It is one of the only programs that works equally well in text mode and GUI mode.
It was designed to run well on a PDP-11, so it just screams on a modern machine.
Emacs was the IDE of choice before people even knew what an IDE was.
People who freak at the emacs feature set should compare it to Eclipse.
I have used emacs on ITS, TOPS-20 and Multics. I am still getting used to this Unix emacs thing, I still smile at the fact that I don't have to put up with gosling emacs any more.
There are a whole lot of rendering engines out there, why choose one with an HTML API?
As a hypothetical alternative, OpenGL is also a perfectly good rendering engine, why not use it? It is just as ubiquitous, it supports every conceivable rendering operation one would ever want to perform. Nothing can touch it in the efficiency department. There are OpenGL bindings for many languages. There's even the new javascript OpenGL binding.
If I was going to choose a rendering engine, I would look first at its API. I certainly would not choose to use HTML as a rendering language.
Configure your servers to get their information from LDAP wherever possible. Then the config files are all fixed, they basically just point to your LDAP server.
If you have servers apps that cannot get their configuration from LDAP, write a Perl script that generates the config file by looking up the information in LDAP.
If you are tricky you can replace the config file with a socket. Use a perl script to generate the contents of the config file on the fly as the the app asks for it, and make sure the the app does not call seek() on the config file.
"Funnily, this issue is exactly the same in Linux "
Funny, but the situation is not like that at all on Linux. On Linux, the browser runs inside SELinux and has ZERO ability to get at any kinds of administrative functionality.
I have a hardware RAID 0 setup for the data that I need immediate access to.
Yes I have drive failures and yes they are catastrophic. But I am prepared for them and they don't slow me down for long.
I have the whole thing mirrored on a networked file server. It's software RAID because it doesn't need to be fast, it just needs to be there.
I do the backups from the remote system. I backup onto hard drives, then I unplug them and put them in a safe place. I rotate several drives in this fashion. I check them regularly for hardware issues. I have to trust these drives more than normal, so I give them a really good working over when they are new. If I were rich, I would buy server drives for these. I am not, so I condition them myself.
I only bother to back up my home directory. Why backup data that can easily be restored with an OS install? It only takes me about 15 minutes to get a newly-installed machine set up on my network.
When I do an OS upgrade, I wipe everything and restore from my backups. It's good practice for when I will actually need the backups. I like nice clean systems, not ones with years of accumulated cruft.
If my RAID controller fails, I can mount the backup mirror and continue working, albeit more slowly.
"If the RAID controller dies, you have to replace it with the same model. blah blah blah"
If my RAID controller dies, I am not going to trust any of the data on any of the drives that were attached to it when it died, so it doesn't matter what brand it is, because there is no way that I am even going to bother trying to recover the data.
You really need to make your backup strategies based on "worst case" scenarios, not just the "what happens when my drive dies" ones.
Who says that one needs to recover data from the remaining drives? What if I also have the data stored somewhere else on different disks on a different controller?
If you lose data when your RAID controller dies, then your real problem is that you are not backing up your data.
Slashdot Mirror
Super El-Wrong-O
I ran gnu emacs on a PDP-11, and it ran just fine.
Like I said, compare it to its competition: eclipse, netbeans
emacs is NOT a text editor, it is an IDE
M-x auto-fill-mode
It starts almost instantaneously on my machine.
It is one of the only programs that works equally well in text mode and GUI mode.
It was designed to run well on a PDP-11, so it just screams on a modern machine.
Emacs was the IDE of choice before people even knew what an IDE was.
People who freak at the emacs feature set should compare it to Eclipse.
I have used emacs on ITS, TOPS-20 and Multics. I am still getting used to this Unix emacs thing, I still smile at the fact that I don't have to put up with gosling emacs any more.
Employees at Microsoft stores will be drowned in "can you help me fix my computer" requests.
They would not be in the laptop market, which has overtaken the desktop market. They did the right thing.
PowerPC has nothing that can compete with Core Duo on the laptop. Not even close.
There are a whole lot of rendering engines out there, why choose one with an HTML API?
As a hypothetical alternative, OpenGL is also a perfectly good rendering engine, why not use it? It is just as ubiquitous, it supports every conceivable rendering operation one would ever want to perform. Nothing can touch it in the efficiency department. There are OpenGL bindings for many languages. There's even the new javascript OpenGL binding.
If I was going to choose a rendering engine, I would look first at its API. I certainly would not choose to use HTML as a rendering language.
Keep all your config information in LDAP.
Configure your servers to get their information from LDAP wherever possible. Then the config files are all fixed, they basically just point to your LDAP server.
If you have servers apps that cannot get their configuration from LDAP, write a Perl script that generates the config file by looking up the information in LDAP.
If you are tricky you can replace the config file with a socket. Use a perl script to generate the contents of the config file on the fly as the the app asks for it, and make sure the the app does not call seek() on the config file.
How long have we had browsers? How obvious is all of this? This reads like an article from 1997.
We are still debating the best way to multi-thread a browser!
One might have thought that we would be a little further along with this kind of stuff.
How long before Silverlight adds email support?
Was it necessary for them to break OS/2 compatibility when they added the headphone jack?
Except on any decent Linux distribution, the X server is running inside SELinux and is really not capable of doing much at all.
I'm sure Comcast has it within their power to put perfectly valid, signed server certificates on their servers.
I'm not talking about "me" in particular, who of course know about this, but rather the unwashed masses.
This is all done under the assumption that the DNS query is for an HTTP request.
What happens when other services run afoul of this setup?
For example: Is my POP client going to hand my login credentials to a Comcast server, if my email service's DNS does not resolve for some reason?
"Funnily, this issue is exactly the same in Linux "
Funny, but the situation is not like that at all on Linux. On Linux, the browser runs inside SELinux and has ZERO ability to get at any kinds of administrative functionality.
How is google free?
The advertisers pay.
People who want premium services pay.
The rest of us pay with our time and our eyeballs, looking at ads.
I have a hardware RAID 0 setup for the data that I need immediate access to.
Yes I have drive failures and yes they are catastrophic. But I am prepared for them and they don't slow me down for long.
I have the whole thing mirrored on a networked file server. It's software RAID because it doesn't need to be fast, it just needs to be there.
I do the backups from the remote system. I backup onto hard drives, then I unplug them and put them in a safe place. I rotate several drives in this fashion. I check them regularly for hardware issues. I have to trust these drives more than normal, so I give them a really good working over when they are new. If I were rich, I would buy server drives for these. I am not, so I condition them myself.
I only bother to back up my home directory. Why backup data that can easily be restored with an OS install? It only takes me about 15 minutes to get a newly-installed machine set up on my network.
When I do an OS upgrade, I wipe everything and restore from my backups. It's good practice for when I will actually need the backups. I like nice clean systems, not ones with years of accumulated cruft.
If my RAID controller fails, I can mount the backup mirror and continue working, albeit more slowly.
I haven't lost data in years.
I laugh when I see people say,
"If the RAID controller dies, you have to replace it with the same model. blah blah blah"
If my RAID controller dies, I am not going to trust any of the data on any of the drives that were attached to it when it died, so it doesn't matter what brand it is, because there is no way that I am even going to bother trying to recover the data.
You really need to make your backup strategies based on "worst case" scenarios, not just the "what happens when my drive dies" ones.
I'm gonna just count on the RAID controller taking out all my drives and all my data when it dies.
This way I will not be disappointed.
RAID1 "might" protect you from a failed drive.
If you are dealing with enterprise hardware and a proper contract, then Sun will come in and fix it right up for you.
If you are not, then you are just wasting time with very expensive hardware.
Simple answer: buy more drives. Put the extras in the closet. By the time you run out of spares, it will be time to move on to new drives.
"the only way you'll be able to access that data"
Gee that's funny, because I can read the data from my backups just fine.
Software RAID may look good in benchmarks, but a real RAID controller is where the real performance is.
I used software RAID 0 on linux for many years, and I thought I was getting good performance.
Then I bought a hardware RAID card, and was totally blown away. I had no idea disk access could be like this. No more waiting, no more bogging.
I'm still questioning my new computer: "No, you didn't really do that THAT quickly did you? There must be some kind of mistake!"
Wrong wrong
Who says that one needs to recover data from the remaining drives? What if I also have the data stored somewhere else on different disks on a different controller?
If you lose data when your RAID controller dies, then your real problem is that you are not backing up your data.