Your problem with radeon cards is certainly strange. In my experience no configuration has been required at all to make them work under X 3d accelerated. The default distribution kernels build in support for DRI and AGP motherboard support and the default config for XFree86 is to have DRI and GLX enabled. So if you just stick a card in the system and turn it on then 3d should work and it has for me on a Radeon 7200 and 9100 so far. The advantage to this is you can swap cards and the system still just works.
However my experience with the nvidia drivers have been disasterous on EVERY OS I have ever used them on (linux, mac os 9, win9x, nt4, w2k, XP). They work ok for games but geeze are they unstable when you try to do any actual development. Even for games they crash and lockup the system a lot more then they should. So far I have had the greatest stability from matrox card, then ati. Sure they may not run quite as fast but they run a lot more reliably and I would rather have the system running reliably then running faster since a crash wastes a lot of time.
Didn't the first 2 patches or so for codered and nimbda break virtual hosting on IIS and a number of other configurations. From what I remember it was at least a week or two before they had a fully working patch for them and by that time admins where not very interested in touching the fixes since the others broke stuff.
Also haven't they "fixed" that rpc exploit about 3-5 times now? It seems to me that the first fix did not solve the various blaster variants since they just applied a bandaid and did not fix the problem.
I second this. Current kde 3.2(cvs) has support for svg however it is not very stable yet but I expect it should improve rapidly however it does work just fine. It can also already support mp3 and ogg formats. If mozilla would support that also it would make things a lot easier to work with. Gecko and khtml for the most part render nearly identically and support the standards as well as possible anything they don't support ends up getting fixed fairly quickly.
Strangely enough on windows I can't get it to play DVDs. I have an ati radeon 9100 with 128M of ram. I installed all the drivers and other software for it and have tried about 3 different dvd playing app and none of them work. However under linux I just opened mplayer and it started playing and no I did not have to compile anything. I am using a debian system and it all just worked the first time.
Sometimes windows does not just work and it can be a royal hell hole to get it working. I also have multiple monitors and under linux it works without problem. I was even able to get XFree ot write the config file for me and it worked fine. However under linux sometimes when it boots up it decides for some reason I don't know that one of the cards or monitors does not need to be used for multiple monitors anymore. The only way I have found to fix the problem is format and reinstall since removing the drivers and reinstalling doesn't work. I have NEVER had to reinstall this debian box which has been running sid for about 2-3 years now and getting upgrades every day for software on it.
Even stuff does not magically always work on a mac. I did tech support long enough to know that low end computers are basically crap. The parts are badly built, the power supplies suck, they don't follow specs etc. When you buy server grade components you install stuff and it just works because that is what you where paying for. Compare how easy it is to get some no name scsi card you picked up at compusa for $40 working comapred to the $500 adaptec scsi card which has support for damned near every os for which the hardware is compatible. Cheap hardware is a problem all over.
Considering you could get a $50 ati or matrox card and it would run faster then the geforce it seems you can come out a lot cheaper then the commercial os. Also I have had no end of stability problems with nvidia hardware which I don't get with matrox and only occasionally with ati. Stability is worth a fair bit to me.
For your 4th point I can do this with python already. I just write my apps and they will run on any arch that python supports. So far it has worked without a problem. It seems to me that cross platform, different bit sizes, etc has already been solved in what I would argue is a better way. Also I don't have buffer overflows in python either.
XML Gui devel can already be done for qt and kde stuff. qtDesigner will make.ui files which are xml files or at least can be. That has been around for a few years now.
For the DB stuff I would prefer to use an OODB instead of a relational DB. I do a lot of work with zope and I don't see much in winfs that impresses me.
As far as communication at some point look at twisted python. It is an amazing network framework and I have seen nothing else that is close. I have not heard a whole lot about indigo but twisted could probably give microsoft a run for their money.
So what it comes down to is if you want to remark that an application is slow then you had better profile it to be sure it is the app that is slow. I see that all the time in too many different areas. I have seen apps rewritten in C from python because they where too slow. Only to have them run at the same speed because of a brain dead algorithm or because they where spending their time waiting on disk io, network, db results etc.
Overall programmers need to do less guesswork and actually profile the damn apps to figure out where ths speed problems are. The odds of you being right on where speed problems are based on various stupies is insanely low. Programmers almost NEVER guess right about where speed problems are. What is funny is that a profiler can tell you exactly where it is that you can make the largest impact on the running speed of your program.
For what I do XFree is more responsive then windows 2000 is by a lot. Athlon xp 2000, 1G of ram and 3 vid cards (2 ati, 1 matrox). Also as others have pointed out X has no user interface it is a protcol. KDE and gnome are user interaces and both of them have gotten a lot more consistent. I push my system a lot and windows is not even as close to responsive as this system is running XFree and kde.
Hmm from what I have seen the nvidia cards have very poor support for hardware accelerated render extension support. However ati and matrox cards do have good support. You problem could be that because of your chosen card the system is doing stuff in software that should be done in hardware. Also remember this is supposedy from a company that is supporting of free software with its closed driver. While those that are supposedly not supporting it have faster drivers for the 2d work which is most of what people do on their boxes.
Also some of it is kde/gnome etc. I know in kde cvs a new kwin was recently merged which fixed a lot of speed issues.
When comparing windows and linux I try to compare them doing the same things. On windows when I open up 30 programs and start running my db tests the windows do no update smoothly anymore, stuff starts to crash etc on w2k. However on lnux the gui gets a little slower but nothing like how much slower windows gets. Windows seems to work fine for running one app at a time but if you run a lot of apps you see how the system really bogs down.
I have been using Kdevelop 3(CVS) and it is a huge improvement over Kdevelop 2. They may not have gone far enough yet but they are making huge strides forward very quickly. You should go to kdevelop.org and look around. Also there is a program in kde cvs that allows you to drag and drop kparts together and then use some code to hook the items together that don't hook together but I don't remember what it is called. Give it some more time and the tools will easily be where they need. Overall I have been using Kdevelop 3 since pretty much the beginning of the cvs cycle for it and have watched it progress and it is very nice to use.
I develop python apps for zope and it has very good python support at least it covers what I need it for right now and continues to add a lot of new features that are useful.
That is wrong. Python has a cyclic GC system in addition to reference counts. The reference count system is just a lot simpler overall and a good deal faster and more predictable then a lot of other GC systems are. So use the simplest system for the most common case and have another system to have other kinds of cases.
I have not found any way to create a leak in python so far and have been doing it for years however I have made a mistake that caused it to allocate enough memory that the linux OOM system killed it. I kept increasing the size of a list I was iterating over so it could never stop iterating. However I don't think that is a memory leak and it was trivial to fix.
Actually there is. http://incoming.debian.org Whenever there is a security exploit the odds are the fix is already in incoming right away. Otherwise that should go into sid in about 6 hours I think.
For i386 the exact link is http://incoming.debian.org/ssh_3.6.1p2-6.0_i386.de b
Actually I like using koffice and don't use openoffice at all. It loads far faster then openoffice does and also is vastly more responsive and it uses the io slaves system that all kde apps use which makes it more usable for me. I don't care at all about compatibility with ms formats and it works very well. The current version can even import pdf files for editing and it does a darn good job of it. If you want ms compat that is much improved in the cvs version along with many other improvements.
Open kpackage on any debian based system. Click on the app(s) you want and tell it to install and it will find other needed stuff for you and do it.
Use Yast2, up2date, urpmi etc and they will all do something very similar. Overall newbies do not need to b downloading items manually to install stuff.
Packages made by those dists also install into the correct menus so that should not be an issue.
If you really want a super simple to install system for users have them use lindows and pay the yearly fee and they can click to install any program online which is just a wrapper for apt-get
I have been helping people in many channels for years and in the vast majority of them if you talk like that you are kicked and banned. I have helped people on #debian-kde, #zope, #python and others. That may be an interesting stereotype behavior but in most places it is not tolerated at all. I mostly am on irc.freenode.net
Hmm it seems to me that zope does both of those things. ZEO gives you clustering and at 10 million requests per day that is about 115 request/s which is easily doable.
I find this comment really strange. I find mozilla is slow to load under linux but what is really strange is that konqueror is VERY fast to load especially kde cvs head which has some of the safarri improvements. Actually on this box (athlon xp 2000 with 1G of ram) konqueror loads faster then IE 6.0 does under w2k. On this box I have almost no lag between starting konqueror and having it appear for the first time but IE takes 1-1.5 seconds to launch. Overall while I like mozilla it is a pig and the reason it takes so long to load is not that IE is preloaded. I find that mozilla takes 4-5 times the memory to use that konqueror or opera do. Also I would note that opera is not part of the linux kernel or preloaded in any way and it also loads FAR faster then mozilla does.
I have to admit I think what AOL is doing is correct and slashdot does not speak with one voice. Hell from my point of view block all of them but don't just block it for AOL find a way to keep it from being sent to help the entire world. I have no problem with blocking spam even if you catch some real email in it unintentionally. I get thousands of messages a day and if I lose 5% of my real messages to wipe out 95% of the spam then that is something I am willing to do. Spam just costs way too much to deal with.
WebWasher is a horrible program that should be pulled from the market for dramatically violating the various specs associated with being a proxy. I emailed a problem report to them about a year ago where if you have . : and / in a form name their software freaks out and floods a server with as many submissions of the form/sec as it can. They had replied with no interest in fixing it even though it is the only proxy I have EVER seen with that kind of behavior and even though those characters in form names are perfectly valid and work with every browser I have seen.
I pretty much consider WebWasher to be a DOS tool that I take measures to prevent it from acessing a site and giving people an error message to turn it off. However from what I have seen the usage of WebWasher is damn near non existant. Maybe 1 in a few million people at most.
I have an sblive and I don't notice problems with any apps. I think it is 16 or 32 devices that can open/dev/dsp without any problems. So with a card like that you can have artsd running, open apps that talk to the sound card directly, run games etc and it doesn't have any errors. It has a hardware mixer for that.
I REALLY like how well it works. You just run apps and the hardware does its job. It seems to me that all of these sound mixers we have now are just to provide software solutions to a hardware problem. I would like to see some software layer written like arts that both gnome and kde could use that would dump directly to the sound card to do the work if possible and if not then it could mix it itself that way we have a standard interface that all apps can use and don't waste hardware that can do the job.
a=a is used in some languages when you are working with an object persistence system to signify a change to a mutable object so that it gets saved to the db. With ZODB for example if you make a change to a mutable object like a list, dictionary etc you can assign the object back to itself and the persistence system will save that object or you could do self._p_changed=1. Other OODB systems have similar types of persistence signaling.
Slashdot Mirror
Your problem with radeon cards is certainly strange. In my experience no configuration has been required at all to make them work under X 3d accelerated. The default distribution kernels build in support for DRI and AGP motherboard support and the default config for XFree86 is to have DRI and GLX enabled. So if you just stick a card in the system and turn it on then 3d should work and it has for me on a Radeon 7200 and 9100 so far. The advantage to this is you can swap cards and the system still just works.
However my experience with the nvidia drivers have been disasterous on EVERY OS I have ever used them on (linux, mac os 9, win9x, nt4, w2k, XP). They work ok for games but geeze are they unstable when you try to do any actual development. Even for games they crash and lockup the system a lot more then they should. So far I have had the greatest stability from matrox card, then ati. Sure they may not run quite as fast but they run a lot more reliably and I would rather have the system running reliably then running faster since a crash wastes a lot of time.
Didn't the first 2 patches or so for codered and nimbda break virtual hosting on IIS and a number of other configurations. From what I remember it was at least a week or two before they had a fully working patch for them and by that time admins where not very interested in touching the fixes since the others broke stuff.
Also haven't they "fixed" that rpc exploit about 3-5 times now? It seems to me that the first fix did not solve the various blaster variants since they just applied a bandaid and did not fix the problem.
I second this. Current kde 3.2(cvs) has support for svg however it is not very stable yet but I expect it should improve rapidly however it does work just fine. It can also already support mp3 and ogg formats. If mozilla would support that also it would make things a lot easier to work with. Gecko and khtml for the most part render nearly identically and support the standards as well as possible anything they don't support ends up getting fixed fairly quickly.
Strangely enough on windows I can't get it to play DVDs. I have an ati radeon 9100 with 128M of ram. I installed all the drivers and other software for it and have tried about 3 different dvd playing app and none of them work. However under linux I just opened mplayer and it started playing and no I did not have to compile anything. I am using a debian system and it all just worked the first time.
Sometimes windows does not just work and it can be a royal hell hole to get it working. I also have multiple monitors and under linux it works without problem. I was even able to get XFree ot write the config file for me and it worked fine. However under linux sometimes when it boots up it decides for some reason I don't know that one of the cards or monitors does not need to be used for multiple monitors anymore. The only way I have found to fix the problem is format and reinstall since removing the drivers and reinstalling doesn't work. I have NEVER had to reinstall this debian box which has been running sid for about 2-3 years now and getting upgrades every day for software on it.
Even stuff does not magically always work on a mac. I did tech support long enough to know that low end computers are basically crap. The parts are badly built, the power supplies suck, they don't follow specs etc. When you buy server grade components you install stuff and it just works because that is what you where paying for. Compare how easy it is to get some no name scsi card you picked up at compusa for $40 working comapred to the $500 adaptec scsi card which has support for damned near every os for which the hardware is compatible. Cheap hardware is a problem all over.
Considering you could get a $50 ati or matrox card and it would run faster then the geforce it seems you can come out a lot cheaper then the commercial os. Also I have had no end of stability problems with nvidia hardware which I don't get with matrox and only occasionally with ati. Stability is worth a fair bit to me.
For your 4th point I can do this with python already. I just write my apps and they will run on any arch that python supports. So far it has worked without a problem. It seems to me that cross platform, different bit sizes, etc has already been solved in what I would argue is a better way. Also I don't have buffer overflows in python either.
XML Gui devel can already be done for qt and kde stuff. qtDesigner will make .ui files which are xml files or at least can be. That has been around for a few years now.
For the DB stuff I would prefer to use an OODB instead of a relational DB. I do a lot of work with zope and I don't see much in winfs that impresses me.
As far as communication at some point look at twisted python. It is an amazing network framework and I have seen nothing else that is close. I have not heard a whole lot about indigo but twisted could probably give microsoft a run for their money.
So what it comes down to is if you want to remark that an application is slow then you had better profile it to be sure it is the app that is slow. I see that all the time in too many different areas. I have seen apps rewritten in C from python because they where too slow. Only to have them run at the same speed because of a brain dead algorithm or because they where spending their time waiting on disk io, network, db results etc.
Overall programmers need to do less guesswork and actually profile the damn apps to figure out where ths speed problems are. The odds of you being right on where speed problems are based on various stupies is insanely low. Programmers almost NEVER guess right about where speed problems are. What is funny is that a profiler can tell you exactly where it is that you can make the largest impact on the running speed of your program.
For what I do XFree is more responsive then windows 2000 is by a lot. Athlon xp 2000, 1G of ram and 3 vid cards (2 ati, 1 matrox). Also as others have pointed out X has no user interface it is a protcol. KDE and gnome are user interaces and both of them have gotten a lot more consistent. I push my system a lot and windows is not even as close to responsive as this system is running XFree and kde.
Hmm from what I have seen the nvidia cards have very poor support for hardware accelerated render extension support. However ati and matrox cards do have good support. You problem could be that because of your chosen card the system is doing stuff in software that should be done in hardware. Also remember this is supposedy from a company that is supporting of free software with its closed driver. While those that are supposedly not supporting it have faster drivers for the 2d work which is most of what people do on their boxes.
Also some of it is kde/gnome etc. I know in kde cvs a new kwin was recently merged which fixed a lot of speed issues.
When comparing windows and linux I try to compare them doing the same things. On windows when I open up 30 programs and start running my db tests the windows do no update smoothly anymore, stuff starts to crash etc on w2k. However on lnux the gui gets a little slower but nothing like how much slower windows gets. Windows seems to work fine for running one app at a time but if you run a lot of apps you see how the system really bogs down.
I have been using Kdevelop 3(CVS) and it is a huge improvement over Kdevelop 2. They may not have gone far enough yet but they are making huge strides forward very quickly. You should go to kdevelop.org and look around. Also there is a program in kde cvs that allows you to drag and drop kparts together and then use some code to hook the items together that don't hook together but I don't remember what it is called. Give it some more time and the tools will easily be where they need. Overall I have been using Kdevelop 3 since pretty much the beginning of the cvs cycle for it and have watched it progress and it is very nice to use.
I develop python apps for zope and it has very good python support at least it covers what I need it for right now and continues to add a lot of new features that are useful.
That is wrong. Python has a cyclic GC system in addition to reference counts. The reference count system is just a lot simpler overall and a good deal faster and more predictable then a lot of other GC systems are. So use the simplest system for the most common case and have another system to have other kinds of cases.
I have not found any way to create a leak in python so far and have been doing it for years however I have made a mistake that caused it to allocate enough memory that the linux OOM system killed it. I kept increasing the size of a list I was iterating over so it could never stop iterating. However I don't think that is a memory leak and it was trivial to fix.
http://www.jython.org/ That is python on the jvm
Actually there is. http://incoming.debian.org Whenever there is a security exploit the odds are the fix is already in incoming right away. Otherwise that should go into sid in about 6 hours I think.
e b
For i386 the exact link is http://incoming.debian.org/ssh_3.6.1p2-6.0_i386.d
Actually I like using koffice and don't use openoffice at all. It loads far faster then openoffice does and also is vastly more responsive and it uses the io slaves system that all kde apps use which makes it more usable for me. I don't care at all about compatibility with ms formats and it works very well. The current version can even import pdf files for editing and it does a darn good job of it. If you want ms compat that is much improved in the cvs version along with many other improvements.
Open kpackage on any debian based system. Click on the app(s) you want and tell it to install and it will find other needed stuff for you and do it.
Use Yast2, up2date, urpmi etc and they will all do something very similar. Overall newbies do not need to b downloading items manually to install stuff.
Packages made by those dists also install into the correct menus so that should not be an issue.
If you really want a super simple to install system for users have them use lindows and pay the yearly fee and they can click to install any program online which is just a wrapper for apt-get
I have been helping people in many channels for years and in the vast majority of them if you talk like that you are kicked and banned. I have helped people on #debian-kde, #zope, #python and others. That may be an interesting stereotype behavior but in most places it is not tolerated at all. I mostly am on irc.freenode.net
Hmm it seems to me that zope does both of those things. ZEO gives you clustering and at 10 million requests per day that is about 115 request/s which is easily doable.
Is there any OSS system with automated patching that people are willing to trust?
Debian Stable
I find this comment really strange. I find mozilla is slow to load under linux but what is really strange is that konqueror is VERY fast to load especially kde cvs head which has some of the safarri improvements. Actually on this box (athlon xp 2000 with 1G of ram) konqueror loads faster then IE 6.0 does under w2k. On this box I have almost no lag between starting konqueror and having it appear for the first time but IE takes 1-1.5 seconds to launch. Overall while I like mozilla it is a pig and the reason it takes so long to load is not that IE is preloaded. I find that mozilla takes 4-5 times the memory to use that konqueror or opera do. Also I would note that opera is not part of the linux kernel or preloaded in any way and it also loads FAR faster then mozilla does.
I have to admit I think what AOL is doing is correct and slashdot does not speak with one voice. Hell from my point of view block all of them but don't just block it for AOL find a way to keep it from being sent to help the entire world. I have no problem with blocking spam even if you catch some real email in it unintentionally. I get thousands of messages a day and if I lose 5% of my real messages to wipe out 95% of the spam then that is something I am willing to do. Spam just costs way too much to deal with.
junkbuster and/or squid should do the job. I know they both work on unixes at least I have not looked for windows based systems.
WebWasher is a horrible program that should be pulled from the market for dramatically violating the various specs associated with being a proxy. I emailed a problem report to them about a year ago where if you have . : and / in a form name their software freaks out and floods a server with as many submissions of the form/sec as it can. They had replied with no interest in fixing it even though it is the only proxy I have EVER seen with that kind of behavior and even though those characters in form names are perfectly valid and work with every browser I have seen.
I pretty much consider WebWasher to be a DOS tool that I take measures to prevent it from acessing a site and giving people an error message to turn it off. However from what I have seen the usage of WebWasher is damn near non existant. Maybe 1 in a few million people at most.
I have an sblive and I don't notice problems with any apps. I think it is 16 or 32 devices that can open /dev/dsp without any problems. So with a card like that you can have artsd running, open apps that talk to the sound card directly, run games etc and it doesn't have any errors. It has a hardware mixer for that.
I REALLY like how well it works. You just run apps and the hardware does its job. It seems to me that all of these sound mixers we have now are just to provide software solutions to a hardware problem. I would like to see some software layer written like arts that both gnome and kde could use that would dump directly to the sound card to do the work if possible and if not then it could mix it itself that way we have a standard interface that all apps can use and don't waste hardware that can do the job.
a=a is used in some languages when you are working with an object persistence system to signify a change to a mutable object so that it gets saved to the db. With ZODB for example if you make a change to a mutable object like a list, dictionary etc you can assign the object back to itself and the persistence system will save that object or you could do self._p_changed=1. Other OODB systems have similar types of persistence signaling.