BeOS has a different scheduling system than linux. Because of this, it runs well for applications that require very low latency (i.e. real-time multimedia applications). This does not apply to Quake3 but rather to real time audio and video editing that is usually only done on a commerical scale. As far as pure performance is concerned, a server will be able to serve more content on a linux based system than a BeOS system.
The market for real-time applications is not only quite small but also quite congested (PowerMax, HP-RT, etc.). What the VC people probably liked about BeOS though was the huge amount of money involved in this little niche though. The fact of the matter is though that you will not really enjoy the multimedia on BeOS than say XFree4 with DRI.
I would also have to dispute the statement that if their is water, their has to be air. Almost all planets have some sort of atmosphere. The existance of water has absolutely nothing to do with atmosphere. The chances of their being life currently on Mars (atleast, in the form that we know it) would most likely only be bacterial reemains from a prior time period considering that the equators of Mars only reach a high temp of somewhere around 0C. Without liquid water (which there surely, isn't on Mars), then their is very little chance for life.
I do believe though that out of respect, we shouldn't litter the planet with all sorts of robots and stuff... If there is no other way though, then oh well.
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I am an avid slashdot reader. I get more quality reading material out of slashdot than alot of the magazines I subscribe to (ok, it doesn't beat playboy, but what does...).
I personally have no problem paying a subscription fee.
And to start the flames off, that navbar really really sucks. What a dirty little trick to try to boost revenue at thinkgeek...
Thank you! I was waiting for a post like this... WTF is a software architect??? I swear all these yuppies out they make up fifty bazillion different titles to appease they merger minions and then people are still stupid enough to have a dilemma such as "Oh boohoo, I just went from a Software Engineer to a Software Architect, what do I do know?!? How do I handle it??". Get a friggin life...
There is only one problem with these boots. Most likely, only geeks would use something like this since regular people tend to be techno-phobes. Unless these shoes can charge a laptop battery on a trip to the soda machine, I don't think that most geeks (not all, just most) would walk around enough to charge anything:)
Agreed on all but the last line. Large number of crashes are due to lack of basic memory protection. A process can crash and cause corruption in globally shared kernel memory. This is quite bad in that it will bring down the whole OS when only the process should have died. While working on a debugger, I was even able to put the win kernel in debug mode and set breakpoints in the kernel! Talk about scary, needless to say, the first lesson learned when writing a win debugger is to put a breakpoint before all system calls!!!
Direct hardware access is a problem, but not nearly common enough to cause the amount of crashes that occur in windows. And for all the zealots out there, yes, many factors contribute to windows instability, but I truely thing that most are caused by the page protection (another reason why NT based kernels don't crash nearly as much).
I don't understand all the doom sayers. The economy is fine. The economy is shifting as it does during situations like this. While airlines might be firing people DoD related bussinesses are still hiring. The only people ever really effected are unskilled labors and since they are unskilled, that just means that instead of making $6 looking at bags at an airport, they can make $6 an hour serving fries to all the people busily working on all the new DoD contracts.
I beg to differ. As far as being widely used, I agree that GCC is not a contender, but as far as performance, the cygwin port of GCC performs quite well and often times much better than intel. Just look for some of the GCC benchmark stories on/.
It's very easy to write a compiler to work with a couple snippets of code, but I can give you plenty of C code that many simplistic compilers just can't handle. That is why production quality code is so important to test with, since you tend to flex the powers of a language a bit more.
I also saw some blurb about handling C++. Now, I can not believe that a company can take a C compiler and then throw around some money and get a C++ compiler. C++ is the nasty, most dubious language out there and writing a compiler for it is absolutely painful. What little fairies does your company have that can create these things so easily???
I don't mean to be sarcastic but I think you had to have been looking for this kind of skepticism if you posted here...
I briefly read over their specs on their website and it I find it quite humorous that all of the benchmark code is asm. So essentially, they have an assembler. Now, we have absolutely no idea what level of optimization they used and did not compare benchs with gcc with full optimization. What I would love to see is a comparision between gcc with -03 and they compiler then a comparision between a larger production quality program. I quite frankly can't see the market for this either.
A broad statement but it is true. The internet exists as a portal between individuals. It is in essence a peer to peer network. What two individuals discuss amoungst themselves should almost always be protected.
If two co-workers comment about a 17 year old girl, is that illegal? If they talk about having sex with her is that illegal? Does that mean that "virtual" child pornography is illegal?
Take a look at the definition of virtual too. Does this mean that stories of child pornography are illegal? If so, I point to the above conversation since surely that would also be illegal.
It's a very dangerous area. It's one thing when it is a publicly broadcasted, corporately controlled medium such as TV or radio, but the internet can exists anywhere. What is the technical definition of the internet also? Do these rules also apply to intranets?
The danger of laws like these is not the laws themselves, but rather the precedence the set. Need I speak of "Separate, but equal" as a prime example of an isolated law can be used to commit horrible acts of injustices.
Well shit, I live in New Jersey, there ain't no way I'm leaving my doors unlocked!
A vast majority of machines were not effected by Nimda. It is only machines that were not kept up to date. A company that builds cars can not say, "Sorry you died in that accident, we had followed most of the recommended safety steps."
It's like having a 10 foot high electric fence with dogs running through the yard but then a step of stairs over the fence and past the dogs. All those steps don't do you any good if you don't take the fundamental security steps.
I know it's a pain, but that's because of the way windows is designed.
Absolutely! Try any enterprise OS such as Solarios, HP-UX, PowerMax, etc.
My company uses HP-UX and you better believe if we find a bug in the OS that is interupting software development, they are responsible to fix it.
Linux and FreeBSD are free! That is why there is no responsibility. They are community projects. If you really were posed to lose a lot of money and your admins were that inept then I wouldn't recommended either of those either.
It is also not necessarly a felony offense because even though the net damage could have been $25k, you would only be able to claim what would have been reasonable damage.
If I build a house and balance it on a tooth pick, then if someone knocks it over and the whole house falls over, I cannot sue the person for the total cost of the house because it would not be reasonable for a person to balance a house on a tooth pick unless the person had the full understanding that it would cause the whole house to fall over.
If you reasonably took the time to evaluate Microsoft security compared to industry standard security, you would see that your company is legally and morally responsible for a bulk of your lose.
I do believe that this person committed a crime, you can not blame all of the damage on this person.
If someone was able to step all of your shipments from the shipping companies trucks that you use because the trucking company did not put locks on the doors than wouldn't your company sue the hell out of the trucking company??
It's because the trucking company is responsible for providing reasonable security since that is part of the agreement. The Windows EULA basically says that M$ is not responsible at all no matter what. In reality, whomever agreed to the EULA's is responsible for this mess.
This is not about somebody breaking into something that was responsable protected, instead it is a faulty product.
And if you had your main office door open wide with a $25k piece of equipment sitting there with no apparent security and somebody walking down the street who normally would never still anything walks up and takes it how would they be prosecuted?
Motivation has a lot to do with how criminals are treated in the courts. If the kid was not out to do that much harm - or did not realize what he was doing, it means he should obviously not get the same punishment as someone who spends a year planning a hiest and go to extreme measures to complete the deal.
It's the difference between 1st murder and manslaughter.
And the analogy to having a main door wide open with absolutely no one watching very expensive equipment is a comparission to running IIS or Outlook.
It wasn't a bad system in it's time. Is was made to be for end-users though. And that's why it is not valid to argue that it is more useful as an enterprise OS than a system specifically designed to be an enterprise system.
Well, I believe a chief part of his argument to the security of the Mac web server was that since Mac didn't pretend to have any sense of security at all, all application programmers would make sure they work there software to be secure. At Ease is a good example of why this isn't true.
Again though, I've heard this same argument in support of windows too. The fact of the matter is, that even if there were a buffer overflow in apache somewhere, this would only allow an exploit to run as whatever apache was running as!
By the same respect, if C++ programmers used STL strings, we would also have no buffer overflows. The fact of the matter is that C is C. A C program can be written for a Mac that will cause just as much of a buffer overflow as any other system
The ad was developed by cyberangels.com and may or may not ever make it to air. The US government has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with this. Don't be fooled either, no matter how good you think you are, if you were convicted of a computer related crime you will not receive a security clearance.
Besides, most "hackers" are silly script kiddies with no real skills. There is a great oppertunity for truely skilled hackers out there though. Check out the NSA if you want to work with some really cool stuff.
Biggest problem though with working for the Government is that the pay isn't really that great. This is where true hackers, who are also patriots can put their money where their mouth is. If you are a true hacker, then take a salary hit and get a job with the NSA/FBI/CIA.
Military jobs are not really that grand and don't won't accomadate rouge genius. They are all about reproducability. They would rather know that they can always get certain results by throwing this much money at grade b programmers than not being sure how well something would turn out by throwing same amount of money at grade a programmers even if it was guarenteed to be better.
Sorry for ranting a bit but that's reality. Oh, BTW, there are plenty of grade b programmers out there that are past draft age so don't expect for the military to care two shits if you can hax0r a windoze box...
Or do you proud Mac Users forget the magic keys of good ole At Ease. Damn thing didn't even need a friggin buffer overflow. We won't even get into the whole virtual memory issue.
Back in elementary school, we used Macs and they were just as pityful as windows machines are today.
I will never understand MacUsers... People say Linux people are crazy but atleast they have something to be proud of.
Lets really take a look at this. You joined a company that hired a bunch of college students and expected them to learn a brand new language while allowing them to spend their days playing with nerf toys??? And you honestly believed this company would last for more than a few months?
I am all in favor of having a good work environment. A good environment will brew creativity and make employees much more productive. The days of the dot com companies where people where paid outrageous amounts for doing nothing are over, as they should be.
Comments like this bother me greatly because I love to program and have a great deal of fun at work. When two really productive people get into a nerf fight at 3 AM after working 20 hours, that's a great thing, but when people work 6 hours days and expect to goof off for 5 hours of that day, well, what do you expect?
There is no backwards compatability. Router's should pass through ECN packets. This is just due to sub-standard equipment. Linux has always been the operating system on the cutting edge of networking (it was the first fullying compliant IPv4 OS).
On a side note, I have been using the 2.4 series since the initial release and have had no problems since I have not enabled ECN. If people are going to reconfigure their kernels they must take the time to understand what they are selecting and not just pick things because they sound cool.
Yet another case of M$ quality hardware causing problems...
The Rage Theatre chipset is supported just not through GAOTS. It is supported with the XVideo extension in X4.0. The cards do an amazing job and the best part is that video plays back better in Linux than in Windows IMHO. Make sure to compile SDL with ATI support and then your golden.
The only problem with the FIRST competition is that they force each team to purchase a kit from them. After buying their kit and any extra parts (from them of course) the robot alone ends up costing $15K. Add the cost for travel and other little things and it ends up costing $30K. This requires corporate sponsership which means that instead of building a robot and playing with cool stuff, you spend 90% of the time writing letters to companies.
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BeOS has a different scheduling system than linux. Because of this, it runs well for applications that require very low latency (i.e. real-time multimedia applications). This does not apply to Quake3 but rather to real time audio and video editing that is usually only done on a commerical scale. As far as pure performance is concerned, a server will be able to serve more content on a linux based system than a BeOS system.
The market for real-time applications is not only quite small but also quite congested (PowerMax, HP-RT, etc.). What the VC people probably liked about BeOS though was the huge amount of money involved in this little niche though. The fact of the matter is though that you will not really enjoy the multimedia on BeOS than say XFree4 with DRI.
I would also have to dispute the statement that if their is water, their has to be air. Almost all planets have some sort of atmosphere. The existance of water has absolutely nothing to do with atmosphere. The chances of their being life currently on Mars (atleast, in the form that we know it) would most likely only be bacterial reemains from a prior time period considering that the equators of Mars only reach a high temp of somewhere around 0C. Without liquid water (which there surely, isn't on Mars), then their is very little chance for life.
I do believe though that out of respect, we shouldn't litter the planet with all sorts of robots and stuff... If there is no other way though, then oh well.
I am an avid slashdot reader. I get more quality reading material out of slashdot than alot of the magazines I subscribe to (ok, it doesn't beat playboy, but what does...).
I personally have no problem paying a subscription fee.
And to start the flames off, that navbar really really sucks. What a dirty little trick to try to boost revenue at thinkgeek...
Thank you! I was waiting for a post like this... WTF is a software architect??? I swear all these yuppies out they make up fifty bazillion different titles to appease they merger minions and then people are still stupid enough to have a dilemma such as "Oh boohoo, I just went from a Software Engineer to a Software Architect, what do I do know?!? How do I handle it??". Get a friggin life...
There is only one problem with these boots. Most likely, only geeks would use something like this since regular people tend to be techno-phobes. Unless these shoes can charge a laptop battery on a trip to the soda machine, I don't think that most geeks (not all, just most) would walk around enough to charge anything :)
Agreed on all but the last line. Large number of crashes are due to lack of basic memory protection. A process can crash and cause corruption in globally shared kernel memory. This is quite bad in that it will bring down the whole OS when only the process should have died. While working on a debugger, I was even able to put the win kernel in debug mode and set breakpoints in the kernel! Talk about scary, needless to say, the first lesson learned when writing a win debugger is to put a breakpoint before all system calls!!!
Direct hardware access is a problem, but not nearly common enough to cause the amount of crashes that occur in windows. And for all the zealots out there, yes, many factors contribute to windows instability, but I truely thing that most are caused by the page protection (another reason why NT based kernels don't crash nearly as much).
I don't understand all the doom sayers. The economy is fine. The economy is shifting as it does during situations like this. While airlines might be firing people DoD related bussinesses are still hiring. The only people ever really effected are unskilled labors and since they are unskilled, that just means that instead of making $6 looking at bags at an airport, they can make $6 an hour serving fries to all the people busily working on all the new DoD contracts.
Basic economics...
I beg to differ. As far as being widely used, I agree that GCC is not a contender, but as far as performance, the cygwin port of GCC performs quite well and often times much better than intel. Just look for some of the GCC benchmark stories on /.
It's very easy to write a compiler to work with a couple snippets of code, but I can give you plenty of C code that many simplistic compilers just can't handle. That is why production quality code is so important to test with, since you tend to flex the powers of a language a bit more.
I also saw some blurb about handling C++. Now, I can not believe that a company can take a C compiler and then throw around some money and get a C++ compiler. C++ is the nasty, most dubious language out there and writing a compiler for it is absolutely painful. What little fairies does your company have that can create these things so easily???
I don't mean to be sarcastic but I think you had to have been looking for this kind of skepticism if you posted here...
let me apologize for not proofreading... that is definitely tough on the eyes :)
I briefly read over their specs on their website and it I find it quite humorous that all of the benchmark code is asm. So essentially, they have an assembler. Now, we have absolutely no idea what level of optimization they used and did not compare benchs with gcc with full optimization. What I would love to see is a comparision between gcc with -03 and they compiler then a comparision between a larger production quality program. I quite frankly can't see the market for this either.
Now, only if someone would actually "bone" some of these "soccer moms", we wouldn't have to deal with so much of this shit...
A broad statement but it is true. The internet exists as a portal between individuals. It is in essence a peer to peer network. What two individuals discuss amoungst themselves should almost always be protected.
If two co-workers comment about a 17 year old girl, is that illegal? If they talk about having sex with her is that illegal? Does that mean that "virtual" child pornography is illegal?
Take a look at the definition of virtual too. Does this mean that stories of child pornography are illegal? If so, I point to the above conversation since surely that would also be illegal.
It's a very dangerous area. It's one thing when it is a publicly broadcasted, corporately controlled medium such as TV or radio, but the internet can exists anywhere. What is the technical definition of the internet also? Do these rules also apply to intranets?
The danger of laws like these is not the laws themselves, but rather the precedence the set. Need I speak of "Separate, but equal" as a prime example of an isolated law can be used to commit horrible acts of injustices.
Well shit, I live in New Jersey, there ain't no way I'm leaving my doors unlocked!
A vast majority of machines were not effected by Nimda. It is only machines that were not kept up to date. A company that builds cars can not say, "Sorry you died in that accident, we had followed most of the recommended safety steps."
It's like having a 10 foot high electric fence with dogs running through the yard but then a step of stairs over the fence and past the dogs. All those steps don't do you any good if you don't take the fundamental security steps.
I know it's a pain, but that's because of the way windows is designed.
Absolutely! Try any enterprise OS such as Solarios, HP-UX, PowerMax, etc.
My company uses HP-UX and you better believe if we find a bug in the OS that is interupting software development, they are responsible to fix it.
Linux and FreeBSD are free! That is why there is no responsibility. They are community projects. If you really were posed to lose a lot of money and your admins were that inept then I wouldn't recommended either of those either.
Oh no, you did leave your front door wide open.
It is also not necessarly a felony offense because even though the net damage could have been $25k, you would only be able to claim what would have been reasonable damage.
If I build a house and balance it on a tooth pick, then if someone knocks it over and the whole house falls over, I cannot sue the person for the total cost of the house because it would not be reasonable for a person to balance a house on a tooth pick unless the person had the full understanding that it would cause the whole house to fall over.
If you reasonably took the time to evaluate Microsoft security compared to industry standard security, you would see that your company is legally and morally responsible for a bulk of your lose.
I do believe that this person committed a crime, you can not blame all of the damage on this person.
If someone was able to step all of your shipments from the shipping companies trucks that you use because the trucking company did not put locks on the doors than wouldn't your company sue the hell out of the trucking company??
It's because the trucking company is responsible for providing reasonable security since that is part of the agreement. The Windows EULA basically says that M$ is not responsible at all no matter what. In reality, whomever agreed to the EULA's is responsible for this mess.
This is not about somebody breaking into something that was responsable protected, instead it is a faulty product.
And if you had your main office door open wide with a $25k piece of equipment sitting there with no apparent security and somebody walking down the street who normally would never still anything walks up and takes it how would they be prosecuted?
Motivation has a lot to do with how criminals are treated in the courts. If the kid was not out to do that much harm - or did not realize what he was doing, it means he should obviously not get the same punishment as someone who spends a year planning a hiest and go to extreme measures to complete the deal.
It's the difference between 1st murder and manslaughter.
And the analogy to having a main door wide open with absolutely no one watching very expensive equipment is a comparission to running IIS or Outlook.
And yet Mac still hasn't gotten any better...
It wasn't a bad system in it's time. Is was made to be for end-users though. And that's why it is not valid to argue that it is more useful as an enterprise OS than a system specifically designed to be an enterprise system.
Well, I believe a chief part of his argument to the security of the Mac web server was that since Mac didn't pretend to have any sense of security at all, all application programmers would make sure they work there software to be secure. At Ease is a good example of why this isn't true.
Again though, I've heard this same argument in support of windows too. The fact of the matter is, that even if there were a buffer overflow in apache somewhere, this would only allow an exploit to run as whatever apache was running as!
By the same respect, if C++ programmers used STL strings, we would also have no buffer overflows. The fact of the matter is that C is C. A C program can be written for a Mac that will cause just as much of a buffer overflow as any other system
The ad was developed by cyberangels.com and may or may not ever make it to air. The US government has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with this. Don't be fooled either, no matter how good you think you are, if you were convicted of a computer related crime you will not receive a security clearance.
Besides, most "hackers" are silly script kiddies with no real skills. There is a great oppertunity for truely skilled hackers out there though. Check out the NSA if you want to work with some really cool stuff.
Biggest problem though with working for the Government is that the pay isn't really that great. This is where true hackers, who are also patriots can put their money where their mouth is. If you are a true hacker, then take a salary hit and get a job with the NSA/FBI/CIA.
Military jobs are not really that grand and don't won't accomadate rouge genius. They are all about reproducability. They would rather know that they can always get certain results by throwing this much money at grade b programmers than not being sure how well something would turn out by throwing same amount of money at grade a programmers even if it was guarenteed to be better.
Sorry for ranting a bit but that's reality. Oh, BTW, there are plenty of grade b programmers out there that are past draft age so don't expect for the military to care two shits if you can hax0r a windoze box...
Or do you proud Mac Users forget the magic keys of good ole At Ease. Damn thing didn't even need a friggin buffer overflow. We won't even get into the whole virtual memory issue.
Back in elementary school, we used Macs and they were just as pityful as windows machines are today.
I will never understand MacUsers... People say Linux people are crazy but atleast they have something to be proud of.
Lets really take a look at this. You joined a company that hired a bunch of college students and expected them to learn a brand new language while allowing them to spend their days playing with nerf toys??? And you honestly believed this company would last for more than a few months?
I am all in favor of having a good work environment. A good environment will brew creativity and make employees much more productive. The days of the dot com companies where people where paid outrageous amounts for doing nothing are over, as they should be.
Comments like this bother me greatly because I love to program and have a great deal of fun at work. When two really productive people get into a nerf fight at 3 AM after working 20 hours, that's a great thing, but when people work 6 hours days and expect to goof off for 5 hours of that day, well, what do you expect?
There is no backwards compatability. Router's should pass through ECN packets. This is just due to sub-standard equipment. Linux has always been the operating system on the cutting edge of networking (it was the first fullying compliant IPv4 OS).
On a side note, I have been using the 2.4 series since the initial release and have had no problems since I have not enabled ECN. If people are going to reconfigure their kernels they must take the time to understand what they are selecting and not just pick things because they sound cool.
Yet another case of M$ quality hardware causing problems...
The Rage Theatre chipset is supported just not through GAOTS. It is supported with the XVideo extension in X4.0. The cards do an amazing job and the best part is that video plays back better in Linux than in Windows IMHO. Make sure to compile SDL with ATI support and then your golden.
The only problem with the FIRST competition is that they force each team to purchase a kit from them. After buying their kit and any extra parts (from them of course) the robot alone ends up costing $15K. Add the cost for travel and other little things and it ends up costing $30K. This requires corporate sponsership which means that instead of building a robot and playing with cool stuff, you spend 90% of the time writing letters to companies.