I don't even live in the US, so there goes that part of your argument. Belgium has the highest rate of smoking in Europe, and even there smokers are not the majority. Here in NZ they're 25%.
How many activities can one engage in that affect any passive bystander? Hobbies? Sure, shooting is noisy, but you don't usually shoot skeets in a bar. Smoke is pervasive. The smell is pervasive. For brittle asthmatics, your "right" to smoke effectively nixes any right they have to enjoy life.
As for losing rights, I thankfully live in a country where secret courts don't exist, and habeus corpus is still able to be challenged in a real court with a real judge. The rights that I hold most dear are mostly secure - speech, association, religion, movement, etc.
As I said, at such a time as smokers find a way to indulge their habit without any other person having to smell it or smell of it, let us know. Until then, we're standing up for OUR right to go places (including for a night out) without having to wash our hair and our clothes when we get home.
I've lost the right to... smoke inside most buildings
Yeah, and of course that "right" over-rides the right of the large non-smoking portion of the population to not be forced to breathe in your carcinogenic by-products, right?
Smokers whinge and moan about how their "rights" are being trodden on, but they ignore the fact that they are a minority in nearly every country on the planet and that the non-smokers suffer from the smokers' exercise of their "right". It's not like firearms ownership, or any of the other things you complain about (though you being thrown through the windshield of my car after a crash wouldn't much impress me), where you can exercise those rights without impacting my existence in any way. Smokers affect everyone around them, and there's nothing they can do to alter that. Once you figure out a way to smoke without the rest of us having to smell it or smell of it, we might let you smoke inside again.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like IBM has placed into hardware what systems like Xen currently does in software, allocating virtual space for different operating systems to share resources and execute simultaneously.
You're wrong:P
The reason you're wrong is that the LPAR concept has been in big iron for quite a few years, long pre-dating Xen and even pre-dating VMWare. Saying that IBM have put the Xen concept into hardware makes it sound like IBM are the ones who copied an idea. Xen is a copy of VMWare, with some LPAR-type functionality, and VMWare is a poor copy of the LPAR concept.
mySQL isn't enterprise-reliable even in stand-alone configuration
Yeah, I hate these unreliable databases. I mean, our MySQL server at work is a hot 2.8GHz Xeon HT with 2GB of RAM, running RH7.3, and it only managed to serve an average of 200 queries per second (peak load was over 400q/s) over 2½ years. That's really unstable, and crap, and stuff, eh!
Being involved with the Fire Service here in NZ, I can say that the last thing you want are boots that intentionally leak. If you're stepping in small, polluted puddles, it's better to keep the water out entirely.
Also, jungle boots won't provide much protection from debris. You need the steel shank and toe cap mentioned in other posts. Dropping stuff on your feet is a MUCH bigger risk than wet feet. You're not going to be stuck wearing these boots for days on end, so forget about trench foot. You'll be able to take them off at night, dry your feet - take talcum/baby powder along, for precisely this purpose - and pack wet boots with newspaper overnight. Helps them retain shape, and absorbs a shitload of moisture.
As well as good boots, and you'll want to ensure that they're well broken-in, strong gloves. The advice given about full leather gloves is good. If you can find out what your local fire department use for cutting people out of car wrecks, you won't go far wrong.
Ensure that every person always has on them a pair of latex or nitrile (nitrile are tougher) gloves, a few plasters, and a medium-size sterile dressing. This will provide your immediate-care supplies in the event of an injury. A big first aid kit should always be handy, but if you're 10 minutes away on the return trip you want to be able to apply pressure to a big wound. Plasters are good for covering blisters, too, until you can deal with them properly.
Also, take a "personal line". That's about three-to-five metres of light rope, which you can use for tying things up, or off, or for lashing boards together to make it easier to drag a bundle of them. A carabiner is nice to have, too.
Lastly, take cargo pants, or better yet army surplus combat pants. They're designed to take punishment (usually they have double layers on the knees, for example), and they have big pockets. Pockets are good. Hard-shell kneepads could also be highly beneficial. If you're kneeling on rubble, you only want to be doing it for a couple of minutes on any given day. After that you'll be crying out for knee pads. The soft ones worn by tilers tear easily, so something like skaters wear is better.
Why can't the editors do something about the grammatical and spelling mistakes of the articles they deem fit to publish?
The editors would have to first be aware that a mistake was actually a mistake, though. I think you're giving too much credit to the standard of literacy amongst the Slashdot editors.
I am interested in how you are going to like the package system a few upgrades down the line.
Probably about as much as I love it after running it on my work desktop for the last 13 months. That is, a lot.
Yes the slow turn-around time on getting binary packages does suck somewhat, but at the same time I can usually get sources and build a package in a shorter period of time than debian can release their binary. I've seen new versions of gaim checked into ports within hours of being announced.
is the driver support in BSD up to the same level as Linux?
Mostly, yes. If it's not hardware that's running on the bleeding edge, FreeBSD drivers are often better than Linux drivers - in some cases, FreeBSD drivers exist where Linux is stuck using *shudder* Project Evil drivers.
If the hardware is a year old, you're reasonably certain that it will be supported well in FreeBSD if it's supported in Linux. The caveat is hardware where there is no open-source driver, such as with nVidia and their persistent non-support of FreeBSD on amd64.
External storage devices are a joy to use under FreeBSD. Provided you've kept the da and umass drivers, things as diverse as top-end Minolta cameras and cheap USB memory card readers will happily work. Even cheap USB bluetooth adaptors work, though I'm still wrestling with how to get my Palm to use one to connect to the 'net - not that that's any different to XP, which has managed to stop recognising my Palm entirely and has also stopped recognising the bluetooth dongle.
Short version, if you want to live on the bleeding edge you want to be running Linux. If you're OK with waiting six to 12 months before you get the latest new toy (entirely new technology, not necessarily latest model. eg: NCQ-capable SATA drives), you are almost guaranteed that your FreeBSD box will recognise it, play nice with it, and have good man pages to explain how to use the drivers.
Personal anecdote: My workstation at work uses the Intel ICH5 chipset for SATA. Three different Linux distros (this is 13 months ago) wouldn't install. Couldn't see the hard drive. FreeBSD 5.1 didn't care, which is good because I've long had a soft spot for the demon. Last night I finished converting my home servers to FreeBSD, from debian. Feels good:)
You obviously missed the fact that AMD are suing Intel for anti-competitive behaviour.
If Intel have said to Dell that offering AMD CPUs is a sure-fire way to have their pricing or availability affected, Dell aren't going to give AMD a second glance.
It's exactly the same logic, and the only reason that Intel can't be making 80% profit on their CPUs is that AMD do offer a modicum of competition. There's no question of MS being subjected to any real competition from products that people can purchase widely from retail outlets.
I read a story about a mass transit system in Denmark automatically (and successfully) failing over to another system in another city as a result of a fire.
Oh the mental images. "Ladies and gentlemen, we regret to inform you that, due to a fire, this service has now been halted. Please board the waiting buses and recommence your trip in Copenhagen."
Is it worth paying twice as much to add another "nine" to the uptime?
When it keeps your stock exchange running? Sure.
The stock exchange can place the blame on nobody but themselves. They have NO redundancy. A single connection provider, through a single firewall. They're not even peering at one of the peering points, unlike the National Library who were able to get a connection through Telstra Clear (with whom they had no previous relationship) up and running long before the fault was resolved. See this NZNOG post for details.
And funnily enough... these destroyers are not allowed in New Zealand waters...
Actually, they would be if the US wanted to send one. However, the stiff necks in Washington refuse to accept anything less than total capitulation to the US position - namely, NZ must repeal the legislation banning nuclear-powered vessels before the US will send even conventionally-powered vessels.
Oh, and wasn't it a destroyer of the US Navy that was brought to a halt courtesy of NT4?
I have a friend who works and lives south of Palmerson North (in Levin to be specific) who said Internet was working OK. Apparenly in his area ADSL was alright although Dialup was having heaps of issues with various ISPs.
Well, I had dialtone in Lower Hutt but my DSL was well 0wned. I was just glad that my employer is on TelstraClear (never thought I'd say that), so we had zero downtime.
Remember their "Five nines of reliability on our core network" ads?
Well, someone did the maths, and a four-hour outage means they're not due to have a core network failure for over another half century. Somehow I can't quite see it.
Just to explain this for people not familiar with NZ's financial system, we're heavily electronic. The vast majority of retail purchases, even if they're only a few dollars, are conducted by electronic transaction not with cash - Electronic Funds Transfer at Point Of Sale.
All the EFTPOS transaction processing is done in Auckland, so everyone south of the cut - about half the population - was isolated from the engine room of retail sales.
To compound the matter, bank ATM networks are all run from Auckland, so people couldn't get cash out either. And similarly they couldn't use electronic credit card transactions because that relies on the EFTPOS network.
The financial implications are pretty severe, though it was only for four hours and on a week day so they're well below what could've been.
Uh, anyone whose ISP keeps their authentication servers (that's most of them) north of the cut was taken offline. Similarly the few people for whom it goes the other way.
There ARE services hosted south of Palmy, y'know, and they were unavailable to Aucklanders and everyone else north of Palmy/Wairarapa.
When Windows 2000 was released, there were 65,535 known bugs in their database, according to statements made at the time.
Does anyone else find it interesting that that number will fit perfectly into an unsigned two-byte integer? Maybe MS are using internally-developed code to keep the number of reported bugs down?
I usually find the BSDs might take a little longer to support the latest, greatest hardware. But that's primarily it. Or more support for more esoteric kernel settings and the like.
They might take longer to support it, but when they do support it that support is usually consistent, complete, and stable. How long's bluetooth been out now? A friend's Mandriva box panicks when she plugs in a BT dongle. My FreeBSD box takes the same dongle with nary a blink, and is quite happy to provide connections through it.
Linux has a high profile, which aids it greatly in getting hardware support. The BSDs do damn well for the poor cousins, all the more so when they are able to implement native hardware support that Linux can only offer with a hack such as the NDIS wrappers - does Linux actually have working atheros support natively yet?
cvsup.
pkg_add -rv cvsup-without-gui, then take a look at the example supfiles in/usr/share/samples/cvsup
Once you've brought the system up-to-date (if you just want to go to 5.4, set the release tag to RELENG_5_4), follow the instructions in the Handbook on building the world.
That handbook section covers all the stuff I've mentioned above. The Handbook is your friend.
It's strongly advised to NOT change root's shell - the BSDs install non-core packages into/usr/local/bin, and if you've split your file system that may not be available for root when you start in single-user mode.
For users, though, chsh is what you're after. Lets you set the user shell post-account creation. Or you can specify the shell when you're creating accounts. You do have to install bash from ports or with pkg_add, though, since it's not installed by default.
FreeBSD doesn't have drivers for every esoteric doodad in existence, but the stuff that it supports is well-supported. It's either there completely, or not at all.
As one example, it works perfectly with Atheros-based WLAN cards. I'm told that Linux barely supports them, for very small values of barely. It's also far easier to get USB drives working under FreeBSD, since it only requires two drivers to support pretty much anything - da and umass, and then shit just works. My Minolta Dynax (Maxxum) 7D, some no-name card reader, an Apacer Steno key - I've tried the last one under several versions of Linux, some with, supposedly, support for USB mass storage, and Linux just blinks and says there's no driver available for that device.
If you want to run on the hardware bleeding edge, FreeBSD is not for you. If you're happy to wait six months, (unless the vendor is one of the cocksuckers like TI), all major hardware will have support and that support is far more likely to be stable and capable than Linux's support for the same hardware.
Given the growth of distros that ship with KDE as the default (or only, a la Knoppix) wm, is this really terribly significant?
It'd be significant if Gnome-based distros had grown dramatically but KDE grew more, but since the biggest growth is in KDE-based distros it's nothing more than an as-expected trend.
Certainly for Firefox/Thunderbird, it's rather a tenuous link given their wide platform support. But with stuff like mutt and pine, the link is very clear - the userbase is almost exclusively OSS-OS.
It's note-worthy that these surveys never investigate the penetration of BSD (not OS-X!) to the desktop. I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop, having given up on Linux as too much effort (wasted a day trying to get Linux installed on a box with ICH5 SATA, and then spent an hour downloading a FreeBSD ISO and installing it without any dramas), and I'd be interested in seeing how the BSDs rate against the various Linux distros. Does anyone know of any surveys that look into this?
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How many activities can one engage in that affect any passive bystander? Hobbies? Sure, shooting is noisy, but you don't usually shoot skeets in a bar. Smoke is pervasive. The smell is pervasive. For brittle asthmatics, your "right" to smoke effectively nixes any right they have to enjoy life.
As for losing rights, I thankfully live in a country where secret courts don't exist, and habeus corpus is still able to be challenged in a real court with a real judge. The rights that I hold most dear are mostly secure - speech, association, religion, movement, etc.
As I said, at such a time as smokers find a way to indulge their habit without any other person having to smell it or smell of it, let us know. Until then, we're standing up for OUR right to go places (including for a night out) without having to wash our hair and our clothes when we get home.
Smokers whinge and moan about how their "rights" are being trodden on, but they ignore the fact that they are a minority in nearly every country on the planet and that the non-smokers suffer from the smokers' exercise of their "right". It's not like firearms ownership, or any of the other things you complain about (though you being thrown through the windshield of my car after a crash wouldn't much impress me), where you can exercise those rights without impacting my existence in any way. Smokers affect everyone around them, and there's nothing they can do to alter that. Once you figure out a way to smoke without the rest of us having to smell it or smell of it, we might let you smoke inside again.
The reason you're wrong is that the LPAR concept has been in big iron for quite a few years, long pre-dating Xen and even pre-dating VMWare. Saying that IBM have put the Xen concept into hardware makes it sound like IBM are the ones who copied an idea. Xen is a copy of VMWare, with some LPAR-type functionality, and VMWare is a poor copy of the LPAR concept.
Plasters == bandaids.
Also, jungle boots won't provide much protection from debris. You need the steel shank and toe cap mentioned in other posts. Dropping stuff on your feet is a MUCH bigger risk than wet feet. You're not going to be stuck wearing these boots for days on end, so forget about trench foot. You'll be able to take them off at night, dry your feet - take talcum/baby powder along, for precisely this purpose - and pack wet boots with newspaper overnight. Helps them retain shape, and absorbs a shitload of moisture.
As well as good boots, and you'll want to ensure that they're well broken-in, strong gloves. The advice given about full leather gloves is good. If you can find out what your local fire department use for cutting people out of car wrecks, you won't go far wrong.
Ensure that every person always has on them a pair of latex or nitrile (nitrile are tougher) gloves, a few plasters, and a medium-size sterile dressing. This will provide your immediate-care supplies in the event of an injury. A big first aid kit should always be handy, but if you're 10 minutes away on the return trip you want to be able to apply pressure to a big wound. Plasters are good for covering blisters, too, until you can deal with them properly.
Also, take a "personal line". That's about three-to-five metres of light rope, which you can use for tying things up, or off, or for lashing boards together to make it easier to drag a bundle of them. A carabiner is nice to have, too.
Lastly, take cargo pants, or better yet army surplus combat pants. They're designed to take punishment (usually they have double layers on the knees, for example), and they have big pockets. Pockets are good. Hard-shell kneepads could also be highly beneficial. If you're kneeling on rubble, you only want to be doing it for a couple of minutes on any given day. After that you'll be crying out for knee pads. The soft ones worn by tilers tear easily, so something like skaters wear is better.
Yes the slow turn-around time on getting binary packages does suck somewhat, but at the same time I can usually get sources and build a package in a shorter period of time than debian can release their binary. I've seen new versions of gaim checked into ports within hours of being announced.
If the hardware is a year old, you're reasonably certain that it will be supported well in FreeBSD if it's supported in Linux. The caveat is hardware where there is no open-source driver, such as with nVidia and their persistent non-support of FreeBSD on amd64.
External storage devices are a joy to use under FreeBSD. Provided you've kept the da and umass drivers, things as diverse as top-end Minolta cameras and cheap USB memory card readers will happily work. Even cheap USB bluetooth adaptors work, though I'm still wrestling with how to get my Palm to use one to connect to the 'net - not that that's any different to XP, which has managed to stop recognising my Palm entirely and has also stopped recognising the bluetooth dongle.
Short version, if you want to live on the bleeding edge you want to be running Linux. If you're OK with waiting six to 12 months before you get the latest new toy (entirely new technology, not necessarily latest model. eg: NCQ-capable SATA drives), you are almost guaranteed that your FreeBSD box will recognise it, play nice with it, and have good man pages to explain how to use the drivers.
Personal anecdote: My workstation at work uses the Intel ICH5 chipset for SATA. Three different Linux distros (this is 13 months ago) wouldn't install. Couldn't see the hard drive. FreeBSD 5.1 didn't care, which is good because I've long had a soft spot for the demon. Last night I finished converting my home servers to FreeBSD, from debian. Feels good :)
If Intel have said to Dell that offering AMD CPUs is a sure-fire way to have their pricing or availability affected, Dell aren't going to give AMD a second glance.
It's exactly the same logic, and the only reason that Intel can't be making 80% profit on their CPUs is that AMD do offer a modicum of competition. There's no question of MS being subjected to any real competition from products that people can purchase widely from retail outlets.
Oh, and wasn't it a destroyer of the US Navy that was brought to a halt courtesy of NT4?
Remember their "Five nines of reliability on our core network" ads?
Well, someone did the maths, and a four-hour outage means they're not due to have a core network failure for over another half century. Somehow I can't quite see it.
All the EFTPOS transaction processing is done in Auckland, so everyone south of the cut - about half the population - was isolated from the engine room of retail sales.
To compound the matter, bank ATM networks are all run from Auckland, so people couldn't get cash out either. And similarly they couldn't use electronic credit card transactions because that relies on the EFTPOS network.
The financial implications are pretty severe, though it was only for four hours and on a week day so they're well below what could've been.
Uh, anyone whose ISP keeps their authentication servers (that's most of them) north of the cut was taken offline. Similarly the few people for whom it goes the other way.
There ARE services hosted south of Palmy, y'know, and they were unavailable to Aucklanders and everyone else north of Palmy/Wairarapa.
Linux has a high profile, which aids it greatly in getting hardware support. The BSDs do damn well for the poor cousins, all the more so when they are able to implement native hardware support that Linux can only offer with a hack such as the NDIS wrappers - does Linux actually have working atheros support natively yet?
pkg_add -rv cvsup-without-gui, then take a look at the example supfiles in
Once you've brought the system up-to-date (if you just want to go to 5.4, set the release tag to RELENG_5_4), follow the instructions in the Handbook on building the world.
That handbook section covers all the stuff I've mentioned above. The Handbook is your friend.
It's strongly advised to NOT change root's shell - the BSDs install non-core packages into /usr/local/bin, and if you've split your file system that may not be available for root when you start in single-user mode.
For users, though, chsh is what you're after. Lets you set the user shell post-account creation. Or you can specify the shell when you're creating accounts. You do have to install bash from ports or with pkg_add, though, since it's not installed by default.
As one example, it works perfectly with Atheros-based WLAN cards. I'm told that Linux barely supports them, for very small values of barely. It's also far easier to get USB drives working under FreeBSD, since it only requires two drivers to support pretty much anything - da and umass, and then shit just works. My Minolta Dynax (Maxxum) 7D, some no-name card reader, an Apacer Steno key - I've tried the last one under several versions of Linux, some with, supposedly, support for USB mass storage, and Linux just blinks and says there's no driver available for that device.
If you want to run on the hardware bleeding edge, FreeBSD is not for you. If you're happy to wait six months, (unless the vendor is one of the cocksuckers like TI), all major hardware will have support and that support is far more likely to be stable and capable than Linux's support for the same hardware.
Given the growth of distros that ship with KDE as the default (or only, a la Knoppix) wm, is this really terribly significant?
It'd be significant if Gnome-based distros had grown dramatically but KDE grew more, but since the biggest growth is in KDE-based distros it's nothing more than an as-expected trend.
debian sarge, three versions of Dead Rat, FC2
None of them included a kernel that could handle ICH5. FreeBSD didn't care. Hail the "dying" OS, I say.
Certainly for Firefox/Thunderbird, it's rather a tenuous link given their wide platform support. But with stuff like mutt and pine, the link is very clear - the userbase is almost exclusively OSS-OS.
It's note-worthy that these surveys never investigate the penetration of BSD (not OS-X!) to the desktop. I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop, having given up on Linux as too much effort (wasted a day trying to get Linux installed on a box with ICH5 SATA, and then spent an hour downloading a FreeBSD ISO and installing it without any dramas), and I'd be interested in seeing how the BSDs rate against the various Linux distros. Does anyone know of any surveys that look into this?