Quite frankly, these things suck as a conductor, and will most likely have terrible parasitics making them useless for even low speed data transmission. We've been working on this problem at work for quite a while now, and I can tell you there are far better solutions out there already. Not to mention their demonstration method is quite pointless, nor does it solve any of the real issues (e.g. connectivity). Additionally this thing most likely won't survive a few washing cycles very well.
In short: I have far more impressive deformable circuits sitting right on my desk...
Also forgot solaris in there. Yes, there are a lot of server operating systems, and windows does hold a sizable(double digits), minority share, but linux holds a majority share, and has a double digit presence in every market but desktop. Throw in FreeBSD, and the FOSS *NIX share for servers is somewhere around ~%80
I wouldn't count on it if you look at market value...
I asked for a citation, not speculation. Linux is a kernel, GNU is the userland, Ubuntu is a distribution. tweaking a few install settings and adding a few extra patches does not make it "might as well be a whole new kernel", and so does not enabling things not enabled by default. Also turning on features not turned on by default does not count either. Trust me I've compiled, tweaked and patched enough Linux kernels to know this. While I certainly agree super computer kernels are tweaked, the notion "they might as well not be Linux", does not hold water. You might as well say that every Gentoo user "might as well not be using linux", because they all have custom per-machine user compile time configured kernels, which is required as part of the installation.
If you want to have a semantics discussion go elsewhere, if you want to have an actual discussion I suggest you read the actual manuals for linux distributions that were "tuned" (according to your words) for super computer and high-node count clusters.
the wake-locks and power management for android has been mainlined in Linux proper since 3.4. tweaking compile time options is fucking easy, and doesn't change the fact its the exact same kernel, and exact same code. Combined with above comment, its fairly clear you don't have a damn clue what you're talking about. Perhaps you just pick up buzzwords from read computer news.
I suggest you compare the binaries and then return to me and dare to repeat said statement. I get it, you hate systemd, you fail to understand the concept that the same code can compile to very different binaries with a single pre-processor variable, and you don't like the fact that some people out there want productivity. Next you also claim that you don't need a configuration file to know which modules to load at boot. (I'm still staring at the/etc/modules file I have open in vi at the moment.) So I must apologize for having a hard time taking you serious. And lets not forget how you twisted my words into "you think I'm stalking you". You're a bad show man.
implying I'm stalking you because I've taken the time to respond to your arguments thoughtfully and patiently. great analogy, it holds water. You've likewise seem to have equal intrest in this conversation.
Where did I imply you stalk me? Quite frankly you're reading stuff I didn't even write.
Also, your correlation between binary driver support and in-app purchases made me chuckle and spill my tea. If you think the only "high performance" hardware that matters is a graphics card, than I fear you have much to learn. Also, your remark about Korean electronics manufacturers is more than a bit wrong. Or are we forgetting Samsung is one of the larger contributors to the linux kernel?
And its exactly THAT mentality about voting that makes sure nothing ever does change.
it doesn't actually. its quite apparent you haven't spent much time really using modern GNU/Linux.
Because/etc/modules and accompanying things really don't exist eh? *facepalm*
I didn't think you got the memo that they are spying on you. I mean we can pretend the snowden leak didn't happen, or be coy about the extent, or the fact that bits and pieces of been leaked for years, many times appearing on slashdot. We can pretend that he hasn't been the victim of a massive character attack against him.
The fact that you think they take a huge interest in what an average person has to say scares me more than the fact that they bother to go over everything they can get their hands on. Also realize some (a.k.a. most) don't live in the US, and we actually think about who we vote on.
Guess what, the world is full of jerks. Studies conclude that rude people are more honest. I don't find Stallman paranoid one bit, most of his "paranoia" over the years has been proven justified.
I think the real issue is you simply don't like what he has to say.
Actually I do not like what he has to say, he instantly kills any possibility of cooperation with his behaviour. His "no binary drivers" thing pretty much stops proper hardware support in its tracks.
my reaction has been just the opposite, drivers for all but the most obscure devices simply load themselves with no interaction. Except the full performance video card drivers. Thats as easy as installing a package and restarting.
Assuming you'll get more than a black screen on reboot.
I've always had driver hell on windows. Half the devices don't show on install, god help you if the ethernet driver doesn't work, and you can't find the install disk. Then you get to the 50,000 diffrent versions of the driver, the buggy piece of shit that comes with windows, or is it driver on the manufactures website which is poorly translated from cantoneese, into mandarin, into russian, into english, that took you 3 hours of searching to find because the company either merged, went out of business, or obsoleted the driver.
Funny you should say that, it took me about 10 minutes to find and download the windows drivers for everything in my latest computer. It took me about 10 hours to get an acceptable performance out of my Intel WiFi chipset on Linux though. And I sort of gave up in the end and use a cable these days. So yes, if somebody who has written drivers for heavily customized embedded systems can't get it to work in a reasonable timespan, then there might be a minor issue with the drivers and operating system.;)
Also, drivers don't have configuration files in linux, they are kernel modules, most of them come with the kernel and are located in/usr/lib/modules/, and linux/udev simply loads them when it detects them, occationally you need to modprobe them and list them in a plain text file in/etc/modules-load.d
Yes, because it totally doesn't store the parameters in a series of shell scripts that are executed at boot. *cough*
Anyways, point still stands. I'd rather have people like Stallman than people like you. There are many reasons to be concerned about privacy, and its been proven that closed modules like DRM, and various phone home utilies exist, track users, and many times leave personal data out in the open, or on company servers, where identity theft is one of the fastest growing, hardest to catch crimes there is right now. We have a hostile government that doesn't give a shit, because they use the same methods to spy on is, and it makes it easy.
We don't need people who don't take Freedom, openess, security and saftey seriously. We also don't need people who are quick to make political compromises to fit in with powerful people, at the expense of the general populace.
I should point out I stopped reading at "hostile government". Guess what, you determine who's in the government. Its your own damned fault, get your head out of your ass and do something about it in
majority share, trend is going towards linux. All the big companies run linux webservers, exception of netflix for FreeBSD.
If I got a penny for everytime I run into windows systems... Even saw a few very very old netware servers recently. Anyway people make the incorrect assumption "servers" equals "web servers" sadly, and then indeed linux has the majority market share. But a lot of software used in an industrial setting simply does not work on Linux/BSD/..., or turn-key systems are bought which quite often run Windows. Or god-forbid: HP-UX, though that one is actually fairly nice if you have some time to sit down with it.
[citation please]
Yes, because things like Cray Linux with customized micro kernels don't exist... Its not because they say "oh hey it uses... linux" in the top 500 list that it's a standard build. It'd be like claiming that China's latest super computer runs Ubuntu. It might be based on it, but you can be pretty damn sure it was optimized. You don't make a multi-million investment to then squander it away with inefficient resource usage.
nope actually. all the android kernel patches have been mainlined since 3.4. What you mean is that they don't run the GNU userland, but instead their own userland based on BIONIC C lib, and their own custom version of java. I trust you understand the diffrence between kernel and userspace. It becomes more aparant when you run custom roms.
Keep on dreaming. If you were to run a fully unoptimized kernel on a phone you'd drain the battery in less than 2 hours most likely. (Please note: I do not consider compiler conditionals the same code. because you could really just put two complete different versions in there and switch between them with conditional constructs) People seem to forget how big of a deal scheduling and power management is on mobile devices. The battery capacity hasn't increased that much over the past years, the power management on the other hand has made huge steps forward.
if you're using ubuntu or mint it does, simply slip the install disk and bam.
We should totally crash that market, I'm going to make a super conducting cable that needs a tank of liquid nitrogen, then I'm also going to sell a tank with better audio characteristics that are achieved by lining the outside with a shiny coating and putting a "Premium Sound" label on it.
Yes, because you can totally hear that outside of audio range noise that comes with rapid digital communications.And don't start with "but sharp transitions", learn how to use a spectrum analyser and Fourier analyser. The later will most likely be useless since it won't go that high. And most switch-mode power supplies used in audio applications operate at fairly high frequencies these days. (Way outside of the audible range, think 50 - 900 kHz.) Get a damned book and learn something about EMI/EMC before you go and spread around audiophile crap.
Stop going on a crusade against binary drivers then. Not a single manufacturer will show their internal hardware architecture and throw it online without being absolutely sure a competitor won't be able to use it in their reverse engineering attempts.And if you have the driver code you can usually already start figuring things out, so yes its a major issue.
Having code doesn't mean its compiled into every executable or even run for that matter. That's something people don't seem to get about programming these days.
Funny you should say that, I've talked to somebody who plays a substantial part in the Debian Linux project recently and he didn't seem to hate systemd at all, in fact he said something along the lines of "finally that damned script mess is on its way out". So before you say "Debian developers" I'd love to hear some names...
You do realize initd is a huge problem right? It sort of prevents the entire "just working" thing for the non-tech savy people who don't have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Then you got lucky, statistically speaking Linux has a very crappy track record. And I've installed Linux on a lot of different hardware over the years. Always there is one thing that hangs up unless you buy specific hardware and have some luck finding configuration files of somebody else.
Weird eh, worst case scenario I download the driver from the manufacturer website and install it. And that generally does the trick on Windows, no configuration and digging through files required. Though I suppose this is something which could actually be fixed by systemd.
Saying Windows 8 sucks fell out of fashion ages ago, especially since 8.1 came around.
It's no different for Apple. Good luck installing Mac OSX on a Thinkpad or worse an Acer. But no one has a problem with this.
Apple/OSX, lol. That summarizes my comment about Apple software and hardware. And Acer is still a lot better than Compaq used to be.
Get rid of your Broadcom card and get an Intel card instead. You can get them for $15 on Ebay. Broadcom sucks.
Its Intel, sadly the driver again requires specific configurations to be fully functional. And there's no hope of ever getting WiDi to function properly either.
If you have Intel sound you shouldn't have that problem.
Again, not going to shop for specific hardware just to make an OS work. If you can't even support Rockwell/Conexant and Realtek properly I wouldn't you have good hardware support.
First of all, Linux is already mainstream on servers, super computers, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.
On servers its not uncommon, but you'd be amazed what's out there. Contrary to common belief web servers aren't the only thing being run. On super computers its usually a heavily customized version, you could just as well use BSD as starting point to be honest. On smartphones it has been so heavily modified that you wouldn't recognize it if you start taking a closer look at it. And in terms of embedded systems I commonly run into non-Linux things. In fact when we step away from ARM I very often see very specific RTOS implementations that have nothing in common with Linux. NetBSD is very common, custom things even more so. You'd be amazed how far you can get with a few lines of assembly and a C or Ada compiler in a few hours.
Second, what have Stallman to do with anything? If there would be no Stallman and GNU, there wouldn't be Linux. But today Stallman don't play a major role in Linux development anymore.
He's a prime example of the mentality that keeps Linux from achieving mainstream desktop and laptop use.
Third, a Linux system is pretty easy to use. Just install it and it works. And lastly, no user care one bit about the discussion over systemd. Users are just using what is the default and if it works, it's fine. Sysvinit and systemd are just fine for users, it's only the hardcore old school users that are whining about systemd.
Now if the default worked I'd love to do that, sadly it rarely does. (Disclaimer: I don't shop for linux compatible hardware, I just shop for what gives the best performance for the least cash like most people do.)
Then break it, afraid to take a leap of faith? People with more control over this than you have chosen systemd, if you don't like it do something about it: make an alternative available. If enough people agree they'll take you into account, if they don't then you were clearly wrong and you'll have to drop it in a year or two. Instead you're now wasting several hundreds of man years on complaining about it. And by pointing at Gnome you're not exactly convincing me. Gnome is a pest that should have died aeons ago,
cold day in hell. To be honest, while I would like linux to be accepted. I'm not getting rid of Stallman, because if we start getting rid of people like him, the GNU/Linux community will just become more like the people we joined this community to get away from.
I suggest if there is ever an event nearby where he speaks that you talk to him for half a minute, lets see how much of your view of said person is left standing. He's an annoying jerk who lives in the eighties who didn't yet get the memo that not everyone is spying on him or is strictly interested in what he thinks. But lets not get into detail about this one.
He inspires confedence as a voice I can trust to be consistant and ethical, even when no one else is, and doesn't bow to pressure, or sell out core principles.
You don't need a person like that to stand up for your principles, if you must find somebody to stand up for them I'd say go for Linus. He might be a jerk, but he's not an obnoxious paranoid unreasonable person.
Also, Free software survives on community effort. Bringing in a bunch of hipsters, will simply bring in hoardes of people who do not contribute, but make demands, sometimes unreasonable, and might try and cause divisions, making work harder. Again, you'll talk about kicking contributers out, to make room for non-contributors.
I'm fairly confident that your community runs more on folks like me (engineers who use this sort of software during their working hours and patch stuff up the moment they run into a major issue) than you realise. Though I've realised long ago Linux is pointless to invest time in, hence my preference for FreeBSD. The key difference is that in the FreeBSD community people don't complain constantly. If they run into an issue they fix it instead of whining about it on Slashdot for half a year.
OK, now you're trolling, linux has had better driver availability than basicly anyone else for the last 5 years. Your simply repeating problems people had pre-kernel 3, which are virtually unheard of.
I started running Linux because all my drivers just worked, as opposed to running XP at the time, where finding the right drivers was a fucking pain. Also, installing extra drivers on Ubuntu is easy, installing them on windows is hard, and installing them on Macs doesn't happen, at all.
Oh yeah, and all the codecs "just worked" too, I just clicked a box saying I didn't give fuck all about licensing. Now try doing that in windows, or even mac.
I have yet to see evidence of this statement. Every computer I install linux on, I must point out this is on recent hardware and often laptops, I usually end up having to fiddle with the driver settings because some person somewhere decided that having the default settings automatically loaded into configuration files was a bad idea. Keep in mind the Windows driver figures out these things by itself, mostly because it doesn't have to take into account 50000 different possible locations for said configuration file. Also: Register! But that's a whole other debate. On the other hand, Windows 7 pretty much automatically installed everything by itself the moment it had network connectivity. And I haven't run into a codec issue in years, because quite frankly nobody still uses Windows Mediaplayer.
Or mabey that Ubuntu was the first desktop that had an App store on the desktop, even before apple. Oh, and it worked.
Or try installing windows on box vs mint/ubuntu/trisquel. Tell me what is easier.
I actually use Linux at work occasionally (Cadence software, yuck), and manage a few FreeBSD servers for hobby purposes. So I am very much familiar with the subject. But I disagree with your assessment. Based on my personal experience many of the scientific applications you speak of do actually run on clusters these days. And pretty much all the clusters I've encountered so far have very different needs from mainstream Linux distributions anyway.
The other software tends to run locally on Windows machines, because lets face it: you're a company and you want market share, you are going to target Windows. With the exception of a few tools I can't state much reasons to run Linux on desktop these days, and even when its necessary the software is usually unpolished, difficult to use, badly documented, and targeted at a very niche market. Half the problems are due to the very fractured system currently used by many linux distros. If you can simply tie down the sort of software you can expect you greatly reduce the difficulties in making things work. Like in the electronics industry we often run into crapware from Cadence and Mentor Graphics which is down right torture to use if you don't use the exact same software setup as the developers used.
And if it takes you days to figure out how to do something on windows you're either doing parallellisation over network, which Windows is indeed terrible at. Or you've never written software for Windows before, which does take some getting used to. But at least you don't have to recompile the executable 20 times for every different flavour and you don't have to mess with GNU Make or GCC, which I consider bonus points
Flexibility is all nice, until you actually want to get something done. You either standardize a series of interfaces, which has NOT been done, or you force something on everyone. But unless you do either of those you're always going to have a system that's half way in limbo for practical applications. I can't say I particularly love linux for any specific thing: for desktops Windows works best, for servers FreeBSD seems to do the job nicely, and for embedded systems we either write something up ourselves or go for NetBSD. The only place where Linux seems to be loved is clusters and super computers, and there you usually have a bunch of admins doing their best to hide the nasty things behind a whole series of customized scripts and tools.
So to summarize it, while I certainly don't mind you using a system for hobby purposes. The rest of us sort of need to get our job done and don't have the time to spend 2 days looking for a solution to something that just works on another operating system. If I have 2 days of spare time there are a million other things I'd love to get finished, forcing a linux distro to work isn't one of them. So please fork a distro for your own purposes or stop whining about systemd.
First of all 1.5 billion, not billions. They also sell a lot more than just their flavour of Linux, which many people seem to forget. (Its all explained pretty well on their website.)
Granted the Stallman comment is a bit old fashioned, but still applies considering his recent whining. But I heavily disagree on the driver remark. If you mean old hardware, sure it has better support. On the other hand if you're running a recent system, lets say a laptop. Forget about having a smooth install unless you buy very specific models of specific brands. Even my ThinkPad, which was rated as having "good" linux support has shoddy WiFi drivers at best, the soundcard fails to operate without me performing quite a lot of manual configuration, and things like free-fall protection for the harddrive you can just sort of forget about. To give you an idea, I installed Debian on my laptop and it took two days to get it up and running. Keep in mind I am very familiar with FreeBSD so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with configuring this type of system. I then proceeded to install Windows 7, other than spending half an hour fixing the bootloader I pretty much only had to install the network driver and Windows did most of the work. On Linux I had to actively invest time in it, time that I could have spent doing other things. And the whining about Windows 8 is also rather old. While I must admit I still run 7 on my home systems, at work I use 8 on a daily basis. Just disable the charms bar, and have it jump to desktop at boot: annoying features disabled.
And so much became clear, but they should just shut up their clapper already or get to work.
Ever realised that it might actually be desired? Its simply that people who disagree are generally a lot more vocal. I have yet to see any unbiased statistics on the well-informed people's opinion of systemd.
That sounds like a steep request, it would require a skill other than whining about systemd and the position of female employees in technology companies though.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite frankly, these things suck as a conductor, and will most likely have terrible parasitics making them useless for even low speed data transmission. We've been working on this problem at work for quite a while now, and I can tell you there are far better solutions out there already. Not to mention their demonstration method is quite pointless, nor does it solve any of the real issues (e.g. connectivity). Additionally this thing most likely won't survive a few washing cycles very well.
In short: I have far more impressive deformable circuits sitting right on my desk...
So you mean the same developers who decided adding it was a good idea? :P
Also forgot solaris in there. Yes, there are a lot of server operating systems, and windows does hold a sizable(double digits), minority share, but linux holds a majority share, and has a double digit presence in every market but desktop. Throw in FreeBSD, and the FOSS *NIX share for servers is somewhere around ~%80
I wouldn't count on it if you look at market value...
I asked for a citation, not speculation. Linux is a kernel, GNU is the userland, Ubuntu is a distribution. tweaking a few install settings and adding a few extra patches does not make it "might as well be a whole new kernel", and so does not enabling things not enabled by default. Also turning on features not turned on by default does not count either. Trust me I've compiled, tweaked and patched enough Linux kernels to know this. While I certainly agree super computer kernels are tweaked, the notion "they might as well not be Linux", does not hold water. You might as well say that every Gentoo user "might as well not be using linux", because they all have custom per-machine user compile time configured kernels, which is required as part of the installation.
If you want to have a semantics discussion go elsewhere, if you want to have an actual discussion I suggest you read the actual manuals for linux distributions that were "tuned" (according to your words) for super computer and high-node count clusters.
the wake-locks and power management for android has been mainlined in Linux proper since 3.4. tweaking compile time options is fucking easy, and doesn't change the fact its the exact same kernel, and exact same code. Combined with above comment, its fairly clear you don't have a damn clue what you're talking about. Perhaps you just pick up buzzwords from read computer news.
I suggest you compare the binaries and then return to me and dare to repeat said statement. I get it, you hate systemd, you fail to understand the concept that the same code can compile to very different binaries with a single pre-processor variable, and you don't like the fact that some people out there want productivity. Next you also claim that you don't need a configuration file to know which modules to load at boot. (I'm still staring at the /etc/modules file I have open in vi at the moment.) So I must apologize for having a hard time taking you serious. And lets not forget how you twisted my words into "you think I'm stalking you". You're a bad show man.
implying I'm stalking you because I've taken the time to respond to your arguments thoughtfully and patiently. great analogy, it holds water. You've likewise seem to have equal intrest in this conversation.
Where did I imply you stalk me? Quite frankly you're reading stuff I didn't even write.
Also, your correlation between binary driver support and in-app purchases made me chuckle and spill my tea. If you think the only "high performance" hardware that matters is a graphics card, than I fear you have much to learn. Also, your remark about Korean electronics manufacturers is more than a bit wrong. Or are we forgetting Samsung is one of the larger contributors to the linux kernel?
And its exactly THAT mentality about voting that makes sure nothing ever does change.
it doesn't actually. its quite apparent you haven't spent much time really using modern GNU/Linux.
Because /etc/modules and accompanying things really don't exist eh? *facepalm*
Are we talking about the folks who put together Debian, or about the people who write software who happen to work on Debian?
I didn't think you got the memo that they are spying on you. I mean we can pretend the snowden leak didn't happen, or be coy about the extent, or the fact that bits and pieces of been leaked for years, many times appearing on slashdot. We can pretend that he hasn't been the victim of a massive character attack against him.
The fact that you think they take a huge interest in what an average person has to say scares me more than the fact that they bother to go over everything they can get their hands on. Also realize some (a.k.a. most) don't live in the US, and we actually think about who we vote on.
Guess what, the world is full of jerks. Studies conclude that rude people are more honest. I don't find Stallman paranoid one bit, most of his "paranoia" over the years has been proven justified.
I think the real issue is you simply don't like what he has to say.
Actually I do not like what he has to say, he instantly kills any possibility of cooperation with his behaviour. His "no binary drivers" thing pretty much stops proper hardware support in its tracks.
my reaction has been just the opposite, drivers for all but the most obscure devices simply load themselves with no interaction. Except the full performance video card drivers. Thats as easy as installing a package and restarting.
Assuming you'll get more than a black screen on reboot.
I've always had driver hell on windows. Half the devices don't show on install, god help you if the ethernet driver doesn't work, and you can't find the install disk. Then you get to the 50,000 diffrent versions of the driver, the buggy piece of shit that comes with windows, or is it driver on the manufactures website which is poorly translated from cantoneese, into mandarin, into russian, into english, that took you 3 hours of searching to find because the company either merged, went out of business, or obsoleted the driver.
Funny you should say that, it took me about 10 minutes to find and download the windows drivers for everything in my latest computer. It took me about 10 hours to get an acceptable performance out of my Intel WiFi chipset on Linux though. And I sort of gave up in the end and use a cable these days. So yes, if somebody who has written drivers for heavily customized embedded systems can't get it to work in a reasonable timespan, then there might be a minor issue with the drivers and operating system. ;)
Also, drivers don't have configuration files in linux, they are kernel modules, most of them come with the kernel and are located in /usr/lib/modules/, and linux/udev simply loads them when it detects them, occationally you need to modprobe them and list them in a plain text file in /etc/modules-load.d
Yes, because it totally doesn't store the parameters in a series of shell scripts that are executed at boot. *cough*
Anyways, point still stands. I'd rather have people like Stallman than people like you. There are many reasons to be concerned about privacy, and its been proven that closed modules like DRM, and various phone home utilies exist, track users, and many times leave personal data out in the open, or on company servers, where identity theft is one of the fastest growing, hardest to catch crimes there is right now. We have a hostile government that doesn't give a shit, because they use the same methods to spy on is, and it makes it easy.
We don't need people who don't take Freedom, openess, security and saftey seriously. We also don't need people who are quick to make political compromises to fit in with powerful people, at the expense of the general populace.
I should point out I stopped reading at "hostile government". Guess what, you determine who's in the government. Its your own damned fault, get your head out of your ass and do something about it in
majority share, trend is going towards linux. All the big companies run linux webservers, exception of netflix for FreeBSD.
If I got a penny for everytime I run into windows systems... Even saw a few very very old netware servers recently. Anyway people make the incorrect assumption "servers" equals "web servers" sadly, and then indeed linux has the majority market share. But a lot of software used in an industrial setting simply does not work on Linux/BSD/..., or turn-key systems are bought which quite often run Windows. Or god-forbid: HP-UX, though that one is actually fairly nice if you have some time to sit down with it.
[citation please]
Yes, because things like Cray Linux with customized micro kernels don't exist... Its not because they say "oh hey it uses ... linux" in the top 500 list that it's a standard build. It'd be like claiming that China's latest super computer runs Ubuntu. It might be based on it, but you can be pretty damn sure it was optimized. You don't make a multi-million investment to then squander it away with inefficient resource usage.
nope actually. all the android kernel patches have been mainlined since 3.4. What you mean is that they don't run the GNU userland, but instead their own userland based on BIONIC C lib, and their own custom version of java. I trust you understand the diffrence between kernel and userspace. It becomes more aparant when you run custom roms.
Keep on dreaming. If you were to run a fully unoptimized kernel on a phone you'd drain the battery in less than 2 hours most likely. (Please note: I do not consider compiler conditionals the same code. because you could really just put two complete different versions in there and switch between them with conditional constructs) People seem to forget how big of a deal scheduling and power management is on mobile devices. The battery capacity hasn't increased that much over the past years, the power management on the other hand has made huge steps forward.
if you're using ubuntu or mint it does, simply slip the install disk and bam.
You wish.
We should totally crash that market, I'm going to make a super conducting cable that needs a tank of liquid nitrogen, then I'm also going to sell a tank with better audio characteristics that are achieved by lining the outside with a shiny coating and putting a "Premium Sound" label on it.
Ever realized most of these > 12 bit ADCs actually have 2 or more bits that are always noise? Read the datasheet.
Yes, because you can totally hear that outside of audio range noise that comes with rapid digital communications.And don't start with "but sharp transitions", learn how to use a spectrum analyser and Fourier analyser. The later will most likely be useless since it won't go that high. And most switch-mode power supplies used in audio applications operate at fairly high frequencies these days. (Way outside of the audible range, think 50 - 900 kHz.) Get a damned book and learn something about EMI/EMC before you go and spread around audiophile crap.
Stop going on a crusade against binary drivers then. Not a single manufacturer will show their internal hardware architecture and throw it online without being absolutely sure a competitor won't be able to use it in their reverse engineering attempts.And if you have the driver code you can usually already start figuring things out, so yes its a major issue.
Having code doesn't mean its compiled into every executable or even run for that matter. That's something people don't seem to get about programming these days.
Funny you should say that, I've talked to somebody who plays a substantial part in the Debian Linux project recently and he didn't seem to hate systemd at all, in fact he said something along the lines of "finally that damned script mess is on its way out". So before you say "Debian developers" I'd love to hear some names...
Sadly he has more influence on the distros than you seem to think. And still he displays the mentality of why they all fail.
You do realize initd is a huge problem right? It sort of prevents the entire "just working" thing for the non-tech savy people who don't have a lot of spare time on their hands.
Then you got lucky, statistically speaking Linux has a very crappy track record. And I've installed Linux on a lot of different hardware over the years. Always there is one thing that hangs up unless you buy specific hardware and have some luck finding configuration files of somebody else.
Weird eh, worst case scenario I download the driver from the manufacturer website and install it. And that generally does the trick on Windows, no configuration and digging through files required. Though I suppose this is something which could actually be fixed by systemd.
Saying Windows 8 sucks fell out of fashion ages ago, especially since 8.1 came around.
It's no different for Apple. Good luck installing Mac OSX on a Thinkpad or worse an Acer. But no one has a problem with this.
Apple/OSX, lol. That summarizes my comment about Apple software and hardware. And Acer is still a lot better than Compaq used to be.
Get rid of your Broadcom card and get an Intel card instead. You can get them for $15 on Ebay. Broadcom sucks.
Its Intel, sadly the driver again requires specific configurations to be fully functional. And there's no hope of ever getting WiDi to function properly either.
If you have Intel sound you shouldn't have that problem.
Again, not going to shop for specific hardware just to make an OS work. If you can't even support Rockwell/Conexant and Realtek properly I wouldn't you have good hardware support.
First of all, Linux is already mainstream on servers, super computers, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.
On servers its not uncommon, but you'd be amazed what's out there. Contrary to common belief web servers aren't the only thing being run. On super computers its usually a heavily customized version, you could just as well use BSD as starting point to be honest. On smartphones it has been so heavily modified that you wouldn't recognize it if you start taking a closer look at it. And in terms of embedded systems I commonly run into non-Linux things. In fact when we step away from ARM I very often see very specific RTOS implementations that have nothing in common with Linux. NetBSD is very common, custom things even more so. You'd be amazed how far you can get with a few lines of assembly and a C or Ada compiler in a few hours.
Second, what have Stallman to do with anything? If there would be no Stallman and GNU, there wouldn't be Linux. But today Stallman don't play a major role in Linux development anymore.
He's a prime example of the mentality that keeps Linux from achieving mainstream desktop and laptop use.
Third, a Linux system is pretty easy to use. Just install it and it works. And lastly, no user care one bit about the discussion over systemd. Users are just using what is the default and if it works, it's fine. Sysvinit and systemd are just fine for users, it's only the hardcore old school users that are whining about systemd.
Now if the default worked I'd love to do that, sadly it rarely does. (Disclaimer: I don't shop for linux compatible hardware, I just shop for what gives the best performance for the least cash like most people do.)
Then break it, afraid to take a leap of faith? People with more control over this than you have chosen systemd, if you don't like it do something about it: make an alternative available. If enough people agree they'll take you into account, if they don't then you were clearly wrong and you'll have to drop it in a year or two. Instead you're now wasting several hundreds of man years on complaining about it. And by pointing at Gnome you're not exactly convincing me. Gnome is a pest that should have died aeons ago,
cold day in hell. To be honest, while I would like linux to be accepted. I'm not getting rid of Stallman, because if we start getting rid of people like him, the GNU/Linux community will just become more like the people we joined this community to get away from.
I suggest if there is ever an event nearby where he speaks that you talk to him for half a minute, lets see how much of your view of said person is left standing. He's an annoying jerk who lives in the eighties who didn't yet get the memo that not everyone is spying on him or is strictly interested in what he thinks. But lets not get into detail about this one.
He inspires confedence as a voice I can trust to be consistant and ethical, even when no one else is, and doesn't bow to pressure, or sell out core principles.
You don't need a person like that to stand up for your principles, if you must find somebody to stand up for them I'd say go for Linus. He might be a jerk, but he's not an obnoxious paranoid unreasonable person.
Also, Free software survives on community effort. Bringing in a bunch of hipsters, will simply bring in hoardes of people who do not contribute, but make demands, sometimes unreasonable, and might try and cause divisions, making work harder. Again, you'll talk about kicking contributers out, to make room for non-contributors.
I'm fairly confident that your community runs more on folks like me (engineers who use this sort of software during their working hours and patch stuff up the moment they run into a major issue) than you realise. Though I've realised long ago Linux is pointless to invest time in, hence my preference for FreeBSD. The key difference is that in the FreeBSD community people don't complain constantly. If they run into an issue they fix it instead of whining about it on Slashdot for half a year.
OK, now you're trolling, linux has had better driver availability than basicly anyone else for the last 5 years. Your simply repeating problems people had pre-kernel 3, which are virtually unheard of.
I started running Linux because all my drivers just worked, as opposed to running XP at the time, where finding the right drivers was a fucking pain. Also, installing extra drivers on Ubuntu is easy, installing them on windows is hard, and installing them on Macs doesn't happen, at all.
Oh yeah, and all the codecs "just worked" too, I just clicked a box saying I didn't give fuck all about licensing. Now try doing that in windows, or even mac.
I have yet to see evidence of this statement. Every computer I install linux on, I must point out this is on recent hardware and often laptops, I usually end up having to fiddle with the driver settings because some person somewhere decided that having the default settings automatically loaded into configuration files was a bad idea. Keep in mind the Windows driver figures out these things by itself, mostly because it doesn't have to take into account 50000 different possible locations for said configuration file. Also: Register! But that's a whole other debate. On the other hand, Windows 7 pretty much automatically installed everything by itself the moment it had network connectivity. And I haven't run into a codec issue in years, because quite frankly nobody still uses Windows Mediaplayer.
Or mabey that Ubuntu was the first desktop that had an App store on the desktop, even before apple. Oh, and it worked.
Or try installing windows on box vs mint/ubuntu/trisquel. Tell me what is easier.
And even that is false.
Are your initials ESR?
Pretty sure they aren't.
I actually use Linux at work occasionally (Cadence software, yuck), and manage a few FreeBSD servers for hobby purposes. So I am very much familiar with the subject. But I disagree with your assessment. Based on my personal experience many of the scientific applications you speak of do actually run on clusters these days. And pretty much all the clusters I've encountered so far have very different needs from mainstream Linux distributions anyway.
The other software tends to run locally on Windows machines, because lets face it: you're a company and you want market share, you are going to target Windows. With the exception of a few tools I can't state much reasons to run Linux on desktop these days, and even when its necessary the software is usually unpolished, difficult to use, badly documented, and targeted at a very niche market. Half the problems are due to the very fractured system currently used by many linux distros. If you can simply tie down the sort of software you can expect you greatly reduce the difficulties in making things work. Like in the electronics industry we often run into crapware from Cadence and Mentor Graphics which is down right torture to use if you don't use the exact same software setup as the developers used.
And if it takes you days to figure out how to do something on windows you're either doing parallellisation over network, which Windows is indeed terrible at. Or you've never written software for Windows before, which does take some getting used to. But at least you don't have to recompile the executable 20 times for every different flavour and you don't have to mess with GNU Make or GCC, which I consider bonus points
Flexibility is all nice, until you actually want to get something done. You either standardize a series of interfaces, which has NOT been done, or you force something on everyone. But unless you do either of those you're always going to have a system that's half way in limbo for practical applications. I can't say I particularly love linux for any specific thing: for desktops Windows works best, for servers FreeBSD seems to do the job nicely, and for embedded systems we either write something up ourselves or go for NetBSD. The only place where Linux seems to be loved is clusters and super computers, and there you usually have a bunch of admins doing their best to hide the nasty things behind a whole series of customized scripts and tools.
So to summarize it, while I certainly don't mind you using a system for hobby purposes. The rest of us sort of need to get our job done and don't have the time to spend 2 days looking for a solution to something that just works on another operating system. If I have 2 days of spare time there are a million other things I'd love to get finished, forcing a linux distro to work isn't one of them. So please fork a distro for your own purposes or stop whining about systemd.
I heavily disagree with you on that. But I'll leave it to yourself to figure out why having a centralized system isn't a bad idea.
First of all 1.5 billion, not billions. They also sell a lot more than just their flavour of Linux, which many people seem to forget. (Its all explained pretty well on their website.)
Granted the Stallman comment is a bit old fashioned, but still applies considering his recent whining. But I heavily disagree on the driver remark. If you mean old hardware, sure it has better support. On the other hand if you're running a recent system, lets say a laptop. Forget about having a smooth install unless you buy very specific models of specific brands. Even my ThinkPad, which was rated as having "good" linux support has shoddy WiFi drivers at best, the soundcard fails to operate without me performing quite a lot of manual configuration, and things like free-fall protection for the harddrive you can just sort of forget about. To give you an idea, I installed Debian on my laptop and it took two days to get it up and running. Keep in mind I am very familiar with FreeBSD so I'm not exactly unfamiliar with configuring this type of system. I then proceeded to install Windows 7, other than spending half an hour fixing the bootloader I pretty much only had to install the network driver and Windows did most of the work. On Linux I had to actively invest time in it, time that I could have spent doing other things. And the whining about Windows 8 is also rather old. While I must admit I still run 7 on my home systems, at work I use 8 on a daily basis. Just disable the charms bar, and have it jump to desktop at boot: annoying features disabled.
And so much became clear, but they should just shut up their clapper already or get to work.
Ever realised that it might actually be desired? Its simply that people who disagree are generally a lot more vocal. I have yet to see any unbiased statistics on the well-informed people's opinion of systemd.
That sounds like a steep request, it would require a skill other than whining about systemd and the position of female employees in technology companies though.