slow ass. And Gnome, on my 8-node POWER5 cluster i got from IBM for beta testing, still runs slower than a 90 year old grandma who just got hit by a car. So, i'm not disagreeing with you. I just think you're full of crap
I've found that KDE and Mozilla (among other apps) are *much* more dependent on hard drive speed than CPU. Get a WD Raptor or similar, and both start up pretty much instantly
They're Ultra 3 SCSI drives mirrored so actually it can read from either drive. The drives aren't the bottleneck here.
Yes: that is because the new Linux desktop support features that are completely lacking from Windows 98 or Windows NT, such as transparency, backing store and bitmap caching, antialiasing, and vector graphics-based themes. Those take tons of memory and CPU. Those features are there in the default installs because most people want them.
And Linux+X11 still provides those features more efficiently than Windows or Macintosh.
Do you have actual evidence that Linux/X11 provides things more efficiently than OS X, or is this wishful thinking? I know my "seat of the pants" feeling that I can't quantify is the total opposite: Linux/X11/KDE is a slow freaking pig on a wayyy faster computer than my OS X.
FWIW, I just installed Mandrake 10 on my 400 Mhz PII (256M RAM, 60G total HD) at home. For the first time I decided to make a real effort to use my Linux box as a desktop system. For the most part I've been extremely successful. The vast majority of what I use my PC for is net-related, and 98% of what I did in WinXP I could do in Linux. I was already using Mozilla as my browser and e-mail client anyway, etc. But there was absolutely no doubt that KDE runs slow as ass on a system of that vintage. I look forward to the day when I can just drop $500 or so on a nice, cheap 3 Ghz system to replace that old dinosaur.
Sorry, bro, but KDE/Mozilla run ass-slow on a 2.8ghz Xeon (whatever version of KDE and X that come with Mandrake 9.2). More processor ain't gonna help you.
It's interesting how the Russian Mafia is helping American Marketers take advantage of Chinese Equipment. My question is: How involved are the actual Chinese people? Are they all victims of circumstance, or are they helping in some way?
They profit. This article is incorrect inasmuch as whenever you see a spam for "bulletproof hosting" it's for a Chinese server. The article kinda implies that their incompetent tools but if you go to and read the comments on the various ISPs you can see that they're really complicit.
The best way is to make sure this way of advertisement of your services is illegal in the USA, and actively go after those that still do it.
90% or more of all SPAM advertises a product or service in the USA
A vast majority of my (several hundred a day to an account I've had since '93) spam is for Canadian pharmacies wanting to sell to me in the US. That's a very politically sensitive issue here now....You're not going to legislate that away on the basis that they use spammers. A majority of the rest is now pirated (errr, excuse me: "OEM") software from Russia, all of which is already illegal. Can't do anything more about that, either.
For my personal domain, I have Postfix using Spamhaus' RBL-XBL blacklist. I've yet to see a false positive from them.
IF you can lift it off the desk, you should have access to it. The router's password should be it's S/N, period. No fancy measures or bells and whistles.
That would never fly as then every unit would have to be materially different., vs. just having a different sticker on its case and on the box. Plus, the extra money to make sure all 3 jibe....
I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside.
've never needed to edit the registry to install hardware. And I've installed some pretty off-the-wall hardware in my time (Windows user since Win95). Don't get me wrong, the registry is a mess (much better in NT based OS's), but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I've had to (to fix munged installations), and I've supported every Windows including 95.
The registry--nay, the entire concept of the registry, is an abomination.
actually yes, Linux is the Divine OS, it survives any amount of hardware failure and is even able to run as incorporeal data floating in the air next to a destroyed computer.
OOOH, mod this guy as +5 insightful. He told me! Guess I'm glad I'm using a Powerbook running OS X. I wouldn't want my laptop to float away....
(my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall)
Last reinstall? Hah! How many have there been? Those two words say more than the rest of your message.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which.conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
Let me know when you find a find a linux distribution that says editing.conf files can destroy your box, doesn't guarantee its safety--and then makes you do it anyway like MS and editing the registry. We'll be waiting....
Firstly, doing more work in order to achieve a better result with the same amount of storage requirements is hardly being "inefficient". Secondly, if Joe User actually learns enough about the reasons he might want to use OGG he's likely to also find out why he gets less battery life
"Better" isn't quantifiable as battery life is. And if Joe User actually learns about codecs and their plusses and minuses, he's no longer Joe User at that point. He's left the bulk of the computer-buying public behind him.
For one thing my entire CD collection is now in OGG format on my main machine and I'm not about to re-encode for the benefit of Apple's decision to add yet another music format. So, until OGG is an option I'm not interested in an iPod. With it, on the other hand, I can live with 25% less battery life.
With my entire collection in MP3 or AAC, my iPod and I can live without Ogg.
What's a popup? Between Safari on my Mac and Mozilla on Win/Linux, I can't remember the last time that I saw a non-user initiated popup.
Any workarounds the ad companies have found must be for the way the google toolbar works, not any of the above programs and their methodologies for blocking popups.
Since I don't use IE and that toolbar at all, I don't care!
Does anyone know why Linus hasn't sued? He'd get ESR, RMS, Tanenbaum and a slew of others that would be ready to testify in a split second. And for the record, the only reason Microsoft still stands is because typically, ESR and RMS are slightly at odds, if not fully orthogonal to one another.
Linus' attitude reminds me of a scene from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead where Ellsworth Toohey speaks to Howard Roark for the first time after trying to bring him down: (quote's close, but may not be exact cuz I'm doing this from memory):
"So what do you think of me now, Mr. Roark?" "But I don't think of you."
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more everything you say above (well, not the nonsense part). Of course, nowhere did he mention reliability.....
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
I agree with that, too. But, to me and my grasp of the English language, the above has nothing to do with the statement of not guaranteeing that your data is ever backed up. Maybe the guy doesn't know American idiom, or maybe he's an idiot and speaks imprecisely, but going by his statement I could have my data on his server for 6 months and have no guarantee it was backed up even once. I'm not reading anything more into the statement than that. His statement may bear no resemblance to their TOS or their contractual obligations (wtf do spokesmen know about anything technical anyway?), but that statement on its own stands as I've interpreted it, and gives the loophole of "tough shit" if they want to use it.
The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
You think? I'm the poster of the article and those were my exact words (though they took out my GMail question....). I think that your example is extreme: you're looking at there's no 100% guarantee of your data being safe for perpetuity. My point is that sentence lets them off the hook for ever backing up your data, much less being ever to restore it. The heck with gamma rays. What about if Johnny, Janey or Siri deletes the wrong directory? "Well, we never backed up your files...." That doesn't cut it. Shit happens, but that doesn't mitigate not even trying. You're paying for a service for them that they should be providing. Hotmail is a different story entirely (hence my 'you're getting what you pay for" line).
You can, but it's not as simple unless you already have the partitions as part of a LVM group. You'd have the same issue in Win98: there's no "room" to add a RAID identifier on the disk what with the small partition table and filesystems right after it. You need to scoot the filesystems down to make room for a RAID identifier area. Windows handles that tricky step in 2000 and above if you are booting NTFS (NOT FAT32) off a basic disc, converting it to dynamic on the fly.
Linux can't do that with the standard tools, you need to apply them intelligently.
First, you need to boot off a floppy (or go into single user mode and remount everything R/O). Essentially you have to make a copy of your current disk to the other one (how doesn't matter, although partitioning and recursive copy is usually faster than block by block, but either is fine). You need to mark it as a RAID member first, though. Then you edit your raid config file like you would normally. BUT! Mark the first disk as dirty in the config file. Now, unmount all the filesystems from the old disk, and turn on the array. The second, "clean" HD which is slightly modified for mirroring, gets mirrored back automagically to the first disk. When it's done, you can reboot, and you're running full mirrored mode.
I'll trust you on that horrid procedure (it sounds good, though*), but you're still a far cry away from mere seconds for the other examples. Plus, it takes even more time to dig up the raid tools, etc, (I know when I set up mine on MDK 9.2 I had to dig around for them), google for the proper format for the raidtab and so on and so forth.
vi/etc/raidtab (add a few lines to define disks and policy... maybe copy and paste) mkraid/dev/md0 raidstart/dev/md0
I'd say 3 minutes if you already knew what you wanted to do. (!)
Or use YaST or something. And Solaris is no easier. I don't really understand the point...
You're going to do that to your one drive you don't have a backup of?
mkraid sets up a set of block devices into a single RAID array. It
looks in its configuration file for the md devices mentioned on the
command line, and initializes those arrays. mkraid works for all types
of RAID arrays (RAID1, RAID4, RAID5, LINEAR and RAID0).
Note that initializing RAID devices destroys all of the data on the
consituent devices.
The point is, Linux is the only OS out of the 4 I cited where you have to destroy your source volume in order to mirror it (I just had this flash of the Vietnam-era "we had to destroy this village in order to save it"). The dickhead troll who was so busy jerking off over his two extra mouse buttons while saying "everyone supports RAID, d00d" I'm sure didn't realize that all RAID implementations aren't created equal, and that sometimes there just is some substance behind the "eye candy."
Slashdot Mirror
I measured it.
:-) I was comparing my Mac to a Dell, d00d.
What actually was measured?
Comparisons across machines make little sense: your "way faster" PC may, for many reasons, have much slower graphics than your Macintosh.
But we don't have to compare across machines, since Linux runs on Macintosh hardware. From my iMac and my Powerbook, I can tell you that Linux+X11+Gnome is much more responsive on the same hardware than OS X.
Ahh. that's because of the superior hardware.
I haven't screwed with Linux on a Mac since I had a G3 running OS 9 (at first I used MKLinux on a 7600...hey, can I start a microkernel flame war here? Is Linus or Tannenbaum reading?).
Now, I don't see any need whatsoever with OS X. Linux doesn't bring anything to my Mac party now.
Or so you SAY! Just like i say you're full of crap. Personally, though, I ported "KDE/Mozilla" to my Cray SX-6 in my closet, and it STILL runs slow ass. And Gnome, on my 8-node POWER5 cluster i got from IBM for beta testing, still runs slower than a 90 year old grandma who just got hit by a car. So, i'm not disagreeing with you. I just think you're full of crap
Gee, let me go slit my wrists now....
KDE/Mozilla run ass-slow on a 2.8ghz Xeon"
I've found that KDE and Mozilla (among other apps) are *much* more dependent on hard drive speed than CPU. Get a WD Raptor or similar, and both start up pretty much instantly
They're Ultra 3 SCSI drives mirrored so actually it can read from either drive. The drives aren't the bottleneck here.
Yes: that is because the new Linux desktop support features that are completely lacking from Windows 98 or Windows NT, such as transparency, backing store and bitmap caching, antialiasing, and vector graphics-based themes. Those take tons of memory and CPU. Those features are there in the default installs because most people want them.
And Linux+X11 still provides those features more efficiently than Windows or Macintosh.
Do you have actual evidence that Linux/X11 provides things more efficiently than OS X, or is this wishful thinking? I know my "seat of the pants" feeling that I can't quantify is the total opposite: Linux/X11/KDE is a slow freaking pig on a wayyy faster computer than my OS X.
FWIW, I just installed Mandrake 10 on my 400 Mhz PII (256M RAM, 60G total HD) at home. For the first time I decided to make a real effort to use my Linux box as a desktop system. For the most part I've been extremely successful. The vast majority of what I use my PC for is net-related, and 98% of what I did in WinXP I could do in Linux. I was already using Mozilla as my browser and e-mail client anyway, etc. But there was absolutely no doubt that KDE runs slow as ass on a system of that vintage. I look forward to the day when I can just drop $500 or so on a nice, cheap 3 Ghz system to replace that old dinosaur.
Sorry, bro, but KDE/Mozilla run ass-slow on a 2.8ghz Xeon (whatever version of KDE and X that come with Mandrake 9.2). More processor ain't gonna help you.
It's interesting how the Russian Mafia is helping American Marketers take advantage of Chinese Equipment. My question is: How involved are the actual Chinese people? Are they all victims of circumstance, or are they helping in some way?
They profit.
This article is incorrect inasmuch as whenever you see a spam for "bulletproof hosting" it's for a Chinese server. The article kinda implies that their incompetent tools but if you go to and read the comments on the various ISPs you can see that they're really complicit.
The best way is to make sure this way of advertisement of your services is illegal in the USA, and actively go after those that still do it.
90% or more of all SPAM advertises a product or service in the USA
A vast majority of my (several hundred a day to an account I've had since '93) spam is for Canadian pharmacies wanting to sell to me in the US. That's a very politically sensitive issue here now....You're not going to legislate that away on the basis that they use spammers.
A majority of the rest is now pirated (errr, excuse me: "OEM") software from Russia, all of which is already illegal. Can't do anything more about that, either.
For my personal domain, I have Postfix using Spamhaus' RBL-XBL blacklist. I've yet to see a false positive from them.
IF you can lift it off the desk, you should have access to it. The router's password should be it's S/N, period. No fancy measures or bells and whistles.
That would never fly as then every unit would have to be materially different., vs. just having a different sticker on its case and on the box. Plus, the extra money to make sure all 3 jibe....
Apparently reading the articles is too much to ask, but could you read the post at least?
He's not asking about switching to Linux... he's asking about why Linux users don't switch to Windows
Err, no. He didn't confine the question to just "Linux users" if you'll go back and look at the post that you read and he didn't.
I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside.
"AirPort Extreme and AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network."
.11b network (via a Snow base station) could use some extension. I have too much earth between me and my back yard.
Rats. My
've never needed to edit the registry to install hardware. And I've installed some pretty off-the-wall hardware in my time (Windows user since Win95). Don't get me wrong, the registry is a mess (much better in NT based OS's), but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.
I've had to (to fix munged installations), and I've supported every Windows including 95.
The registry--nay, the entire concept of the registry, is an abomination.
actually yes, Linux is the Divine OS, it survives any amount of hardware failure and is even able to run as incorporeal data floating in the air next to a destroyed computer.
OOOH, mod this guy as +5 insightful. He told me!
Guess I'm glad I'm using a Powerbook running OS X. I wouldn't want my laptop to float away....
It does too have plug and play! Switch between a serial and a PS/2 mouse sometime. :-)
(my laptop running XP hasn't crashed ONCE since my last reinstall)
.conf file(s) I need to edit to get my tv-tuner card to work in my linux box.
.conf files can destroy your box, doesn't guarantee its safety--and then makes you do it anyway like MS and editing the registry.
Last reinstall? Hah! How many have there been? Those two words say more than the rest of your message.
Now if you will excuse me, I have to go find out which
Let me know when you find a find a linux distribution that says editing
We'll be waiting....
....at least this iteration of the article had a catchier headline. We'll see how next week's will stack up.
Firstly, doing more work in order to achieve a better result with the same amount of storage requirements is hardly being "inefficient". Secondly, if Joe User actually learns enough about the reasons he might want to use OGG he's likely to also find out why he gets less battery life
"Better" isn't quantifiable as battery life is. And if Joe User actually learns about codecs and their plusses and minuses, he's no longer Joe User at that point. He's left the bulk of the computer-buying public behind him.
With my entire collection in MP3 or AAC, my iPod and I can live without Ogg.
So what's the problem with supporting both?
Because battery life is a big selling point. Do you think Joe User will blame Ogg's inefficiences or "the iPod" OR "Apple" for short battery life?
For one thing my entire CD collection is now in OGG format on my main machine and I'm not about to re-encode for the benefit of Apple's decision to add yet another music format. So, until OGG is an option I'm not interested in an iPod. With it, on the other hand, I can live with 25% less battery life.
With my entire collection in MP3 or AAC, my iPod and I can live without Ogg.
What's a popup? Between Safari on my Mac and Mozilla on Win/Linux, I can't remember the last time that I saw a non-user initiated popup.
Any workarounds the ad companies have found must be for the way the google toolbar works, not any of the above programs and their methodologies for blocking popups.
Since I don't use IE and that toolbar at all, I don't care!
Does anyone know why Linus hasn't sued? He'd get ESR, RMS, Tanenbaum and a slew of others that would be ready to testify in a split second. And for the record, the only reason Microsoft still stands is because typically, ESR and RMS are slightly at odds, if not fully orthogonal to one another.
Linus' attitude reminds me of a scene from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead where Ellsworth Toohey speaks to Howard Roark for the first time after trying to bring him down: (quote's close, but may not be exact cuz I'm doing this from memory):
"So what do you think of me now, Mr. Roark?"
"But I don't think of you."
Nothing personal, but this is total fucking nonsense.
It's a throw away line by one guy at the company. It's not a contract or definitive statement of policy. It's just one guy being honest. They *can't* provide 100% guaranteed reliability. NOBODY can provide 100% guaranteed reliability. You cannot predict the future.
Absolutely. I couldn't agree more everything you say above (well, not the nonsense part). Of course, nowhere did he mention reliability.....
They may do everything in their power to ensure that your data is available, but they cannot guarantee that it always will be every time no matter what. That's impossible. And that's all the guy is really stating here. If you somehow read it as "well, it's impossible, so we don't even try" then you're reading a hell of a lot more into it than is actually there.
I agree with that, too. But, to me and my grasp of the English language, the above has nothing to do with the statement of not guaranteeing that your data is ever backed up. Maybe the guy doesn't know American idiom, or maybe he's an idiot and speaks imprecisely, but going by his statement I could have my data on his server for 6 months and have no guarantee it was backed up even once. I'm not reading anything more into the statement than that.
His statement may bear no resemblance to their TOS or their contractual obligations (wtf do spokesmen know about anything technical anyway?), but that statement on its own stands as I've interpreted it, and gives the loophole of "tough shit" if they want to use it.
The scariest part of the article, however, is when a spokesman for iBackup, an Internet-based backup company, disclaims,'We do not provide a 100 percent guarantee that the backup will take place' of customers' data being stored with them for a fee."
Scary? No, that's plain honesty. Which should be respected.
You think? I'm the poster of the article and those were my exact words (though they took out my GMail question....). I think that your example is extreme: you're looking at there's no 100% guarantee of your data being safe for perpetuity. My point is that sentence lets them off the hook for ever backing up your data, much less being ever to restore it. The heck with gamma rays. What about if Johnny, Janey or Siri deletes the wrong directory? "Well, we never backed up your files...."
That doesn't cut it. Shit happens, but that doesn't mitigate not even trying.
You're paying for a service for them that they should be providing. Hotmail is a different story entirely (hence my 'you're getting what you pay for" line).
You can, but it's not as simple unless you already have the partitions as part of a LVM group. You'd have the same issue in Win98: there's no "room" to add a RAID identifier on the disk what with the small partition table and filesystems right after it. You need to scoot the filesystems down to make room for a RAID identifier area. Windows handles that tricky step in 2000 and above if you are booting NTFS (NOT FAT32) off a basic disc, converting it to dynamic on the fly.
Linux can't do that with the standard tools, you need to apply them intelligently.
First, you need to boot off a floppy (or go into single user mode and remount everything R/O). Essentially you have to make a copy of your current disk to the other one (how doesn't matter, although partitioning and recursive copy is usually faster than block by block, but either is fine). You need to mark it as a RAID member first, though. Then you edit your raid config file like you would normally. BUT! Mark the first disk as dirty in the config file. Now, unmount all the filesystems from the old disk, and turn on the array. The second, "clean" HD which is slightly modified for mirroring, gets mirrored back automagically to the first disk. When it's done, you can reboot, and you're running full mirrored mode.
I'll trust you on that horrid procedure (it sounds good, though*), but you're still a far cry away from mere seconds for the other examples. Plus, it takes even more time to dig up the raid tools, etc, (I know when I set up mine on MDK 9.2 I had to dig around for them), google for the proper format for the raidtab and so on and so forth.
vi /etc/raidtab /dev/md0 /dev/md0
(add a few lines to define disks and policy... maybe copy and paste)
mkraid
raidstart
I'd say 3 minutes if you already knew what you wanted to do. (!)
Or use YaST or something. And Solaris is no easier. I don't really understand the point...
You're going to do that to your one drive you don't have a backup of?
mkraid sets up a set of block devices into a single RAID array. It
looks in its configuration file for the md devices mentioned on the
command line, and initializes those arrays. mkraid works for all types
of RAID arrays (RAID1, RAID4, RAID5, LINEAR and RAID0).
Note that initializing RAID devices destroys all of the data on the
consituent devices.
The point is, Linux is the only OS out of the 4 I cited where you have to destroy your source volume in order to mirror it (I just had this flash of the Vietnam-era "we had to destroy this village in order to save it").
The dickhead troll who was so busy jerking off over his two extra mouse buttons while saying "everyone supports RAID, d00d" I'm sure didn't realize that all RAID implementations aren't created equal, and that sometimes there just is some substance behind the "eye candy."