I'm going to reveal myself as one of the crusty curmudgeons this article is talking about. What user interface could possibly be simpler than the one for grep or for tar, for example? Of course you don't know what all those fiddly little gibberinsh switches mean right away, but all of the documentation is right there in "man grep" or "man tar." User interface? There is only the command line, standard in, and standard out.
A lot of this BS about unusability is because people are assuming GUIs are intuitive. I don't see that at all. How the hell would I know that "Exit" is under "File" and that it means to end the program unless I was already immersed in the model? I wouldn't! And who the hell would think that they shut down their OS by clicking "Start" first?
People are afraid of the command line because it IS NOT WHAT THEY ARE CONDITIONED TO USE.
None of this invalidates the article's point, however, which is that the best way to introduce a Windows user to Linux is NOT to sit them down and have them type in a terrifying "find -exec perl -e blah blah \; | less" command line, even if that really is the fastest solution.
The biggest hurdle isn't even that it is different; it is getting people to understand that it CAN be different, and that different can be better.
FWIW, I don't care if a single Windows user comes to Linux (well, I do care, but not that much). Linux meets all my needs and I can interoperate where I need to.
Re:Failure has as many parents as success...
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Software Aesthetics
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If you have written code as part of a large development team, you have seen innumerable cases where poiter work that should be easy turns out to be severly error prone. Your interface specifies a pointer to char pointer, but someone passes you a two-dimensional char array. That pass comes through multiple function calls before it gets to you. The program segfaults and, unlike in java, you don't get a stack trace. Find it. This will take you a while.
Admittedly, C++ is better about this since you can const things and use references (which are a bit clearer than pointers), but not all C++ programmers know these things. Here, C++ backward C compatibility hurts a lot.
It is certainly untrue that one has pointer problems only in optomize code.!
There are quite a few tools to help with these problems; malloc replacements, stack guard libs, etc., but their use is scattershot and sporadic; not all compilers have such libraries available; not all shops believe in them.
Failure has as many parents as success...
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Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 2
It is a popular saying that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. This is true as a parable, but not in fact. Failure, in fact, has many parents.
One of them is economic. Quite apart from catastrophic civil engineering failures that result in injury, death, and vast property loss, there are innumerable engineering failures that merely have a steep price. When Ford designs an automobile and do not discover until production that the bolt holes on the block do not match up with the bolt holes on the transaxle, millions of dollars have already been spent tooling up the incorrect production lines. Millions more will have to be spent to correct the problem, not to mention the amount of inventory built prior to discovering the mistake. Since such errors are so costly, there is a strong economic incentive to avoid them. This is a cost far smaller than the collapse of the pedestrian bridge in the Vegas Hyatt, or than the collapse of the Tacoma-Narrows bridge, but it is a cost that can feel that heavy when the production engineering team has to explain things to the board of directors.
While failure in software can indeed have high costs, it is realy on the level of cost even of the automotive example I use above. The plain truth is that there are bugs that it is simply not worth it to catch before the software ships.
The virtual nature of software makes this an inescapable fact. If you want to see our economy screech to halt, require zero software defects.
Consider as a comparison those places where software failure is roughly equal in consequence to mechanical failure, such as in implanted medical devices, or in launching manned spacecraft, or even in our (USA) overtaxed Air Traffic Control system. In these places, change control is every bit as rigorous as in the design process of civil engineering projects.
Most software is bad because, frankly, most of it doesn't have to be that good and it would cost too much to make it that good. This is not to say that excellence should not be sought, nor to say that developers should not constantly be seeking new ways to improve software design and development, but, believe it or not, we actually do know how to make software with zero defects. Most developers and businesses are not willing to work within the controls that ensure this, or pay the price in slower development and longer time-to-market.
In the long run, I think Free Software is the way to improve the quality of those applications (such as Operating Systems) that must indeed approach zero defects, since barring extremely rigid development methodologies that center around exhaustive code coverage and expected outcomes testing (test, design, code methods) coupled with a rigid system of change control and code review, we will never see zero defects.
As a counter-example I would offer anecdotes from my own experience. One would be the dramatic improvements is error rates and development time I have seen by merely switching from a very fine, but bug prone language (C++) to Java. This is not the only reason to choose a language, but it is s good one. I am just finishing the development of a production floor control system in Java that took a team of six a mere six months to build with a near zero defect rate that would have (in my estimation, admittedly) taken 2 years in C++ and would likely have a number of latent pointer/reference errors that are difficult to discover and even more difficult to locate.
So appropriate technology may be a more important predictor than methodology.
Well, I'm really running on at length, but in my career I have seen the exhortation "we must do better" again and again, and very little changes because quality is expensive, and few people, if any, want to pay the price of quality software.
Again, I say Free Software is your best bet, since you get much greater manpower on the code for "free" than anyone could afford to pay for...
Although I find it odd to be defending MS ('cos I really hate 'em!), I have to say "So what?"
Seriously, would you want the right of appeal to the Supreme Court taken away from anyone, any time, for any reason? Microsoft's move may be tactical and selfish, but the move is a legal right, and one I would not see denied for any reason, including the righteous suffering of the evil empire! Ahem. I mean, including the restraint of a monopolist.
The Supreme Court is unlikely to do anything about this. They are unlikely to overturn Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law made by a federal judge and upheld by a circuit court of appeals. They are unlikely to agree to hear the case. This is more a holding action designed to make the whole process as slow as possible.
It will go to the Federal Circuit Court again, to the Appeals Court, and on back to the Supreme Court at least one more time before things are done. Microsoft needs to give the Supreme Court a reversible error or Constitutional issue before the Supreme Court will agree to hear it.
It is interesting (if you are into legal wrangling), but hardly an important story. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, THEN it is news!
It wasn't THAT backwards. IT was written as an expression:
A> pip b:=a:*.*
That copied all the files on drive A to drive B.
Just like good old BASIC's LET A=B set variable A to be equal to B. FWIW, it is true that many of the lamest things in MS OSes date back to CP/M. Drive letters instead of mount points, ^Z for EOF, CR/LF instead of newline, and so on. Even the infamous DOS PSP (program segment prefix) is practically a byte-for-byte clone of the CP/M base page (did you know you could make DOS calls from a small-model DOS program by doing a CALL 0x0005 instead of an INT 0x21? That's how you called CP/M.) For all I know, the old "FCB-style" file system calls still work in NT's command-line window! (The FCB stands for File Control Block. CP/M didn't use file handles. Instead the OS filled in a structure in the application's memory with all the data neede to access an open file. The real downside of FCBs was they were never made able to work with heirarchical directories).
All of these "klunky" designs of CP/M make a lot of sense when you realize that CP/M had to be able to run on a machine with only 16k of memory and still had to leave room for an application program that could do something useful.
MS-DOS has little excuse (with its ability to address 1M - barring IBM's goofy BIOS placement that limited it to 640k), and Windows 32-bit has no excuse whatsoever.
Of course, when I say I no longer use Windows, I mean I will never upgrade again. Since I mention my use of Windows 95, 98, and 2000 after saying "I no longer use Windows," I thought I should clarify...
Since I no longer use Windows, I spend more on Linux by definition. I don't think this is the question. I think the question is how much would you have had to spend on Windows to get the equivalent functionality to that you are getting from Linux?
I have both download.iso files and curned CDs of Linux and purchased cheap CDs from CheapBytes/LinuxCentral/LinuxMall repeatedly. I also recently sprang for my first fully commerical version (SuSe 7.2 "Professional") because I like SuSE 2nd best (behind Debian), but SuSE does great hardware detection -- useful when installing on other people's hardware.
I have six machines and a laptop at home, all running Linux (okay, one FreeBSD machine in the name being ecumenical).
Two of those machines dual-boot: one to Windows95. One to Windows98. On my laptop I have VMWare (come on, Plex86!) and I have Windows2000 Workstation running under it (because I'm consultant and sometimes you work for people who force you into that sort of thing).
Now, if I had to run IIS, 2000, SQLServer on my home network instead of Apache/Linux/PostgreSQL, I would have paid and be paying a lot more.
Maybe I upgrade my Linux more often than I would Windows, but that's BECAUSE Windows costs a lot, not because Linux is more expensive!
All of this is anecdotal and doesn't prove a thing about TCO. But my point is, who cares about a lower TCO if you hate the product? Liver has a lower TCO than Filet Mignon, but that doesn't mean I want liver every night!
Not to pick nits, but if you are using asynch serial protocols (which you are), your theoretical maximum is 56k/10 (8 databits, 1 start bit, 1 stop bit), or 5.6k.
Realisitically, since we are talking about IP, you also have to figure at least 20 bytes IP datagram overhead per MTU, so lower yet, etc., etc. Once you add in these mandatory minimum overhead elements (you should add a UDP datagram header as another minimum), you'll get a number a lot smaller than 7k for a theoretical maximum throughput.
Sorry again. It is definitely from "My Fair Lady." Sound of Music has a completely different writing team ("I Could Have Danced All Night" is by Lerner and Lowe, and "Sound of Music" is by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Julie Andrews did play Eliza Doolittle on Broadway. Audrey Hepburn played her in the film. Rex Harrison played Higgins in both. Oddly enough, Eliza's singing in the movie was done neither by Ms. Hepburn nor by Ms. Andrews. It was a woman named Marnie Nixon, who also sang for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I."
If by this you men the episode where Catherine convinces Bill to use a bunch of ridiculously fake "street-talk" in his racially offensive malt-liquor commercials, then no. This is not that episode, although this episode does reference that episode. Catherine tells Bill: "Wazzup, y'all" is seriously dated and that today's cool street people greet one another "Gazziza!" In the "Space" episode, Bill and Catherine greet one another: "Gazziza, Bill." "Gazizza, Catherine." Also very funny...
Anyone know all the words to Bill's "misinformed" Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor ad? I remember it was hilarious. It had a line like "It has the zazzapy gazmossis that will keep your feet stinkin' all night long" or something like that. The mix of badly phony "hip" words with absurd variants of real "street" reinterpretations (think "keep your feet stinkin'" as being like "down with that," or "you bad") was just plain hilarious...
I immediately thought of the Newsradio "Space" episode. Joe is thawed out in the far future and immediately asks who won the World Series since he went into hibernation. I forget the exact words, but it was something like "In 2021 it was the Yankees, 2022 the Braves, 2023 the Robots, '24 the Robots, Robots, Robots...."
Message from those of us who were alive when BG first came out: The "movie" did not come before the television series. The movie was a re-edited version of the TV pilot episode. It was a desperate attempt to make some money on a (financial) flop series.
Buck Rogers, on the other hand, came out as a movie first (because they decided it would make more money). It was a TV pilot that was shown as movie first. BG was a TV pilot that came out as a movie after the first series was cancelled. It made enough money that the abysmal Galactica 1980 got the green light.
I'm sure people made this observation when this story was posted the other day, but which license is restrictive and viral? The one that says "you can put any software on the machine with me" or the one that says "if you use me, you can't use this entire class of software?"
Shouldn't this set off big red flashing lights at the DoJ?
1) Try doing this with Windows on an unformatted hard drive. Not easy, is it? Could it be that Microsoft's control of the OEM channel is the source of their leg up? Nah, that couldn't be it.
2) "Reverting" to the command line? It's not like this is hard. Also, take a look at your command prompt on Windows 2000: You'll find the same utilities. SuSE's yast2 gives you GUI setup of setting up a modem, network card, and (something Windows doesn't offer out of the box) packet-filtering NAT firewall that is every bit as easy as anything in Windows (othe distros offer similar tools, but SuSE's is the best one for the willfully ignorant)
3) What, exactly, is an "internet font?" If, by this, you mean TrueType fonts, yes, if you have an older distribution, you'll have a hard time getting this going if you aren't an expert in XFree86. Newer distros have a TrueType font server up by default. Knowing where to download things is some fairly basic system knowledge. Just because IE knows where to put things by their file extension (and not by MIME type as it should, by the way), I would not lay claim to superior technology. I'll grant you an ease-of-use point here over Linux, but how much easier is this than an ATM machine, a TiVo, or a PalmPilot?
4) This is the old "there's no software for it" canard. Is it possible that games are written for Windows and not for Linux because you cannot buy a PC without Windows preinstalled? Could it be that Microsoft's control of the OEM channel gives them a leg up here? You can't have commercial software without a market and you can't have a market without commercial software. Catch-22. Note, however, that this argument has moved from enterprise software to office software, and now it is pretty much only games you can point at.
5) What a shock! An open source operating system can't play closed proprietary media formats created to be deliberately incomaptible with common, open formats! BTW, you can get a realplayer Netscape plugin for Linux. It is a version behind, but it is there. Most of the codecs out there have Linyux versions. I'll definitely give you another ease-of-use point here, but not a "doesn't have."
6) Here I have to concede that it is MUCH better to have no idea what files are on your system, where they are, what their interdependecies are, what they do, or what will break if a second or third product you install saves a different version of one of these mysterious files on to your system. Definitely MUCH better. Anyone who has used Windows for more than running MSOffice has been in "DLL hell." I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this.
It all boils down to choice, you see. If you want to use Windows, hooray! More power to you. Enjoy. Microsoft hatred (at least amongst those informed on the subject) doesn't come from their products. It comes from their ability to force their products on all PC users, whether they want them or not. Windows2000 is a good (if bloated) PC OS. Use it in good health. Just don't call me names because I don't want to use it and I don't have the problems you have with the product I want to use.
Before you assign me an excrementary mantle, check your own scalp for colonic by-products. Also remember that it costs nothing to be polite.
Can you give me some citation of the "pundits" of whom you speak? Do you think the average pimply-faced teenager on/. is a pundit?
I fail to see how one can infer the diminution of Free Software just because some hot and bothered enthusiasts engage in a little self-congratulation.
And even if such "pundits" exist, which I doubt, why should you give them any more credibility than say John "Java: A Born Loser" Dvorak?
I'm also curious why you feel compelled to tell us all how stupid us li'l chilluns is being? Why don't you just dismiss such fools and walk away? Are you hoping to "save" a few "fanatics?"
I'm afraid there are millions (well, tens of thousands) of selfless programmers, however the fact that you put it this way shows that you just plain do not get it: Writing Free Software is not a selfless act! It is about receiving payment in kind. It is about the idea that "devil take the hindmost" is not the philosophy that maximizes the individual good. It is about taking a longer view of benefit. It is about understanding that when everyone gives, you receive. It is not about some sort of selflessness. Quite the reverse. It is about receiving payment in-kind.
What, precisely, can you do with Windows that you cannot with Linux? Also, what, precisely does Microsoft offer above trivial services like HTTP that Linux does not? I can't think of a single one. Sure you can say "DCOM, ASP," but these are just proprietary implementations of techniques first developed on Unix systems.
Microsoft enjoys their dominant position primarily from their control of the marketing channel, not from innovation. I share with you your belief that Linux is unlikely to dislodge Microsoft's stranglehold, but I think this is due to their continuing control of the channel, and to the sheer inertia of the marketplace.
Do not underestimate the power of price and the power of mindshare, however. Linux and various other Free and Open Source Software are the basis of a great deal of IT/CS education these days.
Sure, there are overzealous advocates. Sure there are snobs and elitists. So what? Who cares? At this point there is only one piece of software for which I haven't an adequate Linux replacement. I use Linux for everything else. Not from a religious zealotry, but because it does everything I need. It gives me a multi-user network server OS, perl, C, C++, Java, Python, fortran, and Lisp development enviornment and tools, Web servers, file and print, encryption, multi-use transactional database, word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, web browsing, you name it. How much did it cost me? $0.00 (okay, I bought a cheapbytes disc, so it was more like $4.95). Now why would I write Free Software? Because I got all that.
Don't tar me with the overbroad brush you are using. I'm an experienced IT professional with over a decade in the business, and, as far as I am concerned, Microsoft is dead. On the other hand, since my career has involved real enterprise scale systems in insurance, finance, healthcare, and government, Microsoft was never really alive. The only serious thing I have seen it used for is file and print. I know some people do a lot more, but I think it is just as foolish as using Linux (on x86 PCs) would be. Linux on other architectures, now...
I used to do it with a find within a find and a sed command, but the perl trick is a very nice shortcut, esp. since it edits the files in place and leaves backups behind!
Okay, now take a set of 15,000 web pages under a web server on Windows. Replace all "A" tags that refer to "url1" with "A" tags that refer to "url2" in all 15,000 pages.
How easy is this in Windows? I can do this with one command line in Linux (and any other *nix for that matter). Yes, I have to know REs to do it. Yes, it took me several hours to learn the RE expression syntax and several weeks of using them to make them second nature to me, but now I can do tasks like these in a matter of minutes. With ANY Windows system this would take several weeks.
"Useability" is a slippery term. Also, while Microsoft products do meet a certain level of minimum useability, there is a equal amount of crappy software from third-parties out there that are every bit as "unusable" as the hobbyist stuff for Linux.
And just how "useable" is, for example, MS Office? Sure enough, retarted monkeys can do the basics, but I would bet you 2:1 that 90% of Word users only acheieve 40% code coverage of Word -- in other words, if you start digging into everything Word is every bit as obtuse and difficult as state of the art 1970 glass teletype editors. More difficult, I would argue, because you could learn everything there was to know about those "unusable" editors in about two hours. Of course, you couldn't make a marketing brochure with those editors (unless you wanted to go out of business), but my point is that "useability" is pretty danged meaningless. "Suitability" is more to the point. Word is lousy if you want to do accounting.
Microsoft has actually substantially held back the increasing useability of systems by kepping the PC the dominant platform. Most people do not need general purpose computing devices. Home users need an "appliance" that does Web, e-mail, instant messaging, personal finance, word processing and maybe a spreadsheet. Business users need that plus presentation software, calendar/scheduling etc. These devices could be "embedded" type devices (think the Palm metaphor) that are much easier to use than PCs. Why should ANYONE but the very few who need more need to know about clock speeds, RAM size, ISA/EISA/PCI, irqs, USB, etc.?
The claim that Microsoft has advanced useability is absurd. They have been struggling against their own monopoly platform for over a decade, not because of their own failure, but because of the inappropriate design of the platform for its present use.
I will certainly grant that one must know a lot more to make good use of Linux on PC than to make good use of Windows on a PC. But which is easier to use, a Palm Pilot or a Windows PC? A TiVo or a windows PC? A Nintendo or a Windows PC?
Continuing my tradition of replying to my own posts, I will add that if they make their "database distro" or whatever it is REQUIRE RedHat Linux, then they are a) retarded, b) evil, and 3) going to fail.
The article is way to non-specific to judge what RedHat is doing. If they took one of the solid Open Source databases (I would say PostgreSQL because it presently has features needed for transactional "enterprise class" multi-user databases that MySQL lacks, at least in the last version I used -- I know the developers were talking about adding these features -- such as multi-op transactions, record versioning (for non-blocking transactions) and so on) and, in essence, built a "distribution" that included all the tools folks would want around it (ODBC/JDBC stuff, admin tools, GUI tools a la Oracle Designer), and so long as they continue their habit of making the tools they roll themselves GPL'ed, I say, "What a great idea!" BTW, I'm not saying what the world needs is a Designer-like tool for PostgreSQL, but there are "softies" in the DBA world, just like there are "MSofties" in the programming and sysadmin world. Why not make a buck by giving them what they want? Heck, that's what RedHat's success is based on! They didn't write Linux (okay, so Alan Cox has been working for them for a long time, so one might say they did a lot of good; they also did the abomination that is RPM [flame on!]), but they have built a business out of selling it.
A really good packaging of PostgreSQL with lots of nifty doodads like those the "big boys" sell with their DB engines would be a good product to have.
To me, the whole Linux thing is about freedom. I can always roll my own if I want to or have to, but 95% of the time, I'd rather re-use someone else rolled-up DB environment. So long as they stick with their GPL tradition, I think this is a great idea.
Mind you, this is a vast pile of speculation based on a mere atom of fact. Not that I've ever let that stop me before...
Of course they do. That was my point. I was just trying to say that if you have 1.5 Mbit bandwidth, it doesn't matter if Apache is slower than IIS or Tux/Apache or anything else. Your Apache is going to serve up enough to saturate your channel before you are constrained by any other resource.
People get so hung up on "speed" when it simply is not and should not be a factor. Don't kid yourself. I have worked for people who switched to IIS from Apache because it was "faster." We had a dozen separate web servers each serving up a different department's intranet content, all joined to the rest of the enterprise by a T1. There might have been good reason to switch (although I don' think so), but speed was a lousy one. Each box could saturate the the T1, even the one that was doing perl CGIs full time, without maxing any other resource. That's the point.
Also I was well aware that databases are frequently on separate servers from the web. I've worked on clustered database servers that have a dozen "servers" providing one database to hundreds of web servers. I'm just saying that this scale is a relatively small population. There are probably fewer than 5000 such sites in the world (Caution! That figure was pulled directly from the terminal end of my alimentary canal and I can't back it up with anything but my fists!;-)
I would add that speed is a selection criterion for only a very small number of sites. Most corporate web servers I've worked on are served by anywhere from xDSL-class to T3 class speeds. Apache on a high-end Lintel box would keep that pipe full without being overloaded. (depending on the complexity of what's being served, of course! A lot of servlets that do 9-table joins in a Sybase database, all on the same box as the web server is quite different from serving only static HTML) So would IIS and Tux, since they both perform better. For that small number of sites (of the slashdot size, perhaps?;-) that have pipes big enough to keep several server farms busy, ten percent less CPU demand can be big $$$ savings.
"Optimization" sounds like it is a single thing, but my "optimal" might be very diffeetn from yours. It is, as always, a cost/benefit question.
What's the cost of losing the tool? In my 15 years of MIS experience I have received virtually no support from a software vendor. The only people from whom I have consistently received support (which varies greatly in quality) are my VARs. I have had one successful support call with Sybase, I've never needed to call on Oracle, I have completely given up on calling Microsoft. No other software vendor has provided me with any direct support. Admittedly, I am hardly an entire organization. In the places I've worked over the last 15 years, good value has been obtained primarily from the VARs who sold the package (from IBM's support of our RS-6000s to DEC's support of our bigger Alpha servers [running HP/UX, to be sure] and Sun's support of our E10000).
VARs provide most of the support. Selecting a good var matters more to me than individual software vendors. I really would rather have the source. Programmer's do cost money. That's why they should be paid to build systems and fix problems, not to sit on hold for many hours only to find that no one on the other end of the phone knows the first thing about their own product.
The support myth is just that. I'll take source over an 800 number any day of the week.
This is the basic issue so many people have with support and open source software--closed, commercial softare provides little enough in the way of guarantees, but open source provides even less in most (but not all) cases.
I couldn't disagree with this more strongly than I do. I've had a number of nifty little closed-source commercial products that I have used, and continue to use, to aid me in software development. I have a set of C documentation tools that I run under DOSEMU on my Linux box to help me cross reference my code. These companies have long since discontinued their products and support for them and there is not one thing I can do about it. So I rely on open source tools (Linux and DOSEMU) to extend their useful life.
If these had been free software (in the FSF sense) I would have had the source code and the option to port them to my more modern operating systems. When you have the source you have a much better support guarantee than you can or will EVER get from a closed source vendor.
Sure, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are going to be around for some time. There is (probably) little risk in selecting them as a vendor. But they do have you on the upgrade treadmill. How many companies that bought into OS/2 (and there are more of them than you think, especially in the banking and insurance sectors) are now abandoning it out of fear that IBM will stop supporting it?
So, while I think a case can be made for the purchase of closed solutions for the "big" "enterprise" system components (OS, database, etc.), it is in the smaller utility and yes, specialty development tool space that I think free software is ALWAYS more supportable. Truth is, I think this open source supportability question extends to the "big ticket" items as well.
So, you use a tool from a small company. It goes under. You've got nothing.
You use a tool from a free software product. The developer abandons it. What do you have? Nothing? Nonsense! You've got the source code and the right to use it. (This is part of why the GPL is so important -- this guarantee of your present and future right to use the code.)
I don't think the AC here meant to make a FUDish statement -- I can se where he/she is coming from, but I still think he/she is DEAD WRONG!
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I'm going to reveal myself as one of the crusty curmudgeons this article is talking about. What user interface could possibly be simpler than the one for grep or for tar, for example? Of course you don't know what all those fiddly little gibberinsh switches mean right away, but all of the documentation is right there in "man grep" or "man tar." User interface? There is only the command line, standard in, and standard out.
A lot of this BS about unusability is because people are assuming GUIs are intuitive. I don't see that at all. How the hell would I know that "Exit" is under "File" and that it means to end the program unless I was already immersed in the model? I wouldn't! And who the hell would think that they shut down their OS by clicking "Start" first?
People are afraid of the command line because it IS NOT WHAT THEY ARE CONDITIONED TO USE.
None of this invalidates the article's point, however, which is that the best way to introduce a Windows user to Linux is NOT to sit them down and have them type in a terrifying "find -exec perl -e blah blah \; | less" command line, even if that really is the fastest solution.
The biggest hurdle isn't even that it is different; it is getting people to understand that it CAN be different, and that different can be better.
FWIW, I don't care if a single Windows user comes to Linux (well, I do care, but not that much). Linux meets all my needs and I can interoperate where I need to.
If you have written code as part of a large development team, you have seen innumerable cases where poiter work that should be easy turns out to be severly error prone. Your interface specifies a pointer to char pointer, but someone passes you a two-dimensional char array. That pass comes through multiple function calls before it gets to you. The program segfaults and, unlike in java, you don't get a stack trace. Find it. This will take you a while.
Admittedly, C++ is better about this since you can const things and use references (which are a bit clearer than pointers), but not all C++ programmers know these things. Here, C++ backward C compatibility hurts a lot.
It is certainly untrue that one has pointer problems only in optomize code.!
There are quite a few tools to help with these problems; malloc replacements, stack guard libs, etc., but their use is scattershot and sporadic; not all compilers have such libraries available; not all shops believe in them.
It is a popular saying that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan. This is true as a parable, but not in fact. Failure, in fact, has many parents.
One of them is economic. Quite apart from catastrophic civil engineering failures that result in injury, death, and vast property loss, there are innumerable engineering failures that merely have a steep price. When Ford designs an automobile and do not discover until production that the bolt holes on the block do not match up with the bolt holes on the transaxle, millions of dollars have already been spent tooling up the incorrect production lines. Millions more will have to be spent to correct the problem, not to mention the amount of inventory built prior to discovering the mistake. Since such errors are so costly, there is a strong economic incentive to avoid them. This is a cost far smaller than the collapse of the pedestrian bridge in the Vegas Hyatt, or than the collapse of the Tacoma-Narrows bridge, but it is a cost that can feel that heavy when the production engineering team has to explain things to the board of directors.
While failure in software can indeed have high costs, it is realy on the level of cost even of the automotive example I use above. The plain truth is that there are bugs that it is simply not worth it to catch before the software ships.
The virtual nature of software makes this an inescapable fact. If you want to see our economy screech to halt, require zero software defects.
Consider as a comparison those places where software failure is roughly equal in consequence to mechanical failure, such as in implanted medical devices, or in launching manned spacecraft, or even in our (USA) overtaxed Air Traffic Control system. In these places, change control is every bit as rigorous as in the design process of civil engineering projects.
Most software is bad because, frankly, most of it doesn't have to be that good and it would cost too much to make it that good. This is not to say that excellence should not be sought, nor to say that developers should not constantly be seeking new ways to improve software design and development, but, believe it or not, we actually do know how to make software with zero defects. Most developers and businesses are not willing to work within the controls that ensure this, or pay the price in slower development and longer time-to-market.
In the long run, I think Free Software is the way to improve the quality of those applications (such as Operating Systems) that must indeed approach zero defects, since barring extremely rigid development methodologies that center around exhaustive code coverage and expected outcomes testing (test, design, code methods) coupled with a rigid system of change control and code review, we will never see zero defects.
As a counter-example I would offer anecdotes from my own experience. One would be the dramatic improvements is error rates and development time I have seen by merely switching from a very fine, but bug prone language (C++) to Java. This is not the only reason to choose a language, but it is s good one. I am just finishing the development of a production floor control system in Java that took a team of six a mere six months to build with a near zero defect rate that would have (in my estimation, admittedly) taken 2 years in C++ and would likely have a number of latent pointer/reference errors that are difficult to discover and even more difficult to locate.
So appropriate technology may be a more important predictor than methodology.
Well, I'm really running on at length, but in my career I have seen the exhortation "we must do better" again and again, and very little changes because quality is expensive, and few people, if any, want to pay the price of quality software.
Again, I say Free Software is your best bet, since you get much greater manpower on the code for "free" than anyone could afford to pay for...
Although I find it odd to be defending MS ('cos I really hate 'em!), I have to say "So what?"
Seriously, would you want the right of appeal to the Supreme Court taken away from anyone, any time, for any reason? Microsoft's move may be tactical and selfish, but the move is a legal right, and one I would not see denied for any reason, including the righteous suffering of the evil empire! Ahem. I mean, including the restraint of a monopolist.
The Supreme Court is unlikely to do anything about this. They are unlikely to overturn Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law made by a federal judge and upheld by a circuit court of appeals. They are unlikely to agree to hear the case. This is more a holding action designed to make the whole process as slow as possible.
It will go to the Federal Circuit Court again, to the Appeals Court, and on back to the Supreme Court at least one more time before things are done. Microsoft needs to give the Supreme Court a reversible error or Constitutional issue before the Supreme Court will agree to hear it.
It is interesting (if you are into legal wrangling), but hardly an important story. If the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, THEN it is news!
It wasn't THAT backwards. IT was written as an expression:
A> pip b:=a:*.*
That copied all the files on drive A to drive B.
Just like good old BASIC's LET A=B set variable A to be equal to B. FWIW, it is true that many of the lamest things in MS OSes date back to CP/M. Drive letters instead of mount points, ^Z for EOF, CR/LF instead of newline, and so on. Even the infamous DOS PSP (program segment prefix) is practically a byte-for-byte clone of the CP/M base page (did you know you could make DOS calls from a small-model DOS program by doing a CALL 0x0005 instead of an INT 0x21? That's how you called CP/M.) For all I know, the old "FCB-style" file system calls still work in NT's command-line window! (The FCB stands for File Control Block. CP/M didn't use file handles. Instead the OS filled in a structure in the application's memory with all the data neede to access an open file. The real downside of FCBs was they were never made able to work with heirarchical directories).
All of these "klunky" designs of CP/M make a lot of sense when you realize that CP/M had to be able to run on a machine with only 16k of memory and still had to leave room for an application program that could do something useful.
MS-DOS has little excuse (with its ability to address 1M - barring IBM's goofy BIOS placement that limited it to 640k), and Windows 32-bit has no excuse whatsoever.
Of course, when I say I no longer use Windows, I mean I will never upgrade again. Since I mention my use of Windows 95, 98, and 2000 after saying "I no longer use Windows," I thought I should clarify...
Since I no longer use Windows, I spend more on Linux by definition. I don't think this is the question. I think the question is how much would you have had to spend on Windows to get the equivalent functionality to that you are getting from Linux?
.iso files and curned CDs of Linux and purchased cheap CDs from CheapBytes/LinuxCentral/LinuxMall repeatedly. I also recently sprang for my first fully commerical version (SuSe 7.2 "Professional") because I like SuSE 2nd best (behind Debian), but SuSE does great hardware detection -- useful when installing on other people's hardware.
I have both download
I have six machines and a laptop at home, all running Linux (okay, one FreeBSD machine in the name being ecumenical).
Two of those machines dual-boot: one to Windows95. One to Windows98. On my laptop I have VMWare (come on, Plex86!) and I have Windows2000 Workstation running under it (because I'm consultant and sometimes you work for people who force you into that sort of thing).
Now, if I had to run IIS, 2000, SQLServer on my home network instead of Apache/Linux/PostgreSQL, I would have paid and be paying a lot more.
Maybe I upgrade my Linux more often than I would Windows, but that's BECAUSE Windows costs a lot, not because Linux is more expensive!
All of this is anecdotal and doesn't prove a thing about TCO. But my point is, who cares about a lower TCO if you hate the product? Liver has a lower TCO than Filet Mignon, but that doesn't mean I want liver every night!
Not to pick nits, but if you are using asynch serial protocols (which you are), your theoretical maximum is 56k/10 (8 databits, 1 start bit, 1 stop bit), or 5.6k.
Realisitically, since we are talking about IP, you also have to figure at least 20 bytes IP datagram overhead per MTU, so lower yet, etc., etc. Once you add in these mandatory minimum overhead elements (you should add a UDP datagram header as another minimum), you'll get a number a lot smaller than 7k for a theoretical maximum throughput.
Sorry again. It is definitely from "My Fair Lady." Sound of Music has a completely different writing team ("I Could Have Danced All Night" is by Lerner and Lowe, and "Sound of Music" is by Rodgers and Hammerstein). Julie Andrews did play Eliza Doolittle on Broadway. Audrey Hepburn played her in the film. Rex Harrison played Higgins in both. Oddly enough, Eliza's singing in the movie was done neither by Ms. Hepburn nor by Ms. Andrews. It was a woman named Marnie Nixon, who also sang for Deborah Kerr in "The King and I."
If by this you men the episode where Catherine convinces Bill to use a bunch of ridiculously fake "street-talk" in his racially offensive malt-liquor commercials, then no. This is not that episode, although this episode does reference that episode. Catherine tells Bill: "Wazzup, y'all" is seriously dated and that today's cool street people greet one another "Gazziza!" In the "Space" episode, Bill and Catherine greet one another: "Gazziza, Bill." "Gazizza, Catherine." Also very funny...
Anyone know all the words to Bill's "misinformed" Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor ad? I remember it was hilarious. It had a line like "It has the zazzapy gazmossis that will keep your feet stinkin' all night long" or something like that. The mix of badly phony "hip" words with absurd variants of real "street" reinterpretations (think "keep your feet stinkin'" as being like "down with that," or "you bad") was just plain hilarious...
I immediately thought of the Newsradio "Space" episode. Joe is thawed out in the far future and immediately asks who won the World Series since he went into hibernation. I forget the exact words, but it was something like "In 2021 it was the Yankees, 2022 the Braves, 2023 the Robots, '24 the Robots, Robots, Robots...."
Made me laugh...
Message from those of us who were alive when BG first came out: The "movie" did not come before the television series. The movie was a re-edited version of the TV pilot episode. It was a desperate attempt to make some money on a (financial) flop series.
Buck Rogers, on the other hand, came out as a movie first (because they decided it would make more money). It was a TV pilot that was shown as movie first. BG was a TV pilot that came out as a movie after the first series was cancelled. It made enough money that the abysmal Galactica 1980 got the green light.
I'm sure people made this observation when this story was posted the other day, but which license is restrictive and viral? The one that says "you can put any software on the machine with me" or the one that says "if you use me, you can't use this entire class of software?"
Shouldn't this set off big red flashing lights at the DoJ?
Point by point:
1) Try doing this with Windows on an unformatted hard drive. Not easy, is it? Could it be that Microsoft's control of the OEM channel is the source of their leg up? Nah, that couldn't be it.
2) "Reverting" to the command line? It's not like this is hard. Also, take a look at your command prompt on Windows 2000: You'll find the same utilities. SuSE's yast2 gives you GUI setup of setting up a modem, network card, and (something Windows doesn't offer out of the box) packet-filtering NAT firewall that is every bit as easy as anything in Windows (othe distros offer similar tools, but SuSE's is the best one for the willfully ignorant)
3) What, exactly, is an "internet font?" If, by this, you mean TrueType fonts, yes, if you have an older distribution, you'll have a hard time getting this going if you aren't an expert in XFree86. Newer distros have a TrueType font server up by default. Knowing where to download things is some fairly basic system knowledge. Just because IE knows where to put things by their file extension (and not by MIME type as it should, by the way), I would not lay claim to superior technology. I'll grant you an ease-of-use point here over Linux, but how much easier is this than an ATM machine, a TiVo, or a PalmPilot?
4) This is the old "there's no software for it" canard. Is it possible that games are written for Windows and not for Linux because you cannot buy a PC without Windows preinstalled? Could it be that Microsoft's control of the OEM channel gives them a leg up here? You can't have commercial software without a market and you can't have a market without commercial software. Catch-22. Note, however, that this argument has moved from enterprise software to office software, and now it is pretty much only games you can point at.
5) What a shock! An open source operating system can't play closed proprietary media formats created to be deliberately incomaptible with common, open formats! BTW, you can get a realplayer Netscape plugin for Linux. It is a version behind, but it is there. Most of the codecs out there have Linyux versions. I'll definitely give you another ease-of-use point here, but not a "doesn't have."
6) Here I have to concede that it is MUCH better to have no idea what files are on your system, where they are, what their interdependecies are, what they do, or what will break if a second or third product you install saves a different version of one of these mysterious files on to your system. Definitely MUCH better. Anyone who has used Windows for more than running MSOffice has been in "DLL hell." I'm sorry, but I just don't buy this.
It all boils down to choice, you see. If you want to use Windows, hooray! More power to you. Enjoy. Microsoft hatred (at least amongst those informed on the subject) doesn't come from their products. It comes from their ability to force their products on all PC users, whether they want them or not. Windows2000 is a good (if bloated) PC OS. Use it in good health. Just don't call me names because I don't want to use it and I don't have the problems you have with the product I want to use.
Before you assign me an excrementary mantle, check your own scalp for colonic by-products. Also remember that it costs nothing to be polite.
Can you give me some citation of the "pundits" of whom you speak? Do you think the average pimply-faced teenager on /. is a pundit?
I fail to see how one can infer the diminution of Free Software just because some hot and bothered enthusiasts engage in a little self-congratulation.
And even if such "pundits" exist, which I doubt, why should you give them any more credibility than say John "Java: A Born Loser" Dvorak?
I'm also curious why you feel compelled to tell us all how stupid us li'l chilluns is being? Why don't you just dismiss such fools and walk away? Are you hoping to "save" a few "fanatics?"
I'm afraid there are millions (well, tens of thousands) of selfless programmers, however the fact that you put it this way shows that you just plain do not get it: Writing Free Software is not a selfless act! It is about receiving payment in kind. It is about the idea that "devil take the hindmost" is not the philosophy that maximizes the individual good. It is about taking a longer view of benefit. It is about understanding that when everyone gives, you receive. It is not about some sort of selflessness. Quite the reverse. It is about receiving payment in-kind.
What, precisely, can you do with Windows that you cannot with Linux? Also, what, precisely does Microsoft offer above trivial services like HTTP that Linux does not? I can't think of a single one. Sure you can say "DCOM, ASP," but these are just proprietary implementations of techniques first developed on Unix systems.
Microsoft enjoys their dominant position primarily from their control of the marketing channel, not from innovation. I share with you your belief that Linux is unlikely to dislodge Microsoft's stranglehold, but I think this is due to their continuing control of the channel, and to the sheer inertia of the marketplace.
Do not underestimate the power of price and the power of mindshare, however. Linux and various other Free and Open Source Software are the basis of a great deal of IT/CS education these days.
Sure, there are overzealous advocates. Sure there are snobs and elitists. So what? Who cares? At this point there is only one piece of software for which I haven't an adequate Linux replacement. I use Linux for everything else. Not from a religious zealotry, but because it does everything I need. It gives me a multi-user network server OS, perl, C, C++, Java, Python, fortran, and Lisp development enviornment and tools, Web servers, file and print, encryption, multi-use transactional database, word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, web browsing, you name it. How much did it cost me? $0.00 (okay, I bought a cheapbytes disc, so it was more like $4.95). Now why would I write Free Software? Because I got all that.
Don't tar me with the overbroad brush you are using. I'm an experienced IT professional with over a decade in the business, and, as far as I am concerned, Microsoft is dead. On the other hand, since my career has involved real enterprise scale systems in insurance, finance, healthcare, and government, Microsoft was never really alive. The only serious thing I have seen it used for is file and print. I know some people do a lot more, but I think it is just as foolish as using Linux (on x86 PCs) would be. Linux on other architectures, now...
UltraEdit32 comes with Windows, does it? Under a Free Software license? I don't see it on my Windows2000 Professional CD-ROM...
BTW, I agree with the poster who points out that sed is more lightweight. The "all-in-one" nature of the perl trick was more important to me. YMMV.
Oh yes, that one-line command to edit 15,000 web pages?
/server/base/dir -type d -exec perl -e 's/url1/url2/gi' -p -i.bak *.html \;
$ find
I used to do it with a find within a find and a sed command, but the perl trick is a very nice shortcut, esp. since it edits the files in place and leaves backups behind!
Okay, now take a set of 15,000 web pages under a web server on Windows. Replace all "A" tags that refer to "url1" with "A" tags that refer to "url2" in all 15,000 pages.
How easy is this in Windows? I can do this with one command line in Linux (and any other *nix for that matter). Yes, I have to know REs to do it. Yes, it took me several hours to learn the RE expression syntax and several weeks of using them to make them second nature to me, but now I can do tasks like these in a matter of minutes. With ANY Windows system this would take several weeks.
"Useability" is a slippery term. Also, while Microsoft products do meet a certain level of minimum useability, there is a equal amount of crappy software from third-parties out there that are every bit as "unusable" as the hobbyist stuff for Linux.
And just how "useable" is, for example, MS Office? Sure enough, retarted monkeys can do the basics, but I would bet you 2:1 that 90% of Word users only acheieve 40% code coverage of Word -- in other words, if you start digging into everything Word is every bit as obtuse and difficult as state of the art 1970 glass teletype editors. More difficult, I would argue, because you could learn everything there was to know about those "unusable" editors in about two hours. Of course, you couldn't make a marketing brochure with those editors (unless you wanted to go out of business), but my point is that "useability" is pretty danged meaningless. "Suitability" is more to the point. Word is lousy if you want to do accounting.
Microsoft has actually substantially held back the increasing useability of systems by kepping the PC the dominant platform. Most people do not need general purpose computing devices. Home users need an "appliance" that does Web, e-mail, instant messaging, personal finance, word processing and maybe a spreadsheet. Business users need that plus presentation software, calendar/scheduling etc. These devices could be "embedded" type devices (think the Palm metaphor) that are much easier to use than PCs. Why should ANYONE but the very few who need more need to know about clock speeds, RAM size, ISA/EISA/PCI, irqs, USB, etc.?
The claim that Microsoft has advanced useability is absurd. They have been struggling against their own monopoly platform for over a decade, not because of their own failure, but because of the inappropriate design of the platform for its present use.
I will certainly grant that one must know a lot more to make good use of Linux on PC than to make good use of Windows on a PC. But which is easier to use, a Palm Pilot or a Windows PC? A TiVo or a windows PC? A Nintendo or a Windows PC?
Useability my rotund fundament!
Continuing my tradition of replying to my own posts, I will add that if they make their "database distro" or whatever it is REQUIRE RedHat Linux, then they are a) retarded, b) evil, and 3) going to fail.
The article is way to non-specific to judge what RedHat is doing. If they took one of the solid Open Source databases (I would say PostgreSQL because it presently has features needed for transactional "enterprise class" multi-user databases that MySQL lacks, at least in the last version I used -- I know the developers were talking about adding these features -- such as multi-op transactions, record versioning (for non-blocking transactions) and so on) and, in essence, built a "distribution" that included all the tools folks would want around it (ODBC/JDBC stuff, admin tools, GUI tools a la Oracle Designer), and so long as they continue their habit of making the tools they roll themselves GPL'ed, I say, "What a great idea!" BTW, I'm not saying what the world needs is a Designer-like tool for PostgreSQL, but there are "softies" in the DBA world, just like there are "MSofties" in the programming and sysadmin world. Why not make a buck by giving them what they want? Heck, that's what RedHat's success is based on! They didn't write Linux (okay, so Alan Cox has been working for them for a long time, so one might say they did a lot of good; they also did the abomination that is RPM [flame on!]), but they have built a business out of selling it.
A really good packaging of PostgreSQL with lots of nifty doodads like those the "big boys" sell with their DB engines would be a good product to have.
To me, the whole Linux thing is about freedom. I can always roll my own if I want to or have to, but 95% of the time, I'd rather re-use someone else rolled-up DB environment. So long as they stick with their GPL tradition, I think this is a great idea.
Mind you, this is a vast pile of speculation based on a mere atom of fact. Not that I've ever let that stop me before...
Of course they do. That was my point. I was just trying to say that if you have 1.5 Mbit bandwidth, it doesn't matter if Apache is slower than IIS or Tux/Apache or anything else. Your Apache is going to serve up enough to saturate your channel before you are constrained by any other resource.
;-)
People get so hung up on "speed" when it simply is not and should not be a factor. Don't kid yourself. I have worked for people who switched to IIS from Apache because it was "faster." We had a dozen separate web servers each serving up a different department's intranet content, all joined to the rest of the enterprise by a T1. There might have been good reason to switch (although I don' think so), but speed was a lousy one. Each box could saturate the the T1, even the one that was doing perl CGIs full time, without maxing any other resource. That's the point.
Also I was well aware that databases are frequently on separate servers from the web. I've worked on clustered database servers that have a dozen "servers" providing one database to hundreds of web servers. I'm just saying that this scale is a relatively small population. There are probably fewer than 5000 such sites in the world (Caution! That figure was pulled directly from the terminal end of my alimentary canal and I can't back it up with anything but my fists!
I would add that speed is a selection criterion for only a very small number of sites. Most corporate web servers I've worked on are served by anywhere from xDSL-class to T3 class speeds. Apache on a high-end Lintel box would keep that pipe full without being overloaded. (depending on the complexity of what's being served, of course! A lot of servlets that do 9-table joins in a Sybase database, all on the same box as the web server is quite different from serving only static HTML) So would IIS and Tux, since they both perform better. For that small number of sites (of the slashdot size, perhaps? ;-) that have pipes big enough to keep several server farms busy, ten percent less CPU demand can be big $$$ savings.
"Optimization" sounds like it is a single thing, but my "optimal" might be very diffeetn from yours. It is, as always, a cost/benefit question.
What's the cost of losing the tool? In my 15 years of MIS experience I have received virtually no support from a software vendor. The only people from whom I have consistently received support (which varies greatly in quality) are my VARs. I have had one successful support call with Sybase, I've never needed to call on Oracle, I have completely given up on calling Microsoft. No other software vendor has provided me with any direct support. Admittedly, I am hardly an entire organization. In the places I've worked over the last 15 years, good value has been obtained primarily from the VARs who sold the package (from IBM's support of our RS-6000s to DEC's support of our bigger Alpha servers [running HP/UX, to be sure] and Sun's support of our E10000).
VARs provide most of the support. Selecting a good var matters more to me than individual software vendors. I really would rather have the source. Programmer's do cost money. That's why they should be paid to build systems and fix problems, not to sit on hold for many hours only to find that no one on the other end of the phone knows the first thing about their own product.
The support myth is just that. I'll take source over an 800 number any day of the week.
This is the basic issue so many people have with support and open source software--closed, commercial softare provides little enough in the way of guarantees, but open source provides even less in most (but not all) cases.
I couldn't disagree with this more strongly than I do. I've had a number of nifty little closed-source commercial products that I have used, and continue to use, to aid me in software development. I have a set of C documentation tools that I run under DOSEMU on my Linux box to help me cross reference my code. These companies have long since discontinued their products and support for them and there is not one thing I can do about it. So I rely on open source tools (Linux and DOSEMU) to extend their useful life.
If these had been free software (in the FSF sense) I would have had the source code and the option to port them to my more modern operating systems. When you have the source you have a much better support guarantee than you can or will EVER get from a closed source vendor.
Sure, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are going to be around for some time. There is (probably) little risk in selecting them as a vendor. But they do have you on the upgrade treadmill. How many companies that bought into OS/2 (and there are more of them than you think, especially in the banking and insurance sectors) are now abandoning it out of fear that IBM will stop supporting it?
So, while I think a case can be made for the purchase of closed solutions for the "big" "enterprise" system components (OS, database, etc.), it is in the smaller utility and yes, specialty development tool space that I think free software is ALWAYS more supportable. Truth is, I think this open source supportability question extends to the "big ticket" items as well.
So, you use a tool from a small company. It goes under. You've got nothing.
You use a tool from a free software product. The developer abandons it. What do you have? Nothing? Nonsense! You've got the source code and the right to use it. (This is part of why the GPL is so important -- this guarantee of your present and future right to use the code.)
I don't think the AC here meant to make a FUDish statement -- I can se where he/she is coming from, but I still think he/she is DEAD WRONG!