They've finally enabled expat as their XML parser, so it now dislays well formedness errors. Yippee. Finally a good XML development platform for Linux and Win32.
I'm now just hoping someone will develop an XSL system for Mozilla. Seems doubtful though...
This is just plain dumb. Mozilla is already completely themable via XUL. Why on earth would they build this proprietary, windows only 4 MEGABYTE (compressed) skin technology when mozilla has it built in from the core in a completely open and cross platform manner? They would do a better service to the community by helping out on XUL development. But of course, they don't care about that - just about sending your email address and other info about you to companies who pay them...
At their maximum hit rate of 37,576,067 bytes/sec, that's 36,695 K/sec. At an average of 50K per page (that's a recommended amount for page size given download speed etc. It also happens to be about average) they're serving up 734 web pages every second (that's full pages including gifs, not hits).
In total that's 63 million hits per day. There's not a web site on the planet that has to handle that capacity from a single machine.
The point is that web server performance on static pages is bullshit. For some real performance figures try comparing ASP vs mod_perl and get the shock of your life.
Unfortunately the per-process max applies to all child processes too, so Apache would run into that limit when spawning lots of children. We had it happen to Postgres and setting the system max via/proc didn't help. Postrgres uses a similar process spawning model.
I think you've really got things confused here. XSL is not a superceding spec over CSS - it's simply another tool in our toolbox. XSL is most certainly more complex than CSS, but with reason - there's no element selection or reordering capability in CSS (barring some nasty tricks). You need to think on levels of complexity and suitability:
XSL is the most complex - use it for displaying XML data where CSS can't give enough formatting
CSS2 is less complex, but provides a great deal of formatting control
CSS1 is simple to use.
Use HTML (preferably with CSS) where you have no desire to reformat your document or publish data.
My C/C++ days are long gone, but I don't mind testing and debugging the nightly builds. So I do. I think a lot of other people do this too. Recently I logged a bug that XML parsing was broken. It's now been fixed. Woohoo.
OK - I know GM has been going on in the lab for years, but all of a sudden it seems everyone everywhere is doing it.
What's worrying about this is when you look at the early science in almost every avenue. Take for example medicine. Initially we started off drilling holes in peoples heads - primitive, but it worked after a fashion - those people's heads didn't hurt any more - but they had slightly bigger problems!!! Then look at early nuclear reactors... I don't really need to elaborate on that point.
The problem is, changing genes has a _lot_ longer lasting effect - changed genes don't just stop at one plant - they continue into the next generation. It's fine to say that "we wouldn't have gotten this far..." (not quoting you - just something I've heard), but we've never mucked about with the innards before. Look what happens when you mess with the number of protons in an atom. Whooaaa - suddenly you've created a radioactive beasty with one tiny tiny change. I think mucking with DNA is about the same - we change one thing because we see it has effect X, but we forget about side effect Y.
And the human genome project is only 10% complete... Don't think doctors aren't already investigating human DNA modification - they are.
KVoice handles my voice mail, although it's a bit unstable, and the pickup feature is crap (there's no automatic pickup - you have to load kvoice and click on pickup - which is impossible to do in time if you're not logged on!).
You can do demand fax serving with HylaFax.
Other than that, I don't know of any text->speech or speech->text projects. Unfortunately it's not something that can be done very easily for free - it requires a huge investment of time, hence why these speech->text systems were originally hugely expensive.
This can only be seen as a good thing for everyone. (I think) I've looked at all the different possibilities:
Microsoft releases Windows under a restrictive licence (they won't allow free binary copies to be given away). MS lose lots of "face" because of this, because it's almost completely pointless. Noone would touch the code.
They release it under a similar licence as the VBScript source code - i.e. you can't make any changes to the code without prior consent from Microsoft - i.e. an additional licence to the one that allows you to read the code! This would mean as many people read the code as read the VBScript code. i.e. none
People do read the code and find GPL or BSD code in there, as has been suspected all along (e.g. in their DNS code). Although I suspect they would only release the source code for the kernel, not the services.
Linux suddenly gains massive amounts of credibility, because people can then say "Well, windows is open source too - so the only difference between windows and Linux is Linux crashes less".
Of any of the above things - I can't really imagine this doing anything bad for Linux. I can however see it as being very bad for Microsoft - their business model just doesn't fit well around open source, and so they are hoping that it will be a magic wand to make the Justice Department leave them alone. I hope the JD aren't that naive.
First, here's the original "Overview" of the report (the full report is stupidly expensive). Basically what they do (DH Brown) is compare on a feature for feature basis on shipping systems. If we go on this basis, RH5.2 lacks many commercial OS features, such as Journalling, high end SMP, Transaction services, Corba/COM integration, etc that these more expensive OS's offer. The msnbc overview glossed over the report quite a bit - the report actually stated that Linux is good for a lot of things, such as web services, even for high end systems provided you have a very close fit - that's what Linux is good for.
There are issues with Linux, like shipping security out of the US that commercial OS's can get around with licences from the govt. That's a big problem for Linux - you can't just download, or buy for 2 bucks, a SSL enabled Web and News server. You can't even get it for $3000. Not that it's hard to setup mind - I've done it myself - configuring Apache for SSLeay was quite easy, but that's not what DH Brown measures - and it's not something that can easily be measured (unfortunately, for the free s/w croud).
There are some serious shortcomings in the report though. Such as looking at 2.0, not 2.2 (hence why Linux appears to fall down in comparisons of SMP, large file support, Max memory support - 2GB in 2.0). The section on SMP testing simply has a big blank space for the performance of Linux - which makes it look like it comes last at first sight. I wouldn't mind betting it's better than NT with a 2.2 kernel.
Unfortunately there's also the issue that the report just discusses the features that go into NT (and the others) that provide high reliability, such as HA clustering (which is shite on NT), resource management (also shite on NT) etc. They don't actually take into account how stable the system is in every day use. If they did, NT would come last.
I'm not sure about how Linux is worse off than commercial Unixes vis-a-vis internet services. Can someone clear up what AIX and Tru64 offer over Linux in terms of IP protocols/tools, TCP/IP extensions, bundled web browsers/servers, bundled email servers and e-commerce tools. Perhaps it's just that very last one, which comes down to issues about SSL again... Sigh.
Other than those things, I'm not quite sure how they have Linux so far down the scale. I'm inclined to believe they just got it plain wrong. What am I missing?
I already have a minimal htcpcp server written in Perl... Doesn't actually make the coffee, but it processes requests, and is a valid server... It's single threaded, which is probably a good thing.
My favourite bit of that RFC is the bit about security. Read it if you don't know what I mean...
Make your code as modular as makes sense. Then release any general modules that might do things better than people have seen before. You don't have to release any code that's military specific that way, just some core components.
Obviously I don't know how your software is built, or what the components are, so I can't say if this really applies to your s/w. I hope it helps though.
In your model, GNU is just below Linux (everything rests under GNU, except Linux which is one level above). So it _still_ applies that everything can come under the Linux name.
The credit is there. We all appreciate GNU tremendously. But shouting for recognition doesn't get anyone on your side.
I didn't read Doc Technical's review, because it's crap. I know it's crap because of the excerpt on the slashdot front page.
What a pointless review.
And Katz wasn't much better. Who in hell would care about Bill's personal life in a management book? I don't understand where you're coming from on this Jon - help me out?
It's no use you just moderating the original post in a thread - you have to mark up replies as well. Reading in +2 mode is a blessing, but dull unless you moderate the replies too.
I've started testing reading/. at threshold=+2. It's an interesting read - better than before, especially with many posts like this topic. But I'd like to see more moderation of the replies too - When I switched to +2 there were only about 10 replies to this entire topic! (OK, so that was exhagerating a bit - but not much)
I'm not saying RedHat should decrease the size of their OS. I'm saying that Red Hat make money on Linux sales because it's prohibitively large for most computer users to download, so they go down to Comp USA or wherever and stump up the cash.
You can't make a living writing GPL software. Unless Red Hat pays you to so they can ship more great software on their CD. This isn't a flame against Red Hat.
Someone please prove me wrong - prove that you can actually make money (enough to live on) on small pieces of GPL software that you can download in less than an hour at 56k/s (i.e. less than 10Mb or so).
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They've finally enabled expat as their XML parser, so it now dislays well formedness errors. Yippee. Finally a good XML development platform for Linux and Win32.
I'm now just hoping someone will develop an XSL system for Mozilla. Seems doubtful though...
What a ridiculous sweeping statement. So the guy who writes 1 line of code a year is better than the guy who writes 10,000?
This is just plain dumb. Mozilla is already completely themable via XUL. Why on earth would they build this proprietary, windows only 4 MEGABYTE (compressed) skin technology when mozilla has it built in from the core in a completely open and cross platform manner? They would do a better service to the community by helping out on XUL development. But of course, they don't care about that - just about sending your email address and other info about you to companies who pay them...
If anyone knows the answer, please tell me...
Who needs a web server like this anyway?
I just did some simple calculations:
At their maximum hit rate of 37,576,067 bytes/sec, that's 36,695 K/sec. At an average of 50K per page (that's a recommended amount for page size given download speed etc. It also happens to be about average) they're serving up 734 web pages every second (that's full pages including gifs, not hits).
In total that's 63 million hits per day. There's not a web site on the planet that has to handle that capacity from a single machine.
The point is that web server performance on static pages is bullshit. For some real performance figures try comparing ASP vs mod_perl and get the shock of your life.
Unfortunately the per-process max applies to all child processes too, so Apache would run into that limit when spawning lots of children. We had it happen to Postgres and setting the system max via /proc didn't help. Postrgres uses a similar process spawning model.
This has been gone over here time and time again...
That setting is a system-wide setting only. What is being discussed is a per-process setting, which is in limits.h - default 1024.
NB: Per process includes processes with child processes like Apache.
I think you've really got things confused here. XSL is not a superceding spec over CSS - it's simply another tool in our toolbox. XSL is most certainly more complex than CSS, but with reason - there's no element selection or reordering capability in CSS (barring some nasty tricks). You need to think on levels of complexity and suitability:
XSL is the most complex - use it for displaying XML data where CSS can't give enough formatting
CSS2 is less complex, but provides a great deal of formatting control
CSS1 is simple to use.
Use HTML (preferably with CSS) where you have no desire to reformat your document or publish data.
Matt.
My C/C++ days are long gone, but I don't mind testing and debugging the nightly builds. So I do. I think a lot of other people do this too. Recently I logged a bug that XML parsing was broken. It's now been fixed. Woohoo.
That was supposed to be in reply to the AC below.
This is what scares the crap out of me (and an awful lot of other very bright people):
People like yourself dismiss GM foods (and genetic modifications in general) as being the same as evolution
We're not talking about natural selection here - very specifically we're talking about un-natural selection.
Matt.
Geez...
OK - I know GM has been going on in the lab for years, but all of a sudden it seems everyone everywhere is doing it.
What's worrying about this is when you look at the early science in almost every avenue. Take for example medicine. Initially we started off drilling holes in peoples heads - primitive, but it worked after a fashion - those people's heads didn't hurt any more - but they had slightly bigger problems!!! Then look at early nuclear reactors... I don't really need to elaborate on that point.
The problem is, changing genes has a _lot_ longer lasting effect - changed genes don't just stop at one plant - they continue into the next generation. It's fine to say that "we wouldn't have gotten this far..." (not quoting you - just something I've heard), but we've never mucked about with the innards before. Look what happens when you mess with the number of protons in an atom. Whooaaa - suddenly you've created a radioactive beasty with one tiny tiny change. I think mucking with DNA is about the same - we change one thing because we see it has effect X, but we forget about side effect Y.
And the human genome project is only 10% complete... Don't think doctors aren't already investigating human DNA modification - they are.
Matt.
KVoice handles my voice mail, although it's a bit unstable, and the pickup feature is crap (there's no automatic pickup - you have to load kvoice and click on pickup - which is impossible to do in time if you're not logged on!).
You can do demand fax serving with HylaFax.
Other than that, I don't know of any text->speech or speech->text projects. Unfortunately it's not something that can be done very easily for free - it requires a huge investment of time, hence why these speech->text systems were originally hugely expensive.
Matt.
Fair point. I should have added "in server space" to that. Apps are coming, but I agree - we're not there yet.
Matt.
Of any of the above things - I can't really imagine this doing anything bad for Linux. I can however see it as being very bad for Microsoft - their business model just doesn't fit well around open source, and so they are hoping that it will be a magic wand to make the Justice Department leave them alone. I hope the JD aren't that naive.
Matt.
Yes - NT can do this, but the system log fills up awfully quickly on an NT server if you do it...
To enable it, enter User Manager (no - really - stupid eh?), and change the Policies->Audit options.
First, here's the original "Overview" of the report (the full report is stupidly expensive). Basically what they do (DH Brown) is compare on a feature for feature basis on shipping systems. If we go on this basis, RH5.2 lacks many commercial OS features, such as Journalling, high end SMP, Transaction services, Corba/COM integration, etc that these more expensive OS's offer. The msnbc overview glossed over the report quite a bit - the report actually stated that Linux is good for a lot of things, such as web services, even for high end systems provided you have a very close fit - that's what Linux is good for.
There are issues with Linux, like shipping security out of the US that commercial OS's can get around with licences from the govt. That's a big problem for Linux - you can't just download, or buy for 2 bucks, a SSL enabled Web and News server. You can't even get it for $3000. Not that it's hard to setup mind - I've done it myself - configuring Apache for SSLeay was quite easy, but that's not what DH Brown measures - and it's not something that can easily be measured (unfortunately, for the free s/w croud).
There are some serious shortcomings in the report though. Such as looking at 2.0, not 2.2 (hence why Linux appears to fall down in comparisons of SMP, large file support, Max memory support - 2GB in 2.0). The section on SMP testing simply has a big blank space for the performance of Linux - which makes it look like it comes last at first sight. I wouldn't mind betting it's better than NT with a 2.2 kernel.
Unfortunately there's also the issue that the report just discusses the features that go into NT (and the others) that provide high reliability, such as HA clustering (which is shite on NT), resource management (also shite on NT) etc. They don't actually take into account how stable the system is in every day use. If they did, NT would come last.
I'm not sure about how Linux is worse off than commercial Unixes vis-a-vis internet services. Can someone clear up what AIX and Tru64 offer over Linux in terms of IP protocols/tools, TCP/IP extensions, bundled web browsers/servers, bundled email servers and e-commerce tools. Perhaps it's just that very last one, which comes down to issues about SSL again... Sigh.
Other than those things, I'm not quite sure how they have Linux so far down the scale. I'm inclined to believe they just got it plain wrong. What am I missing?
Matt.
I already have a minimal htcpcp server written in Perl... Doesn't actually make the coffee, but it processes requests, and is a valid server... It's single threaded, which is probably a good thing.
My favourite bit of that RFC is the bit about security. Read it if you don't know what I mean...
User space has nothing to do with it. Or do you suddenly not have the ability to send email from the command line from your user account?
The reality of this is that StarOffice suffers from the same problem, especially since it can run MS Office macros.
Make your code as modular as makes sense. Then release any general modules that might do things better than people have seen before. You don't have to release any code that's military specific that way, just some core components.
Obviously I don't know how your software is built, or what the components are, so I can't say if this really applies to your s/w. I hope it helps though.
In your model, GNU is just below Linux (everything rests under GNU, except Linux which is one level above). So it _still_ applies that everything can come under the Linux name.
The credit is there. We all appreciate GNU tremendously. But shouting for recognition doesn't get anyone on your side.
I didn't read Doc Technical's review, because it's crap. I know it's crap because of the excerpt on the slashdot front page.
What a pointless review.
And Katz wasn't much better. Who in hell would care about Bill's personal life in a management book? I don't understand where you're coming from on this Jon - help me out?
Matt - who's sticking to O'Reilly books.
Please take note moderators!
It's no use you just moderating the original post in a thread - you have to mark up replies as well. Reading in +2 mode is a blessing, but dull unless you moderate the replies too.
Otherwise, keep up the good work.
Matt.
I've started testing reading /. at threshold=+2. It's an interesting read - better than before, especially with many posts like this topic. But I'd like to see more moderation of the replies too - When I switched to +2 there were only about 10 replies to this entire topic! (OK, so that was exhagerating a bit - but not much)
Thanks.
You've missed the point completely.
I'm not saying RedHat should decrease the size of their OS. I'm saying that Red Hat make money on Linux sales because it's prohibitively large for most computer users to download, so they go down to Comp USA or wherever and stump up the cash.
You can't make a living writing GPL software. Unless Red Hat pays you to so they can ship more great software on their CD. This isn't a flame against Red Hat.
Someone please prove me wrong - prove that you can actually make money (enough to live on) on small pieces of GPL software that you can download in less than an hour at 56k/s (i.e. less than 10Mb or so).