>Moral is start thinking about leaving when your company goes bad not when they lay you off as they tank.
Try looking for a UNIX/Linux-related job in Santa Cruz (or even the Bay Area). It's damn hard. Hardly anyone has done any hiring around here since 2001. Any open position is met with hundreds of applicants. Head hunters? Yeah right. Head hunters are also in the dole queue, so to speak.
It's smart to stay in your current job until you can find a new one under those conditions. It's likely those folks have been looking for a new job since this fiaSCO began, but were unable to find one.
>IMHO, Windows compatibility is one of the things that killed OS/2
I'm sure that was a factor... however, the more I think about it, the more I think that a bigger factor was that OS/2 wasn't available pre-installed on PCs (other than those made by IBM). Linux has a clear advantage over OS/2 in gaining pre-install marketshare: Price. If Dell were to work with a Linux distro instead of redmond, they could sell their PCs for a lower cost than those with Windows. If Linux can run all Windows applications, that's going to make the transition easier. Yes there is the danger of developers only focusing on Windows (how is that different than what we have now?), but downward price pressure gives Linux an advantage that OS/2 never had.
>I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.
Traditionally, DRAM-based storage units are LESS reliable than hard disks. Why? Power loss. Yes, you can always create a massive UPS, but to be really considered "stable storage", you need to be able to store data without power for years on end. The advantage here is that the unit writes data to its hard disks, giving you some assurance that you won't lose your data even then. That turns the RAM in the unit into a giant cache. This helps with read operations, but does nothing for writes. Besides, if the hard drives fail in this unit, the unit still fails. That makes it no more reliable than RAID.
>To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.
This concept has been around since before Ethernet. The concept of storage in solid-state isn't new. Even using RAM for a hard disk isn't new. Ever run VDISK in an expanded-memory DOS system? This concept was available in the higher-end comptuer world far before that.
>It wasn't awful in previous versions, but there certainly was room for improvement.
Maybe, but it's already come a long, long way. I recently booted a Knoppix CD on a name-brand LAPTOP and everything worked. It was amazing. I'd wager to say that it beats anything else for hardware detection and compatibility on PC hardware, including any version of Windows. Frankly Windows is not in the same league. Ever try to swap a windows image onto different hardware? Exactly.
>Over-educated? Compared to the nations we're outsourcing to, yes. Compared to western Europe or Japan, no.
>You can get just as good an education, if not better, in CS, from India.
I'm sure you can, if your family has the means. If you read the article though, the CEO of Intel was pointing the finger at the K-12 education system. Do you expect me to believe the average Indian child gets a better education than the average child from the United States? I don't think so.
> If the US is so advanced, it needs to push harder and raise the bar.
Why? As I pointed out, education is a red herring. Look at Germany. Highly educated, strong math and science skills, high unemployement. Are you suggesting that producing more engineers would make the number of unemployed engineers decrease?
Cost is the only real factor. How can you reduce the cost of engineering in the United States and still pay a prevailing professional salary? I'm not sure you can. Increasing education would only increase cost.
>By eighth grade, they are behind. By the 12th grade, they are substantially behind other industrialized nations.
Ponting the finger at the education system? I call bullshit on that. The countries they're outsourcing engineering to do NOT have a better education system than the United States, especially when you're talking about universally accessible K-12 education. If they were outsourcing to Japan or Germany because they literally couldn't find educated people here, that would be one thing, but that isn't the case. The jobs are leaving solely due to cost considerations.
Yes, our educational system needs some shoring up, but it's not fair to blame it when it's not the cause of the predicament we're in. The facts would seem to show that if anything, the United States is OVER educated. We've told everyone to go get a college degree and a desk job. In doing so, we've increased our standard of living to the point where it's difficult for us to compete against countries with lower standards of living.
This is exactly what happened to those western european nations he speaks of... They don't have unemployment for lack of skills. You can call it protectionism if you want, but I find it impossibly difficult to believe that the transfer of these high-quality jobs to other nations could be good for the United State's economy overall. These are exactly the jobs we should be trying to attract to improve the economy, so I think it's appropriate to raise warning flags when they start going away.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but in my opinion the education issue is a red herring.
>Why do so many people insist on responding to every new idea with "Wow, this could hurt someone" hysteria?
I wasn't suggesting that it would happen, I was just responding to the notion that the laws of physics would prevent the driver from being hurt if if did happen. They wouldn't.
You're right... wheels do not tend to sieze up for no apparent reason, but gasoline engines easily can... if you get a leak in the oil pan.
That said, I'm sure the possibility that the engine could crap out was taken into the design here. Hopefully.
>The driver is held in place by a counterbalance. Even with no power, the rules of physics do not change.
Indeed. If the mechanism that allows the wheel to spin independently of the driver were to sieze up at 60MPH, what do you imagine would happen to that massive wheel's rotational inertia?
>MPEG4 is not that special at very high bitrates. MPEG4 is for low bitrates almost exclusively. This makes for small files which look good enough, but not files which look perfect.
I've heard that before too, but if you compare an equal-bitrate Mpeg2 with Mpeg4, I think you'll find that Mpeg4 wins. The optimizations were designed for low bitrates, but help at high bitrates as well.
>I'd say the opposite, a lot of enterprise users want to squeeze out every last drop of performance they can get.
That depends on what you mean by "enterprise". I'm sure in the educational and research sector this is true, but in the business sector, hardware is cheap and man-hours are expensive. Squeezing every last drop of performance, as you say, is not something that would get bankrolled.
Perhaps "terminal I/O" refers to virtual terminals as well (Xterm, eTerm, RXVT, the Linux console), etc...?
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but the vast majority of applications I use in Linux are console apps. They're simply more efficient and easier to work with than "point and click" GUI apps. You definately need to know how to program console apps to call yourself a master UNIX programmer.
>Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
Yes they do. The maker of the DVD has a right to copy that DVD, but there's no part of copyright law that says the player must be licensed. There is the only the DMCA, which says you can't circumvent copy "protection". (Which incidentally flies in the face of a many years of reverse engineering case law). If I buy a copy of something, I have every right to view it, whether or not my player is "approved".
>Just like when DVDs started to get popular people had to replace their VCRs with DVD players.
>No. A program can be open-source and proprietary! I call bullshit on that. How can you GPL code and still say it's proprietary? That makes no sense. Open source (GPL) is open by definition.
>The taint is only about the license. Again, that's exactly why it's stupid. It's rhetoric imbedded in the kernel, when users just want something that works. I don't want the kernel preaching to me about what software license is better.
>I think a more appropriate way of handling things would be have a message explaining _why_ the tainted message is coming up, and why they can't GPL the driver. Work with the system, not against it.
I agree. I'd go so far as to say the "kernel tainted" message should be changed to "binary driver loaded" or something similar.
The "kernel tainted" message itself is biased against proprietary software at it's core. It's saying that anything that isn't licensed a certain way is undoubtedly screwing up the kernel's workings. It's user-unfriendly, and that's why these folks decided to circumvent it.
Developers should know if there is a binary-only driver loaded for tech support reasons, but there's no reason that message couldn't be user-friendly. Linux developers should either stop with the slanted messages or explicitly dissalow binary-only drivers. The middle ground where you say "yeah, we allow it, but it poisons your system and causes your cats to catch malaria" is just crap.
>Pseudo-science? Just because the Bible mentions it? >Ironically, people thought that Troy were just figments of the imagination 150 years ago, and now they have pretty good proof of where it is.
Actually, that's a pretty good point. There are many parallels between Homer's stories and the bible. Both are collections of stories that are largely mythical. That's not to say there isn't truth in them, but no one claimed Homer's stories were 100% historical fact, unlike the flood story in the bible. Clearly no one is out looking for the cyclops race in the mediteranean islands. Homer's stories were set in a place that actually existed, but that doesn't make the stories true.
What these folks are claiming is not that the place existed, but that the story is true as well. I doubt anyone disclaims the existence of mount Ararat. If the "Noah's Flood" story were not in a religious text, do you think anyone, anywhere would regard the story itself as fact? I doubt it.
What makes this potentially pseudo-science is the use of religion to twist a myth into fact, then in turn twisting all available evidence to make it support that "fact". If they find a piece of gnarled wood, suddenly it's a piece of the ark... etc.
That said, they're welcome to use the scientific method to prove that the ark story is true. If the evidence were sound, it would be the find of the century.
>Most users expect their computers to fuck up. they think it's normal to have to reboot every few hours, to have information become "lost," to have windows shut itself down for no understandable reason at all.
Yeah, many have unfortunately come to expect that, but I have to believe that's just due to ignorance. They just don't know of better alternatives.
In the end, you're largely right. People want their computers to "just work", and not have to deal with much. I submit the only reason Windows has an advantage over Linux to "Joe Average" is that it's pre-installed on their PC. I don't think Windows is appreciably easier to use.
I have to believe that if you sat the average non-gamer down in front of a Linux machine and said "Here's how you browse the web" and "here's how you write your papers", and "Guess what?, it will never crash"... They'd be happy as a clam.
>Any point where there is a complete API layer, such that you can divide everything into system and applications, has a side that's an OS.
Interesting. I used to be of the "kernel only" operating system camp (that's what they taught us in CS)... but I'm starting to think that it needs to be redifined. However, your definition also needs a bit of honing. An API can be defined by any piece of middleware. Clearly a true operating system would exist between the hardware and the middleware. Or is the entire concept of an operating system outdated?
By your definition:
A Java VM is an OS. An application server (such as WebSphere) is an OS. A database is an OS. (You could call stored procedures an application) Perl is an OS.....
>look forward to gimp being able to do the things I need to do in PS so I can make the switch.
What exactly are you missing? I'm not a graphic designer by trade, perhaps that's why I've never noticed any missing functionality. I'm sure the gimp development team would be interested in knowing what features people think are critical that are still not available.
>There's so many ways linux is this close to outdistancing Windows
It surpassed windows back in the 2.0 timeframe, in my opinion. It's long been more reliable, and more usable (always works the same way), for years. There's much
>none of them are complete enough to be of use to joe average.
Joe Average could use Linux (if it were pre-installed the same way Windows is) and not even know it. Who cares if it can't run some over-the-counter shovelware app?
>So long as linux is playing catch-up, 'tho, this is nothing but one more tool for MS to point at and say "See? We set the standards! Why would you look anywhere else?"
Windows has been playing catch-up to UNIX since DOS 1.0. Look at security, reliability, performance, etc. Not usability, Windows has been playing catch-up to the Mac on that front.
>RAM-based players don't have enough storage (or cost *way* too much)
Actually flash-based players are quite cheap. You can buy a Rio 500 on EBay for about $40. You can quite easily store an hour of music in them (or two with a smart media card). Can you run for more than two hours? If so I'm impressed. Most runners don't run that long, so flash-based players are perfect. They don't skip, have virtually no moving parts, and are small and light.
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>Moral is start thinking about leaving when your company goes bad not when they lay you off as they tank.
Try looking for a UNIX/Linux-related job in Santa Cruz (or even the Bay Area). It's damn hard. Hardly anyone has done any hiring around here since 2001. Any open position is met with hundreds of applicants. Head hunters? Yeah right. Head hunters are also in the dole queue, so to speak.
It's smart to stay in your current job until you can find a new one under those conditions. It's likely those folks have been looking for a new job since this fiaSCO began, but were unable to find one.
>IMHO, Windows compatibility is one of the things that killed OS/2
I'm sure that was a factor... however, the more I think about it, the more I think that a bigger factor was that OS/2 wasn't available pre-installed on PCs (other than those made by IBM). Linux has a clear advantage over OS/2 in gaining pre-install marketshare: Price. If Dell were to work with a Linux distro instead of redmond, they could sell their PCs for a lower cost than those with Windows. If Linux can run all Windows applications, that's going to make the transition easier. Yes there is the danger of developers only focusing on Windows (how is that different than what we have now?), but downward price pressure gives Linux an advantage that OS/2 never had.
>I don't understand why the company isn't touting reliability.
Traditionally, DRAM-based storage units are LESS reliable than hard disks. Why? Power loss. Yes, you can always create a massive UPS, but to be really considered "stable storage", you need to be able to store data without power for years on end. The advantage here is that the unit writes data to its hard disks, giving you some assurance that you won't lose your data even then. That turns the RAM in the unit into a giant cache. This helps with read operations, but does nothing for writes. Besides, if the hard drives fail in this unit, the unit still fails. That makes it no more reliable than RAID.
>To me, this is the most exciting advance in computing since Ethernet.
This concept has been around since before Ethernet. The concept of storage in solid-state isn't new. Even using RAM for a hard disk isn't new. Ever run VDISK in an expanded-memory DOS system? This concept was available in the higher-end comptuer world far before that.
>djgpp - UNIX emulator for DOS.
djgpp - C++ compiler for DOS
> Cygwin - UNIX emulator. Can create Windows programs, reliant on a cygwin1.dll.
Cygwin - A unix-to-Windows porting library, complete with compiler and a large collection of pre-ported software
> cd-ex - MP3/OGG encoder?
cd-ex - A freeware CD ripper that plugs nicely into MP3 and ogg encoders. Similar to Grip in the Linux world.
>It wasn't awful in previous versions, but there certainly was room for improvement.
Maybe, but it's already come a long, long way. I recently booted a Knoppix CD on a name-brand LAPTOP and everything worked. It was amazing. I'd wager to say that it beats anything else for hardware detection and compatibility on PC hardware, including any version of Windows. Frankly Windows is not in the same league. Ever try to swap a windows image onto different hardware? Exactly.
>But maybe anything short of deciphering a core dump to debug a program is a dirty hack for a real programmer.
Or you could just put in breakpoints and step through the program.
>I don't like adding extra login to my programs in hudreds of places.
I assume you meant "logic".
That's what "functions" are for. You can encapsulate your logic in a function and call it from multiple places.
#defines are a dirty hack. Java has no need of them.
>Over-educated?
Compared to the nations we're outsourcing to, yes. Compared to western Europe or Japan, no.
>You can get just as good an education, if not better, in CS, from India.
I'm sure you can, if your family has the means. If you read the article though, the CEO of Intel was pointing the finger at the K-12 education system. Do you expect me to believe the average Indian child gets a better education than the average child from the United States? I don't think so.
> If the US is so advanced, it needs to push harder and raise the bar.
Why? As I pointed out, education is a red herring. Look at Germany. Highly educated, strong math and science skills, high unemployement. Are you suggesting that producing more engineers would make the number of unemployed engineers decrease?
Cost is the only real factor. How can you reduce the cost of engineering in the United States and still pay a prevailing professional salary? I'm not sure you can. Increasing education would only increase cost.
>By eighth grade, they are behind. By the 12th grade, they are substantially behind other industrialized nations.
Ponting the finger at the education system? I call bullshit on that. The countries they're outsourcing engineering to do NOT have a better education system than the United States, especially when you're talking about universally accessible K-12 education. If they were outsourcing to Japan or Germany because they literally couldn't find educated people here, that would be one thing, but that isn't the case. The jobs are leaving solely due to cost considerations.
Yes, our educational system needs some shoring up, but it's not fair to blame it when it's not the cause of the predicament we're in. The facts would seem to show that if anything, the United States is OVER educated. We've told everyone to go get a college degree and a desk job. In doing so, we've increased our standard of living to the point where it's difficult for us to compete against countries with lower standards of living.
This is exactly what happened to those western european nations he speaks of... They don't have unemployment for lack of skills. You can call it protectionism if you want, but I find it impossibly difficult to believe that the transfer of these high-quality jobs to other nations could be good for the United State's economy overall. These are exactly the jobs we should be trying to attract to improve the economy, so I think it's appropriate to raise warning flags when they start going away.
I'm not sure what to do about it, but in my opinion the education issue is a red herring.
>Why do so many people insist on responding to every new idea with "Wow, this could hurt someone" hysteria?
I wasn't suggesting that it would happen, I was just responding to the notion that the laws of physics would prevent the driver from being hurt if if did happen. They wouldn't.
You're right... wheels do not tend to sieze up for no apparent reason, but gasoline engines easily can... if you get a leak in the oil pan.
That said, I'm sure the possibility that the engine could crap out was taken into the design here. Hopefully.
>The driver is held in place by a counterbalance. Even with no power, the rules of physics do not change.
Indeed. If the mechanism that allows the wheel to spin independently of the driver were to sieze up at 60MPH, what do you imagine would happen to that massive wheel's rotational inertia?
It woudn't be pretty.
>MPEG4 is not that special at very high bitrates. MPEG4 is for low bitrates almost exclusively. This makes for small files which look good enough, but not files which look perfect.
I've heard that before too, but if you compare an equal-bitrate Mpeg2 with Mpeg4, I think you'll find that Mpeg4 wins. The optimizations were designed for low bitrates, but help at high bitrates as well.
>I'd say the opposite, a lot of enterprise users want to squeeze out every last drop of performance they can get.
That depends on what you mean by "enterprise". I'm sure in the educational and research sector this is true, but in the business sector, hardware is cheap and man-hours are expensive. Squeezing every last drop of performance, as you say, is not something that would get bankrolled.
Yes, I know the parent post was supposed to be a joke.
Perhaps "terminal I/O" refers to virtual terminals as well (Xterm, eTerm, RXVT, the Linux console), etc.. .?
Perhaps I'm in the minority, but the vast majority of applications I use in Linux are console apps. They're simply more efficient and easier to work with than "point and click" GUI apps. You definately need to know how to program console apps to call yourself a master UNIX programmer.
>Linux users do not have a God or country given right to watch American Wedding on their Linux box.
Yes they do. The maker of the DVD has a right to copy that DVD, but there's no part of copyright law that says the player must be licensed. There is the only the DMCA, which says you can't circumvent copy "protection". (Which incidentally flies in the face of a many years of reverse engineering case law). If I buy a copy of something, I have every right to view it, whether or not my player is "approved".
>Just like when DVDs started to get popular people had to replace their VCRs with DVD players.
That's stupid. You're confusing technical capability with licensing. They're entirely different.
>Linux users need to give up their technology that doesn't work correctly and use that which does.
Perhaps the users aren't wrong. Perhaps the DMCA is wrong.
>No. A program can be open-source and proprietary!
I call bullshit on that. How can you GPL code and still say it's proprietary? That makes no sense. Open source (GPL) is open by definition.
>The taint is only about the license.
Again, that's exactly why it's stupid. It's rhetoric imbedded in the kernel, when users just want something that works. I don't want the kernel preaching to me about what software license is better.
>I think a more appropriate way of handling things would be have a message explaining _why_ the tainted message is coming up, and why they can't GPL the driver. Work with the system, not against it.
I agree. I'd go so far as to say the "kernel tainted" message should be changed to "binary driver loaded" or something similar.
The "kernel tainted" message itself is biased against proprietary software at it's core. It's saying that anything that isn't licensed a certain way is undoubtedly screwing up the kernel's workings. It's user-unfriendly, and that's why these folks decided to circumvent it.
Developers should know if there is a binary-only driver loaded for tech support reasons, but there's no reason that message couldn't be user-friendly. Linux developers should either stop with the slanted messages or explicitly dissalow binary-only drivers. The middle ground where you say "yeah, we allow it, but it poisons your system and causes your cats to catch malaria" is just crap.
>Pseudo-science? Just because the Bible mentions it?
>Ironically, people thought that Troy were just figments of the imagination 150 years ago, and now they have pretty good proof of where it is.
Actually, that's a pretty good point. There are many parallels between Homer's stories and the bible. Both are collections of stories that are largely mythical. That's not to say there isn't truth in them, but no one claimed Homer's stories were 100% historical fact, unlike the flood story in the bible. Clearly no one is out looking for the cyclops race in the mediteranean islands. Homer's stories were set in a place that actually existed, but that doesn't make the stories true.
What these folks are claiming is not that the place existed, but that the story is true as well. I doubt anyone disclaims the existence of mount Ararat. If the "Noah's Flood" story were not in a religious text, do you think anyone, anywhere would regard the story itself as fact? I doubt it.
What makes this potentially pseudo-science is the use of religion to twist a myth into fact, then in turn twisting all available evidence to make it support that "fact". If they find a piece of gnarled wood, suddenly it's a piece of the ark... etc.
That said, they're welcome to use the scientific method to prove that the ark story is true. If the evidence were sound, it would be the find of the century.
>Most users expect their computers to fuck up. they think it's normal to have to reboot every few hours, to have information become "lost," to have windows shut itself down for no understandable reason at all.
Yeah, many have unfortunately come to expect that, but I have to believe that's just due to ignorance. They just don't know of better alternatives.
In the end, you're largely right. People want their computers to "just work", and not have to deal with much. I submit the only reason Windows has an advantage over Linux to "Joe Average" is that it's pre-installed on their PC. I don't think Windows is appreciably easier to use.
I have to believe that if you sat the average non-gamer down in front of a Linux machine and said "Here's how you browse the web" and "here's how you write your papers", and "Guess what?, it will never crash"... They'd be happy as a clam.
>Any point where there is a complete API layer, such that you can divide everything into system and applications, has a side that's an OS.
....
Interesting. I used to be of the "kernel only" operating system camp (that's what they taught us in CS)... but I'm starting to think that it needs to be redifined. However, your definition also needs a bit of honing. An API can be defined by any piece of middleware. Clearly a true operating system would exist between the hardware and the middleware. Or is the entire concept of an operating system outdated?
By your definition:
A Java VM is an OS.
An application server (such as WebSphere) is an OS.
A database is an OS. (You could call stored procedures an application)
Perl is an OS.
on and on.
>look forward to gimp being able to do the things I need to do in PS so I can make the switch.
What exactly are you missing? I'm not a graphic designer by trade, perhaps that's why I've never noticed any missing functionality. I'm sure the gimp development team would be interested in knowing what features people think are critical that are still not available.
>There's so many ways linux is this close to outdistancing Windows
It surpassed windows back in the 2.0 timeframe, in my opinion. It's long been more reliable, and more usable (always works the same way), for years. There's much
>none of them are complete enough to be of use to joe average.
Joe Average could use Linux (if it were pre-installed the same way Windows is) and not even know it. Who cares if it can't run some over-the-counter shovelware app?
>So long as linux is playing catch-up, 'tho, this is nothing but one more tool for MS to point at and say "See? We set the standards! Why would you look anywhere else?"
Windows has been playing catch-up to UNIX since DOS 1.0. Look at security, reliability, performance, etc. Not usability, Windows has been playing catch-up to the Mac on that front.
>RAM-based players don't have enough storage (or cost *way* too much)
Actually flash-based players are quite cheap. You can buy a Rio 500 on EBay for about $40. You can quite easily store an hour of music in them (or two with a smart media card). Can you run for more than two hours? If so I'm impressed. Most runners don't run that long, so flash-based players are perfect. They don't skip, have virtually no moving parts, and are small and light.
>with the 2 lights - one for yes and one for no
I thought he only got one light... he had to blink it once for yes, twice for no.
I need to get laid.