That's good. I might try Opera again now that I know I can turn the native lnf on. Now the question remains, why didn't they do the native skin in the first place.
Firefox is based on GTK and so it fits right in with Gnome, except for a minor problem with the scrollbars (the up and down tabs are always squared off). Opera won't fit in on my gnome destop at all. So on linux, Opera does fit KDE better than Firefox is, and for gnome the reverse is true. Firefox actually uses my Gnome theme to draw the widgets (or emulates them very well).
Sorry, but that is not a native-looking windows XP app. It looks like the crappy consumer Symantec Antirvirus UI. It reminds me of the first Mozilla versions with their owner-drawn controls that weren't themed native at all.
To me opera just doesn't look right on any platform, whether Windows or Linux. It doesn't look like a standard application, at least to me. At least IE and Firefox look like they belong on Windows, and Linux (well, firefox, anyway).
nope, it wasn't captive. Captive was definitely unbearably slow. I'm glad this new driver is faster, but it still will never be fast enough to use as a primary partition due to fuse.
The latest knoppix CD uses an older version of this NTFS driver (read-only if I'm not mistaken) via FUSE and it is *slow*. Rsyncing an entire disk for backup purposes can take days (yes days). Disabling the fuse-ntfs system in knoppix and mounting using the read-only NTFS kernel-level driver is several orders of magnitude faster. So I think this driver is good for sharing data and doing emergency stuff, but it is no where near fast enough to think about using it as a root file system or anything. Knowing this latest driver is faster than Paragon's driver is good news; paragon's driver must have been even slower.
When the ntfs driver is stable, I hope it will be put in the kernel (at least as a native file system). Then we can consider adding a unix layer on it and install linux to the same drive as Windows, for those that want to dual-boot.
Starting to sound like our missile defense system. First a missile, then an anti-missile missile. Then an anti-anti-missile missile, and so forth. I feel safer already. If Star Wars can keep the homeland safe, then surely a better rootkit from symantec (or sony!) can keep me safe from these rootkits!
Reselling altered copyrighted material is an interesting proposition legally. On the other hand, if I buy a DVD or video, I should have to right to view it however I want, and I think I should also have to right to pay someone else to edit it to my liking if I want; it's my DVD after all. Despite everything (no matter which side you take), copyright holders do not have a right to force me to view it the way they want me to. The hard part is that in order to change the DVD, I have to copy it first, which is now a felony. And I think that's the part where these companies have gotten tripped up.
Taking this ruling farther, is it illegal if I publish an MPlayer EDL list for editing out naughty bits of a DVD? I believe Hollywood would want to make it so. On the other hand, when the DVD format was created, it was intended all along that the DVD player could apply edit codes to the video to alter the rating, supply alternate soundtracks, etc. Very little of this has ever been used in the production of DVDs, as Hollywood is the one making them in the first place.
There are already small-scale (miniature compared to this) radio-controlled ornithopters that seem to fly every bit as well as a normal electric parkflyer. The problem is scaling the idea up. What makes this version somewhat revolutionary is that fact that it is full scale. The forces that the various parts of an ornithopter would experience when the flapping motion is occurring are pretty great, yet the materials have to be light-weight. Sounds like this flight was a complete success, despite the crash at the end. A sheer wind can cause problems for even the largest conventional airplane. This plane is also interesting in that it is human-powered, with assistance from a 60-lb thrust jet turbine. Whether or not an ornithopter is anything more than a curiosity remains to be seen. I doubt we'll be seeing jetliner-scale onithopters ever. The efficiency of the conventional design is so great at large scales that I doubt it will ever be beaten by a flapper. On the other hand, perhaps advances in materials will someday allow flying human-powered flappers to become a sport like bicycling.
Well yeah. We use pci cards that have a dozen ports on them. And USB dongles can work with vmware in a similar fashion, so that's good.
Obviously you've never dealt in scientific software before. We'd love to do without the dongles, but it just doesn't happen. These stupid pieces of software cost tens of thousands of dollars for just a few seats. We express our displeasure, but in this market, we're price takers, not price makers (it's a buyer's market). These things are often overlooked by the average slashdotter.
Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials.
Most channels are now synchronizing their ads, it seems. Looks like muting the tv and walking away is the only real way to skip commercials. --
LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century? FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.
Virtualization has been great for dealing with pesky license servers. Some very expensive software packages require a license server that talks to a hardware dongle. In a university setting, we sometimes run dozens of these license servers. Even worse, most license managers expect the dongle to always be on parallel port one. So with vmware server, we can set up a bunch of dongles on an expansion card, then map each port into the vmware image. Furthermore, each vmware image can have a particular mac address set for it, so even if we have to change hardware or move the license server image around, everything stays set. Dongles are evil. But virtualization makes it liveable. And prevents us from having to have dozens of separate machines that do nothing by run the license software.
Somehow I doubt users will agree to let that happen. HTTPS is used by more and more sites and I don't think anyone would want their https web sites restricted to modem speeds.
It very well could be mental illness of sorts. There are compulsive shop-lifters, for example, who are influenced by something that can only be described as mental illness. Also, think about serial killers. One certainly can argue that they are very mentally ill. Of course that doesn't absolve them or this young man of personal responsibility. But there are devient behaviors that we say are not normal. Behaviors can also be addictive without meaning a person is mentally ill or insane, though. Gambling, for example, can be very addictive and in many respects his situation isn't much different (except the illegal stuff!). I think one could argue that the same things that make gambling addictive (thought of easy money, personal gratification) could make this crime addictive for this man.
Well in my experience, dosemu doesn't always emulate some graphics modes. if you want to run dosemu on a virtual terminal, it can actually grab the vga bios and use your video card directly. dosbox has been a little more faithful in its emulation of vesa modes I think (but it is way slower than dosemu)
DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.
This is simply not true. I know of quite a few developers still working with embedded systems using DOS. And no it won't be replaced with ELKS or ucLinux anytime soon. DOS works and works very well in this niche. Serial port communications, harward control, even POS, etc. The DOS embedded world is alive and well.
I still run several DOS applications and even piddle around with my old PowerBASIC compiler in FreeDOS running under DOSEMU. DOSEMU works very well for most things (non-graphical) and runs several orders of magnitude faster than bochs (no emulation of the cpu). FreeDOS and DOSEMU are a great match. Plus all the years of Unix innovations in the command line have been incorporated into the FreeDOS shell, makeing DOS actually quite nice to use in all its 16-bit glory. For graphical DOS stuff, I use dosbox which has it's own DOS implementation but, like bochs, emulates the hardware as well (but is way faster than bochs) and allows sound and vga emulation for running the old Sierra games.
FreeDOS still has a bright future in several niches. There is still a need for a 16-bit, real-mode operating system in a number of embedded situations.
Correct. By convention, almost all character editors make tab stops by default to be every 8 characters. Therefore any indenting in your code should automatically use tab stops and then use spaces to fill in the white space that doesn't lie on a 8-character boundary. This is what I meant. Thus the whole idea of fudging with the tab stops and using code formatters to replace tabs with spaces is a poor idea, as you imply.
I can grudgingly accept the arguments of the web site mentioned in the summary, but I am not convinced their solution is the answer. Certainly it will only work if *all* text editors work that way. And that is not likely to ever happen.
Tabs have been and should continue to be what they are. If you need to format code within the 8 spaces, then use a tab. Otherwise use a space. In no other way can we get source code that looks consistant across editors and platforms. Especially in neat languages like python. Attempts to redefine tab stops are misguided. And don't even get me started on the use of proportional fonts in programming editors. Heresy.
Do you have proof of this, or is this just your own opinion? Is there a documented link between organized crime and allofmp3.com? Or is this just standard prejudice against all Russian businesses?
While the selling of western music on allofmp3.com is questionable, certainly for many Russians and people loving Russian and other foreign music who live abroad, allofmp3.com is the *only* source for a lot of foreign (Russian, Ukranian, etc) music. You cannot buy Hi-Fi on CD in an american store. Nor can you find a lot of this kind of music on the download networks. It's just not there. For these people, allofmp3.com is a godsend.
One thing that allofmp3.com demonstrates is that people are willing to spend money (a lot of money) on music when you can offer the music in the formats that *the customers want*. From what I've seen allofmp3.com provides sufficient value to customers that it is actually cheaper to buy from allofmp3.com than to download from the peer-to-peer networks. I even find that it's easier and cheaper for me to buy albums off of allofmp3.com than to even rip my own CDs. That's the kicker. And that's the thing the RIAA has failed to grasp. Even at 10 cents a track and without any DRM, they could be making a fortune.
Color me unimpressed. If the Russians didn't even bother to put engines on it, the entire project is a dumbed down copy of a shuttle with autopilot, and little in the way of innovation.
Like I said before, this isn't the project to use when you explain how much you loved the soviets.
There are good reasons why the Russians didn't put engines on it. But to say "the Russians didn't even bother to put engines on it" really doesn't reflect well on you. Do some research on the subject before posting such a comment.
The Russian shuttle, by design, *didn't need* main engines on the vehicle itself. But putting the main engines in the big external tank, they not only simplified the orbiter, but also managed to achieve a theoretical cargo capacity that was quite a bit larger than the Space Shuttle. This meant that while main engines could not be reused, Russia could use existing engine technology that they already had to power the thing. Had Russia had the ability to build a restartable, throttlable liquid fuel engine, they might have gone the path that Nasa went. But in the end, I think their decision was a good one given the circumstances.
So we're not mindlessly expressing love for the soviets, but rather grudging admiration. You on the other hand seem to be merely attacking the poster (who did attack you).
Sounds like a logical fallacy to me. How can anyone work on developing new technology when they are starving to death? Somehow you have to break past that initial barrier and then people will begin to not only feed themselves, but also learn and grow and work. Yes the handout mentality is a problem, and the original poster's comment about working 20 hours a week was silly.
Having used Apple's enterprise hardware and software (OS X Server and XServe) for three years, I can tell you that Apple just doesn't get the enterprise. They are either unwilling or unable to treat enterprise customers any differently than their average consumer customer. Only recently has Apple even set up a special support mechanism for their enterprise customers. Previous to this point, when you called up apple with a server problem you would never get anyone on the phone that understood servers. One time I called up to get a drive replaced on warranty. The drive (in a RAID-5 array) had not failed, but the yellow warning light had come on, indicating that a failure was likely. After describing the situation to the support rep, he asked me if I had put the disk back in to see if it would go back to a green light. I was flabbergasted. I gently told him that no, I could not do that. This was a mission-critical server and that once the disk had even so much as blinked, it had to be replaced (I had already inserted the spare at that point). I was unable to get the service rep to budge, so I had to escalate the issue through our local education rep and finally got the warranty replacement.
Other major issues we have had stem from the fact that Apple wants us to reboot our computer every couple of weeks. Uptime longer than a month or so is impossible with Apple. We've told our Apple reps that this is unacceptable but they've said we just have to live with the fact that Apple focuses on consumers mainly and for them a reboot is acceptable for almost every update. If you though Microsoft Windows was bad about reboots in the past, Apple is worse.
Finally, despite Apple using Open Source as a marketing point, and despite the fact that Apple bundles a lot of OSS with their OS, Apple is not an Open Source company in any form. Their bundles of OSS are done in way that makes it impossible to recompile or replace components yourself. For example, although they ship OpenLDAP, it is deeply integrated into other Apple components and you cannot fix bugs yourself or upgrade the OpenLDAP component (much of the source is there, but it is not buildable). We ran into some very nasty bugs in Panther server with the hacks they did to OpenLDAP. Bugs that would completely deadlock the server every week and require a hard reset. It took us a year of fighting with Apple to get them to acknowledge that there was a bug. And this was only after another customer spend weeks building a script that would hammer the server and illustrate the bug. Apple finally released a fix for this in 10.3.6 or 7 I think, after it had been reported back at 10.3.3, about a year earlier. And of course by this time, Apple's engineers were hard at work on Tiger, so they didn't really even want to go back and touch panther again. Right about the time Apple released Tiger Server, I complained about some chronic NFS file locking problems in Panther Server (10.3.9) to Apple and they said simply, just upgrade to Tiger. I told them that wasn't possible as it was a production server and I couldn't upgrade it midstream like that, but in Apple's eyes, I'm out of luck. Running OS X server is a bit like trying to run Fedora Core on a server. Apple just doesn't want to support any OS version longer than a year or two. I'm finally getting ready to roll out a Tiger server box (my 3 year cycle on the panther server is about up) as it fixes numerous issues I've been having, but it is not a trivial migration. Plus I've heard a lot of reports that Samba just doesn't work under load on Tiger Server. So that really leaves me in a bit of a bind.
Fortunately we're about to replace the main file server and we're taking bids from other vendors. Right now we're looking at some new Apple RAID arrays, because the price is right, but we're not going to be running OS X server at all. It will definitely be linux on a Dell or HP server. Also Sun is pricing out some hardware that is a whole grade above Apple's RAID at a price that nearly matches Apple's
Even under windows drivers load into the kernel and normally become part of the kernel proper. Things under linux are similar, but differ from Windows in very important ways. First of all, the overriding philosophy behind the linux kernel is the GPL (well a modified version of the GPLv2) license for the source code. This states that the source code for the kernel and parts of the kernel should always be available. Also, for philosophical reasons associated with the licensing issue, Linus has said that he does not care as much about a binary stable driver API (ABI) in the kernel. Since the source code to the kernel is always available, if you want decent drivers, they should be placed in the kernel source code tree, since drivers really ought to be free and open. Unfortunately this means that a binary kernel driver from one version of the kernel may not work on another. This is done partially to encourage open source drivers and partially to prevent the kernel developers from being tied to design decisions that later prove unwise. But this does pose a problem for folks that want to implement their own third-party drivers in a propriety fashion. NVidia writes a special open source driver that implements a special, stable ABI that it's proprietary, closed-source video driver talks to to overcome this.
Many have argued that Linus needs to stablize the kernel driver ABI. But on the other hand, by not doing so and encouraging drivers to be open source and in the kernel source tree brings us a large amount of stability that Windows just cannot achieve. Most windows stability problems are not caused by the kernel, which is as stable as Linux, but by third-party device drivers. Anyway it is a trade-off, and one that is hotly contested. Personally, everything I currently use has open source drivers that come with my kernel bundle (Fedora Core). They are loaded on demand, so they don't cause memory bloat. If I was to compile my own kernel, I could choose not to build many of the drivers, reducing the disk bloat too.
One of the biggest things for me in this kernel release is the Broadcom wireless driver. Kudos to the team that clean-room reverse engineered the driver.
Slashdot Mirror
That's good. I might try Opera again now that I know I can turn the native lnf on. Now the question remains, why didn't they do the native skin in the first place.
Firefox is based on GTK and so it fits right in with Gnome, except for a minor problem with the scrollbars (the up and down tabs are always squared off). Opera won't fit in on my gnome destop at all. So on linux, Opera does fit KDE better than Firefox is, and for gnome the reverse is true. Firefox actually uses my Gnome theme to draw the widgets (or emulates them very well).
h ots/bittorrent.jpg
And on windows you get things like this:
http://www.opera.com/img/products/desktop/screens
Sorry, but that is not a native-looking windows XP app. It looks like the crappy consumer Symantec Antirvirus UI. It reminds me of the first Mozilla versions with their owner-drawn controls that weren't themed native at all.
To me opera just doesn't look right on any platform, whether Windows or Linux. It doesn't look like a standard application, at least to me. At least IE and Firefox look like they belong on Windows, and Linux (well, firefox, anyway).
nope, it wasn't captive. Captive was definitely unbearably slow. I'm glad this new driver is faster, but it still will never be fast enough to use as a primary partition due to fuse.
The latest knoppix CD uses an older version of this NTFS driver (read-only if I'm not mistaken) via FUSE and it is *slow*. Rsyncing an entire disk for backup purposes can take days (yes days). Disabling the fuse-ntfs system in knoppix and mounting using the read-only NTFS kernel-level driver is several orders of magnitude faster. So I think this driver is good for sharing data and doing emergency stuff, but it is no where near fast enough to think about using it as a root file system or anything. Knowing this latest driver is faster than Paragon's driver is good news; paragon's driver must have been even slower.
When the ntfs driver is stable, I hope it will be put in the kernel (at least as a native file system). Then we can consider adding a unix layer on it and install linux to the same drive as Windows, for those that want to dual-boot.
Starting to sound like our missile defense system. First a missile, then an anti-missile missile. Then an anti-anti-missile missile, and so forth. I feel safer already. If Star Wars can keep the homeland safe, then surely a better rootkit from symantec (or sony!) can keep me safe from these rootkits!
Reselling altered copyrighted material is an interesting proposition legally. On the other hand, if I buy a DVD or video, I should have to right to view it however I want, and I think I should also have to right to pay someone else to edit it to my liking if I want; it's my DVD after all. Despite everything (no matter which side you take), copyright holders do not have a right to force me to view it the way they want me to. The hard part is that in order to change the DVD, I have to copy it first, which is now a felony. And I think that's the part where these companies have gotten tripped up.
Taking this ruling farther, is it illegal if I publish an MPlayer EDL list for editing out naughty bits of a DVD? I believe Hollywood would want to make it so. On the other hand, when the DVD format was created, it was intended all along that the DVD player could apply edit codes to the video to alter the rating, supply alternate soundtracks, etc. Very little of this has ever been used in the production of DVDs, as Hollywood is the one making them in the first place.
There are already small-scale (miniature compared to this) radio-controlled ornithopters that seem to fly every bit as well as a normal electric parkflyer. The problem is scaling the idea up. What makes this version somewhat revolutionary is that fact that it is full scale. The forces that the various parts of an ornithopter would experience when the flapping motion is occurring are pretty great, yet the materials have to be light-weight. Sounds like this flight was a complete success, despite the crash at the end. A sheer wind can cause problems for even the largest conventional airplane. This plane is also interesting in that it is human-powered, with assistance from a 60-lb thrust jet turbine. Whether or not an ornithopter is anything more than a curiosity remains to be seen. I doubt we'll be seeing jetliner-scale onithopters ever. The efficiency of the conventional design is so great at large scales that I doubt it will ever be beaten by a flapper. On the other hand, perhaps advances in materials will someday allow flying human-powered flappers to become a sport like bicycling.
Well yeah. We use pci cards that have a dozen ports on them. And USB dongles can work with vmware in a similar fashion, so that's good.
Obviously you've never dealt in scientific software before. We'd love to do without the dongles, but it just doesn't happen. These stupid pieces of software cost tens of thousands of dollars for just a few seats. We express our displeasure, but in this market, we're price takers, not price makers (it's a buyer's market). These things are often overlooked by the average slashdotter.
Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials.
Most channels are now synchronizing their ads, it seems. Looks like muting the tv and walking away is the only real way to skip commercials.
--
LEELA: Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?
FRY: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio... and in magazines... and movies, and at ballgames, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written in the sky. But not in dreams, no sirree.
Virtualization has been great for dealing with pesky license servers. Some very expensive software packages require a license server that talks to a hardware dongle. In a university setting, we sometimes run dozens of these license servers. Even worse, most license managers expect the dongle to always be on parallel port one. So with vmware server, we can set up a bunch of dongles on an expansion card, then map each port into the vmware image. Furthermore, each vmware image can have a particular mac address set for it, so even if we have to change hardware or move the license server image around, everything stays set. Dongles are evil. But virtualization makes it liveable. And prevents us from having to have dozens of separate machines that do nothing by run the license software.
Somehow I doubt users will agree to let that happen. HTTPS is used by more and more sites and I don't think anyone would want their https web sites restricted to modem speeds.
It very well could be mental illness of sorts. There are compulsive shop-lifters, for example, who are influenced by something that can only be described as mental illness. Also, think about serial killers. One certainly can argue that they are very mentally ill. Of course that doesn't absolve them or this young man of personal responsibility. But there are devient behaviors that we say are not normal. Behaviors can also be addictive without meaning a person is mentally ill or insane, though. Gambling, for example, can be very addictive and in many respects his situation isn't much different (except the illegal stuff!). I think one could argue that the same things that make gambling addictive (thought of easy money, personal gratification) could make this crime addictive for this man.
Well in my experience, dosemu doesn't always emulate some graphics modes. if you want to run dosemu on a virtual terminal, it can actually grab the vga bios and use your video card directly. dosbox has been a little more faithful in its emulation of vesa modes I think (but it is way slower than dosemu)
DOS is too old and simple to be of any use in embedded apps as well. Projects like ELKS and ucLinux are far better options. It might be usable by companies' boot disks, but the limited compatibility might make licensing one of the many commercial DOS implimentations a cheaper and more reliable option.
This is simply not true. I know of quite a few developers still working with embedded systems using DOS. And no it won't be replaced with ELKS or ucLinux anytime soon. DOS works and works very well in this niche. Serial port communications, harward control, even POS, etc. The DOS embedded world is alive and well.
I still run several DOS applications and even piddle around with my old PowerBASIC compiler in FreeDOS running under DOSEMU. DOSEMU works very well for most things (non-graphical) and runs several orders of magnitude faster than bochs (no emulation of the cpu). FreeDOS and DOSEMU are a great match. Plus all the years of Unix innovations in the command line have been incorporated into the FreeDOS shell, makeing DOS actually quite nice to use in all its 16-bit glory. For graphical DOS stuff, I use dosbox which has it's own DOS implementation but, like bochs, emulates the hardware as well (but is way faster than bochs) and allows sound and vga emulation for running the old Sierra games.
FreeDOS still has a bright future in several niches. There is still a need for a 16-bit, real-mode operating system in a number of embedded situations.
Correct. By convention, almost all character editors make tab stops by default to be every 8 characters. Therefore any indenting in your code should automatically use tab stops and then use spaces to fill in the white space that doesn't lie on a 8-character boundary. This is what I meant. Thus the whole idea of fudging with the tab stops and using code formatters to replace tabs with spaces is a poor idea, as you imply.
I can grudgingly accept the arguments of the web site mentioned in the summary, but I am not convinced their solution is the answer. Certainly it will only work if *all* text editors work that way. And that is not likely to ever happen.
Tabs have been and should continue to be what they are. If you need to format code within the 8 spaces, then use a tab. Otherwise use a space. In no other way can we get source code that looks consistant across editors and platforms. Especially in neat languages like python. Attempts to redefine tab stops are misguided. And don't even get me started on the use of proportional fonts in programming editors. Heresy.
For american artists, none. That's not very different from the RIAA.
Do you have proof of this, or is this just your own opinion? Is there a documented link between organized crime and allofmp3.com? Or is this just standard prejudice against all Russian businesses?
While the selling of western music on allofmp3.com is questionable, certainly for many Russians and people loving Russian and other foreign music who live abroad, allofmp3.com is the *only* source for a lot of foreign (Russian, Ukranian, etc) music. You cannot buy Hi-Fi on CD in an american store. Nor can you find a lot of this kind of music on the download networks. It's just not there. For these people, allofmp3.com is a godsend.
One thing that allofmp3.com demonstrates is that people are willing to spend money (a lot of money) on music when you can offer the music in the formats that *the customers want*. From what I've seen allofmp3.com provides sufficient value to customers that it is actually cheaper to buy from allofmp3.com than to download from the peer-to-peer networks. I even find that it's easier and cheaper for me to buy albums off of allofmp3.com than to even rip my own CDs. That's the kicker. And that's the thing the RIAA has failed to grasp. Even at 10 cents a track and without any DRM, they could be making a fortune.
Color me unimpressed. If the Russians didn't even bother to put engines on it, the entire project is a dumbed down copy of a shuttle with autopilot, and little in the way of innovation.
Like I said before, this isn't the project to use when you explain how much you loved the soviets.
There are good reasons why the Russians didn't put engines on it. But to say "the Russians didn't even bother to put engines on it" really doesn't reflect well on you. Do some research on the subject before posting such a comment.
The Russian shuttle, by design, *didn't need* main engines on the vehicle itself. But putting the main engines in the big external tank, they not only simplified the orbiter, but also managed to achieve a theoretical cargo capacity that was quite a bit larger than the Space Shuttle. This meant that while main engines could not be reused, Russia could use existing engine technology that they already had to power the thing. Had Russia had the ability to build a restartable, throttlable liquid fuel engine, they might have gone the path that Nasa went. But in the end, I think their decision was a good one given the circumstances.
So we're not mindlessly expressing love for the soviets, but rather grudging admiration. You on the other hand seem to be merely attacking the poster (who did attack you).
Sounds like a logical fallacy to me. How can anyone work on developing new technology when they are starving to death? Somehow you have to break past that initial barrier and then people will begin to not only feed themselves, but also learn and grow and work. Yes the handout mentality is a problem, and the original poster's comment about working 20 hours a week was silly.
Having used Apple's enterprise hardware and software (OS X Server and XServe) for three years, I can tell you that Apple just doesn't get the enterprise. They are either unwilling or unable to treat enterprise customers any differently than their average consumer customer. Only recently has Apple even set up a special support mechanism for their enterprise customers. Previous to this point, when you called up apple with a server problem you would never get anyone on the phone that understood servers. One time I called up to get a drive replaced on warranty. The drive (in a RAID-5 array) had not failed, but the yellow warning light had come on, indicating that a failure was likely. After describing the situation to the support rep, he asked me if I had put the disk back in to see if it would go back to a green light. I was flabbergasted. I gently told him that no, I could not do that. This was a mission-critical server and that once the disk had even so much as blinked, it had to be replaced (I had already inserted the spare at that point). I was unable to get the service rep to budge, so I had to escalate the issue through our local education rep and finally got the warranty replacement.
Other major issues we have had stem from the fact that Apple wants us to reboot our computer every couple of weeks. Uptime longer than a month or so is impossible with Apple. We've told our Apple reps that this is unacceptable but they've said we just have to live with the fact that Apple focuses on consumers mainly and for them a reboot is acceptable for almost every update. If you though Microsoft Windows was bad about reboots in the past, Apple is worse.
Finally, despite Apple using Open Source as a marketing point, and despite the fact that Apple bundles a lot of OSS with their OS, Apple is not an Open Source company in any form. Their bundles of OSS are done in way that makes it impossible to recompile or replace components yourself. For example, although they ship OpenLDAP, it is deeply integrated into other Apple components and you cannot fix bugs yourself or upgrade the OpenLDAP component (much of the source is there, but it is not buildable). We ran into some very nasty bugs in Panther server with the hacks they did to OpenLDAP. Bugs that would completely deadlock the server every week and require a hard reset. It took us a year of fighting with Apple to get them to acknowledge that there was a bug. And this was only after another customer spend weeks building a script that would hammer the server and illustrate the bug. Apple finally released a fix for this in 10.3.6 or 7 I think, after it had been reported back at 10.3.3, about a year earlier. And of course by this time, Apple's engineers were hard at work on Tiger, so they didn't really even want to go back and touch panther again. Right about the time Apple released Tiger Server, I complained about some chronic NFS file locking problems in Panther Server (10.3.9) to Apple and they said simply, just upgrade to Tiger. I told them that wasn't possible as it was a production server and I couldn't upgrade it midstream like that, but in Apple's eyes, I'm out of luck. Running OS X server is a bit like trying to run Fedora Core on a server. Apple just doesn't want to support any OS version longer than a year or two. I'm finally getting ready to roll out a Tiger server box (my 3 year cycle on the panther server is about up) as it fixes numerous issues I've been having, but it is not a trivial migration. Plus I've heard a lot of reports that Samba just doesn't work under load on Tiger Server. So that really leaves me in a bit of a bind.
Fortunately we're about to replace the main file server and we're taking bids from other vendors. Right now we're looking at some new Apple RAID arrays, because the price is right, but we're not going to be running OS X server at all. It will definitely be linux on a Dell or HP server. Also Sun is pricing out some hardware that is a whole grade above Apple's RAID at a price that nearly matches Apple's
Even under windows drivers load into the kernel and normally become part of the kernel proper. Things under linux are similar, but differ from Windows in very important ways. First of all, the overriding philosophy behind the linux kernel is the GPL (well a modified version of the GPLv2) license for the source code. This states that the source code for the kernel and parts of the kernel should always be available. Also, for philosophical reasons associated with the licensing issue, Linus has said that he does not care as much about a binary stable driver API (ABI) in the kernel. Since the source code to the kernel is always available, if you want decent drivers, they should be placed in the kernel source code tree, since drivers really ought to be free and open. Unfortunately this means that a binary kernel driver from one version of the kernel may not work on another. This is done partially to encourage open source drivers and partially to prevent the kernel developers from being tied to design decisions that later prove unwise. But this does pose a problem for folks that want to implement their own third-party drivers in a propriety fashion. NVidia writes a special open source driver that implements a special, stable ABI that it's proprietary, closed-source video driver talks to to overcome this.
Many have argued that Linus needs to stablize the kernel driver ABI. But on the other hand, by not doing so and encouraging drivers to be open source and in the kernel source tree brings us a large amount of stability that Windows just cannot achieve. Most windows stability problems are not caused by the kernel, which is as stable as Linux, but by third-party device drivers. Anyway it is a trade-off, and one that is hotly contested. Personally, everything I currently use has open source drivers that come with my kernel bundle (Fedora Core). They are loaded on demand, so they don't cause memory bloat. If I was to compile my own kernel, I could choose not to build many of the drivers, reducing the disk bloat too.
One of the biggest things for me in this kernel release is the Broadcom wireless driver. Kudos to the team that clean-room reverse engineered the driver.