Recently, I built a new system based on the core7 i930, reasoning being there is simply no AMD cpu that can match its performance, and I do consider myself a power user when I am using it for emulating Cisco CCIE labs and probably be running several VM instances in the future.
I'm told that most Cisco machines have processors the speed of an Amiga 500 inside. How many thousands of those do you need to emulate that you actually need an i7?:)
Very few things even most on/. would utilize a computer for will only see an Intel advantage maybe 1% of the time.
After all - does using an AMD or Intel chip make any difference rendering/.?
My cars spends some 23 hours a day going 0mph. Yet I'm sure glad it can go over a 100mph when I need it.
Your car analogy is lousy, because my 2000 Toyota Yaris can and does sometimes go 160km/h, and in relative terms it cost me much less than my CPU. If I was buying a car comparable to my CPU, I would be driving an SUV twice the size. Hm, on the other hand, thanks for that analogy, it put things into perspective. Maybe next time I shop for CPUs it will save me some money:)
This looks like a good opportunity to recommend The Mythical Man-Month. It talks about software written forty years ago, but its lessons are still plenty applicable today:)
The shell also has less redundancy.
Compare cat foo.txt with File("foo.txt"), there should be no need for both parentheses and quotes.
I agree with your point in general, but I must point out problems with this particular example - cat(1) is not a shell builtin command, it's a separate program. (Indeed it's 44 kilobyte binary on my x86_64 system. Wow.) And, it's got a completely unintuitive name (no, "con-cat-enating" is not even remotely as familiar as "printing out" or "piping" or "reading" or whatever). So from a user point of view, having to learn a strange (even feline:) command name isn't much worse than having to learn some punctuation rule.
Umm, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice, but it looks like I'm the first to tell you that you have a grave security bug in that code - while you are executing any such script, other users on the same system who know how to use ps(1) can see your MySQL root password.
Read the fine manual mysql(1) and look up --defaults-extra-file.
However, I think this article is being overly sensationalistic (surprise, surprise).
It's not actually so much sensationalist as much as it's pointless. It's a huge laundry list of statistics that don't actually add up to any really worthwhile conclusions on their own merit. And I always hate it when people blow up the graph of a 1-6% change (in this instance Chrome) to the same absolute size as the other graphs where data is tenfold, but the slope is steeper so it looks fantastic. That's just plain silly. A less generic graph would have been one showing changes relative to IE6's graph (decline), or something like that, something that actually paints a picture of what is going on, beyond the obvious. But that would take some real effort...
(Mod parents up, particularly the informative anonymous grandparent!)
This is a major milestone for Xen parent (heh) machines because we now have a very clear prospect of a stable Xen dom0 kernel branching process, creating code that has a reasonable amount of support by both the Xen kernel developers and mainline kernel developers - the divergence is getting smaller practically by the month.
The dom0 kernel list shows what the past divergence at 2.6.18 has created - a flurry of interconnected yet different branches with varying levels of features and stability. Xen kernel developers have since atoned:) and have made a really big effort to get in line with the paravirt_ops scheme. They've also been very forthcoming towards us users (see the utter lack of flaming on the xen-devel list, even when people send completely useless bug reports:).
Debian packages of the new Xen dom0 kernels (based on mainline stable 2.6.32) are already available at the standard place - see Xen @ Debian Wiki - and the 4.x hypervisor should also get there soonish (the new dom0 kernel works fine with the hypervisor 3.4.3~rc3 that's already packaged).
Because there is almost nothing that does not work with Windows, yet it is a standard recommendation that someone double-check their desired machine for compatibility with Linux first. Seriously, don't trot out that bullshit.
Anybody who has used a current version of Linux next to a current version of Windows knows the difference, and while there are a lot of reasons to love Linux, hardware compatibility on an x86 system compared with Windows is not one of them.
You were right on the mark in the first part, but you exaggerated the current situation in the second part. Hardware compatibility has become really decent these days, it's at the point where you do not have to spend 80% of the shopping time checking whether the manufacturer has any hint of a clue about Linux drivers (BTDT, and was every bit as pissed off about that as the next guy), instead it's become pretty easy to pinpoint the 20% of hardware that doesn't work right off the website description / in-store packaging, and simply steer clear. To put things into perspective - I'm sure we all sometimes have a worse shopping experience buying groceries.
Forcing an insurance company to pay for a pre-existing condition is simple theft.
This makes no more sense than asking a car insurance company for insurance AFTER you've been in an accident.
You're implying that car insurance is analogous to health insurance. Where I live, there's mandatory car insurance and mandatory health insurance. So that looks like a decent analogy in favor of that part of this bill. And it's almost a car analogy, too.:)
How do you want people to source allegations about an article deletion if Wikipedia hides the history of deleted pages as if they never existed? There's no citing a memory hole.
You can always help people find any deleted article on Wikipedia simply by stating its exact name, and even better by linking its old location. For example, like this. An anonymous user doesn't get much from that, but a logged-in user and especially a sysop sees additional information there that tells the entire history. Then any of those users can also paste whatever they deem useful for others to see. It only takes one single person to do that, out of many thousands that have the permission.
AFAIR, an article revision goes away completely on Wikipedia only if its content and description is judged to be made solely as abuse. This doesn't happen for the vast majority of "regular" content disputes or even vandalism (it's rolled back or undone, but stays as part of the history).
You might think this is obvious, but any Slashdot article on Wikipedia inevitably includes lots of comments saying "My drive-by edit was reverted and I'm never contributing again and Wikipedia is dying."
I wouldn't go so far to support the unsupported generalization in the rest of your post, but this part does seem to be true, and it's becoming really annoying.
This attitude appears so prevalent at times that we actually see such completely anecdotal posts, painfully devoid of anything resembling a rational argumentation common in the technical community, get upvoted as "Insightful" or "Informative", and a lot. A google search gave me an example within fifteen seconds: a comment with score +5, Informative containing a completely anonymized anecdote without so much as a single reference to what was talked about so that the readers can actually try and judge for themselves. (Sure, there's some non-trivial information in the comment, but is that really substantial enough for a maximum informative rating?!)
One almost gets the impression that Wikipedia is the new Microsoft;)
Why is it, that Linux with X11 & Gnome - takes less than 27 seconds to boot on a BRAND NEW computer, and the SAME brand NEW computer...Windows 7 fights itself through disk-trashing-hell+preload-to-infinity for 5-7 minutes? I was READY for windows 7, I heard good things about it, I tried it for a WHOLE WEEK...until I almost caved in, and even though it was HELL to get all my hardware up and running with Ubuntu 9.10 (which is the shitties Ubuntu yet, hardware wise)...I STILL prefer to run Linux...compared to almost wanting to KILL my computer over the constant disk-activity!
There must be something wrong with your particular setup, because for example my clean Windows 7 install booted in 21 seconds to the login prompt, and 6 seconds between logging in and the disk settling down. This is with a two year old SATA disk, 2 GB DDR3 RAM and a 3 GHz quad-core processor. After installing some basic applications such as MS anti-virus, NVidia drivers, Firefox etc and some things like Steam, Cisco VPN, etc., the boot time became longer by about a third, but the OS is still just as usable. It's completely comparable to my Debian install that I continue to dual-boot on the same hardware.
[Windows 7] would be more compelling if all versions of 7 were 64 bit native, as CPU's have been 64 bit for quite some time now. The 64 bit part would be the real selling point here, as it would allow all versions to move past that 4 GB memory limit, hardware permitting. For a lot of people, the only reason they really had to move to XP from 98SE was the file system limits on FAT32. While 98 was more stable than 95, the reason I upgraded was the 2 GB FAT limit that was smashed with FAT32. Microsoft too often forgets that we need practical reasons to upgrade, not just shiny eye-candy.
I try to follow your logic there, but it doesn't really work. In practice, most people do not actually need more than 4 GB of memory right now, nor will they in the near future. (Well, to be more precise, nor should they, but goodness knows what could happen.) In other words, support for the fifth gigabyte of memory could not be a major selling point.
"Redhat Enterprise Linux 5" is essentially a massive kernel fork at 2.6.18.
Yes. When I last checked a few weeks ago, they had over 4000 individual patch files in that source RPM. Nevertheless much of that code must simply come from newer mainline. So it's a fork of the mainline 2.6.18 release, which is dead upstream anyway since 2007-02-24.
You're right, people aren't upgrading - because that costs money and the mantra "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" trumps all when it comes to finances.
When people don't upgrade, they by and large eventually become hosts to all sorts of abusive and/or outright illegal behaviour, that ends up hurting the rest of us - financially. Ultimately the question is how long does the society tolerate this kind of a dissipated financial loss before it becomes intolerable, and then acts to force that loss back to the people whose behaviour is unacceptable, in the form they understand best - fines.
There's another web server survey out there that says the latest Apache 1.3.x alone has 4.26%, and its graph may be interpreted to say that it's not dying. Damn:)
The first part of the article is an annoying rant, but once you get past the first dozen paragraph it's fairly factual and grounded in reasoning rather than emotion. Whereas your comment is equally judgmental yet has too little factual content to be rated +4, informative (which is the rating I see on it now).
There will be free Linuxes, like Debian. There will be "pragmatic" Linuxes, like Ubuntu. There will be all sorts of Linuxes in between.
You do realize that the Debian and Ubuntu are siblings and that their freedom and pragmatism policies don't actually differ all that much, at least not enough for RMS to think either of them is free enough?:)
Maybe Slashdot isn't representative of the Linux community, but if it's not-- what is?
What the fuck? Your argument is "I personally can't think of any better single representative of the large community of which this smaller community is a tiny subset, so it must be an accurate representation of the whole"? How do you even manage to type this kind of garbage without dying from the sheer amount of stupid in it?
Slashdot Mirror
Recently, I built a new system based on the core7 i930, reasoning being there is simply no AMD cpu that can match its performance, and I do consider myself a power user when I am using it for emulating Cisco CCIE labs and probably be running several VM instances in the future.
I'm told that most Cisco machines have processors the speed of an Amiga 500 inside. How many thousands of those do you need to emulate that you actually need an i7? :)
Warning! Car analogy comming up.
Very few things even most on /. would utilize a computer for will only see an Intel advantage maybe 1% of the time.
After all - does using an AMD or Intel chip make any difference rendering /.?
My cars spends some 23 hours a day going 0mph. Yet I'm sure glad it can go over a 100mph when I need it.
Your car analogy is lousy, because my 2000 Toyota Yaris can and does sometimes go 160km/h, and in relative terms it cost me much less than my CPU. If I was buying a car comparable to my CPU, I would be driving an SUV twice the size. Hm, on the other hand, thanks for that analogy, it put things into perspective. Maybe next time I shop for CPUs it will save me some money :)
That's why it was funny, you know. :)
This looks like a good opportunity to recommend The Mythical Man-Month . It talks about software written forty years ago, but its lessons are still plenty applicable today :)
The shell also has less redundancy. Compare cat foo.txt with File("foo.txt"), there should be no need for both parentheses and quotes.
I agree with your point in general, but I must point out problems with this particular example - cat(1) is not a shell builtin command, it's a separate program. (Indeed it's 44 kilobyte binary on my x86_64 system. Wow.) And, it's got a completely unintuitive name (no, "con-cat-enating" is not even remotely as familiar as "printing out" or "piping" or "reading" or whatever). So from a user point of view, having to learn a strange (even feline :) command name isn't much worse than having to learn some punctuation rule.
For instance, to do mysql queries:
mysql_query() { /usr/bin/mysql --user=root --pass=topsecret database
}
echo 'SELECT * FROM accounts' | mysql_query
Umm, I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice, but it looks like I'm the first to tell you that you have a grave security bug in that code - while you are executing any such script, other users on the same system who know how to use ps(1) can see your MySQL root password.
Read the fine manual mysql(1) and look up --defaults-extra-file.
However, I think this article is being overly sensationalistic (surprise, surprise).
It's not actually so much sensationalist as much as it's pointless. It's a huge laundry list of statistics that don't actually add up to any really worthwhile conclusions on their own merit. And I always hate it when people blow up the graph of a 1-6% change (in this instance Chrome) to the same absolute size as the other graphs where data is tenfold, but the slope is steeper so it looks fantastic. That's just plain silly. A less generic graph would have been one showing changes relative to IE6's graph (decline), or something like that, something that actually paints a picture of what is going on, beyond the obvious. But that would take some real effort...
(Mod parents up, particularly the informative anonymous grandparent!)
This is a major milestone for Xen parent (heh) machines because we now have a very clear prospect of a stable Xen dom0 kernel branching process, creating code that has a reasonable amount of support by both the Xen kernel developers and mainline kernel developers - the divergence is getting smaller practically by the month.
The dom0 kernel list shows what the past divergence at 2.6.18 has created - a flurry of interconnected yet different branches with varying levels of features and stability. Xen kernel developers have since atoned :) and have made a really big effort to get in line with the paravirt_ops scheme. They've also been very forthcoming towards us users (see the utter lack of flaming on the xen-devel list, even when people send completely useless bug reports :).
Debian packages of the new Xen dom0 kernels (based on mainline stable 2.6.32) are already available at the standard place - see Xen @ Debian Wiki - and the 4.x hypervisor should also get there soonish (the new dom0 kernel works fine with the hypervisor 3.4.3~rc3 that's already packaged).
Not really. It's been possible to get them throughout this time, up until about mid last month. See:
Because there is almost nothing that does not work with Windows, yet it is a standard recommendation that someone double-check their desired machine for compatibility with Linux first. Seriously, don't trot out that bullshit.
Anybody who has used a current version of Linux next to a current version of Windows knows the difference, and while there are a lot of reasons to love Linux, hardware compatibility on an x86 system compared with Windows is not one of them.
You were right on the mark in the first part, but you exaggerated the current situation in the second part. Hardware compatibility has become really decent these days, it's at the point where you do not have to spend 80% of the shopping time checking whether the manufacturer has any hint of a clue about Linux drivers (BTDT, and was every bit as pissed off about that as the next guy), instead it's become pretty easy to pinpoint the 20% of hardware that doesn't work right off the website description / in-store packaging, and simply steer clear. To put things into perspective - I'm sure we all sometimes have a worse shopping experience buying groceries.
For those who may not be aware, this subthread references an amusing exchange from the movie "Idiocracy"
This makes no more sense than asking a car insurance company for insurance AFTER you've been in an accident.
You're implying that car insurance is analogous to health insurance. Where I live, there's mandatory car insurance and mandatory health insurance. So that looks like a decent analogy in favor of that part of this bill. And it's almost a car analogy, too. :)
There's nothing wrong with effectively becoming affectionate about proper spelling :)
How do you want people to source allegations about an article deletion if Wikipedia hides the history of deleted pages as if they never existed? There's no citing a memory hole.
You can always help people find any deleted article on Wikipedia simply by stating its exact name, and even better by linking its old location. For example, like this. An anonymous user doesn't get much from that, but a logged-in user and especially a sysop sees additional information there that tells the entire history. Then any of those users can also paste whatever they deem useful for others to see. It only takes one single person to do that, out of many thousands that have the permission.
AFAIR, an article revision goes away completely on Wikipedia only if its content and description is judged to be made solely as abuse. This doesn't happen for the vast majority of "regular" content disputes or even vandalism (it's rolled back or undone, but stays as part of the history).
You might think this is obvious, but any Slashdot article on Wikipedia inevitably includes lots of comments saying "My drive-by edit was reverted and I'm never contributing again and Wikipedia is dying."
I wouldn't go so far to support the unsupported generalization in the rest of your post, but this part does seem to be true, and it's becoming really annoying.
This attitude appears so prevalent at times that we actually see such completely anecdotal posts, painfully devoid of anything resembling a rational argumentation common in the technical community, get upvoted as "Insightful" or "Informative", and a lot. A google search gave me an example within fifteen seconds: a comment with score +5, Informative containing a completely anonymized anecdote without so much as a single reference to what was talked about so that the readers can actually try and judge for themselves. (Sure, there's some non-trivial information in the comment, but is that really substantial enough for a maximum informative rating?!)
One almost gets the impression that Wikipedia is the new Microsoft ;)
Why is it, that Linux with X11 & Gnome - takes less than 27 seconds to boot on a BRAND NEW computer, and the SAME brand NEW computer...Windows 7 fights itself through disk-trashing-hell+preload-to-infinity for 5-7 minutes? I was READY for windows 7, I heard good things about it, I tried it for a WHOLE WEEK...until I almost caved in, and even though it was HELL to get all my hardware up and running with Ubuntu 9.10 (which is the shitties Ubuntu yet, hardware wise)...I STILL prefer to run Linux...compared to almost wanting to KILL my computer over the constant disk-activity!
There must be something wrong with your particular setup, because for example my clean Windows 7 install booted in 21 seconds to the login prompt, and 6 seconds between logging in and the disk settling down. This is with a two year old SATA disk, 2 GB DDR3 RAM and a 3 GHz quad-core processor. After installing some basic applications such as MS anti-virus, NVidia drivers, Firefox etc and some things like Steam, Cisco VPN, etc., the boot time became longer by about a third, but the OS is still just as usable. It's completely comparable to my Debian install that I continue to dual-boot on the same hardware.
[Windows 7] would be more compelling if all versions of 7 were 64 bit native, as CPU's have been 64 bit for quite some time now. The 64 bit part would be the real selling point here, as it would allow all versions to move past that 4 GB memory limit, hardware permitting. For a lot of people, the only reason they really had to move to XP from 98SE was the file system limits on FAT32. While 98 was more stable than 95, the reason I upgraded was the 2 GB FAT limit that was smashed with FAT32. Microsoft too often forgets that we need practical reasons to upgrade, not just shiny eye-candy.
I try to follow your logic there, but it doesn't really work. In practice, most people do not actually need more than 4 GB of memory right now, nor will they in the near future. (Well, to be more precise, nor should they, but goodness knows what could happen.) In other words, support for the fifth gigabyte of memory could not be a major selling point.
"Redhat Enterprise Linux 5" is essentially a massive kernel fork at 2.6.18.
Yes. When I last checked a few weeks ago, they had over 4000 individual patch files in that source RPM. Nevertheless much of that code must simply come from newer mainline. So it's a fork of the mainline 2.6.18 release, which is dead upstream anyway since 2007-02-24.
You're right, people aren't upgrading - because that costs money and the mantra "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" trumps all when it comes to finances.
When people don't upgrade, they by and large eventually become hosts to all sorts of abusive and/or outright illegal behaviour, that ends up hurting the rest of us - financially. Ultimately the question is how long does the society tolerate this kind of a dissipated financial loss before it becomes intolerable, and then acts to force that loss back to the people whose behaviour is unacceptable, in the form they understand best - fines.
There's another web server survey out there that says the latest Apache 1.3.x alone has 4.26%, and its graph may be interpreted to say that it's not dying. Damn :)
The first part of the article is an annoying rant, but once you get past the first dozen paragraph it's fairly factual and grounded in reasoning rather than emotion. Whereas your comment is equally judgmental yet has too little factual content to be rated +4, informative (which is the rating I see on it now).
There will be free Linuxes, like Debian. There will be "pragmatic" Linuxes, like Ubuntu. There will be all sorts of Linuxes in between.
You do realize that the Debian and Ubuntu are siblings and that their freedom and pragmatism policies don't actually differ all that much, at least not enough for RMS to think either of them is free enough? :)
:) Just in case anyone cares, that's a small Latin letter c with an acute.
What the fuck? Your argument is "I personally can't think of any better single representative of the large community of which this smaller community is a tiny subset, so it must be an accurate representation of the whole"? How do you even manage to type this kind of garbage without dying from the sheer amount of stupid in it?
I thought the same, although not so graphic :)
Here's a nicer description of why the original statement was wrong:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/biased-sample.html