Also they fail to mention why you want your system up to date
Security and stability fixes, primarily.
Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
Ahhh, solved. FreeBSD has branches, -STABLE for code that has been tested, and -CURRENT for code that hasn't. By updating along the -STABLE track you can be sure of no nasty surprises. (5.0-CURRENT is having lots of nasty surprises, right now).
They fail to mention any real advanatges of why should one want to go from Linux, which they clasify as the 'kernel', to FreeBSD,
FreeBSD is distributed as an entire OS - there is no "distribution" concept, it arrives and works. The advantage is in the reduced amount of fragmentation, and ultimately a reduction in the time it takes to get anything working.
While the mention the linux compatiblity layer, they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible
It'd be a big list! But, yes, some highlights would've been good. A good example would be Oracle, which aparrently can be made to run under Linux emulation, but it's a bit of a fight. Probably easier to just use Linux:)
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
You certainly could, and in fact the Linux emulation layer does include a bunch of symlinks to make the FreeBSD file system look distinctly like a Linux one. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the ports and packages systems.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system?
Kind of, it has a system called soft updates. To cut a long story short it runs the advantages of a journaling file system without the journal. There is only one of them.
(Video is done mostly through XFree so both are about equal in that respect).
Yes and no. It's only recently that FreeBSD has started to ship with XFree4.x.x (due to deeply conservative release engineering). Also FreeBSD does not have access to closed source video drivers, i.e. closed source nVidia drivers. Linux is ahead in video, but then so is Windows.
I know that there certainly were some... ahhh... issues with the Intel 8255x driver for Linux. There was a bunfight a while back when FreeBSD wasn't compatible with the embedded version of the 82559 (82559er), and the suggestion was made that someone look at the Linux driver to see what the command we were missing was. This led to a big stream of mails about how bad Linux's 8255x driver was, see.
Or something like that.
Anyway, I'd look at the changelogs for the network driver between 2.2.17 and 2.4.1, you may learn something.
Now, I know that Rational can generate UML from code.
And, indeed, many moons ago the software company I worked for had need for such a thing. We had built a suite of programs on MFC and it had grown to beyond it's original design - which sucked. The PHB's wanted diagrams so that the code may be "maintainable" and Mr Rational was called in to help.
The troops arrived, laptops, projectors, suits, the whole team spoke to them for a whole day. We got the product and pointed it at our code and it went completely mad... started running around MFC producing UML diagrams, badly. Anyway, those who have used MFC know that the last thing you want is a class diagram.
Mr Rational was sent home, tail between legs, and we had to fend off their salesmen's calls for months after.
Me too! I've used doxygen in real world projects, and managed to convert my source with scratty "when I feel like it" comments over to lovely shiny HTML docs that nobody will ever look at in, ohhh, a day? About that.
Dead easy and doesn't interfere with writing code.
this is a great example of a post from a passive-religious-java-coder
Wrong, from Wrongsville Alabama. I'm a C++ (systems) coder. There's just no point in trying to get C++ bespoke work any more since most projects are done in Java.
meeting 50% of c++ speeds which is pretty sad
Well, Java on a 1GHz Athlon is going to be about as fast as C++ on a 500MHz - which sounds fine to me. Don't use it for anything computationally expensive and you'll be fine.
Java runs slowly (which is true, but not a new observation).
It's not even that true any more, certainly within 50% of C++ in most cases. What is true is that it doesn't allow any 'low down' control, and that it bloats out a treat. But, it is generally believed here (NZ) and quite possibly the rest of the world that Java is the near term future of internal applications (which accounts for perhaps 95% of software development) but certainly not systems programming (which accounts for perhaps 95% of CPU cycles executed).
CV's, job applications, it's all a question of marketing. Like all marketing you have to paint a picture. By saying that your uncle has shut down his manufacturing business and is now looking to work as a programmer... but I've not held a job in it before... but I've not had any formal training. See, it doesn't sound good.
Your uncle has some VAST advantages over a new graduate. New grads, entry level programmers: You're not going to like this so block your ears. For one he has real world experience in how businesses work, how financing a business (particularly cashflows) work, of dealing with customers, of what deadlines mean and the fact that they are important. These are hugely rare skills in the software engineering world and he would do well to bring them to the fore when talking to potential employers.
From a purely programming perspective you also have to remember that even if his projects were small and ad hoc, they: Shipped; Fulfilled the business requirements; Were on budget and on time. Again, all three of these are actually very rare. All three at once is virtually unheard of.
He's in a very good position, but I wouldn't be going for a coding job. Personally, I'd like to see him paint himself as a project lead or business analyst. If he approaches some outsourcing companies offering to be an interface between their clients and the coding teams, leveraging his real world (non IT industry) experience to his advantage, they'd be hard pressed to turn him down.
I play practically nothing else at Lan's now. Get a rocket arena server up and going (this may take some time, do this the day before), or for a more inclusive game play jailbreak.
Jailbreak is definately easier to set up and has some unique properties: The score of the team is the score of the middle ranking player in the team - this encourages genuine teamplay rather than individual heroics; The game also presents numerous opportunities for the lamer players to be heroes by rescuing their more gung-ho mates from jail.
Once you're in to rocket arena though, point of no return:)
There's also some mileage in bringing a PS2 along for something more chilled out. SSX and beer, for instance.
I went to these as a kid, very cool lectures covering some suprisingly difficult stuff with the usual obfuscating crap removed. It was also the only time I got to see TV crews and the amount of hassle it takes to make television, so a learning process on two fronts. If you can get to see one or two of these lectures, do.
Downside: Eventually you get to university and get taught exactly the same thing with the obfuscating crap put back in again. By the same people.
The majority of gain can probably be had from really simple stuff. Take the stairs once or twice a day instead of the lift. Walk to the park to have lunch. We recently had an adverising campaign here (NZ) where some government agency stuck stickers on bus stops urging you to walk the last two stops. If you drive in, maybe find some parking 15-20 minutes walk away.
Try the simple dietary stuff too - grill instead of fry. Water instead of Coke.
If this doesn't work, then you might need to start on the heavy stuff, but the simple things don't need to suck. Anyway, it's not like I would know, I'm on the beanpole half of the IT industry:)
Didn't you post exactly the same thing about three weeks back? I believe at the time the conclusion was that the legal deparment fscked up because all you had to do was put a link to the kernel patches on your website.
So, what's the problem with embedded NetBSD? Have you talked to the core team about it?
Y'know, it's not that hard. You can just buy a moderately high end ADSL or cable modem router, and once that's set up it's more or less plug and play.
All the home powerline networking means is that the plug and play aspect is made even easier. Once the early adopters are dealt with, you can expect to find ADSL / cable routers that just plug into the power and to the cable - and that's it. Internet access to the whole house.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing really that earth shattering, but it does link against QT3 rather than QT2, hence the major version number bump.
Dave
You mean like "a trivial text-based client primarily for a code example" say?
Dave
Also they fail to mention why you want your system up to date
:)
Security and stability fixes, primarily.
Do you really want the latest kernel if it is untested on a production system?
Ahhh, solved. FreeBSD has branches, -STABLE for code that has been tested, and -CURRENT for code that hasn't. By updating along the -STABLE track you can be sure of no nasty surprises. (5.0-CURRENT is having lots of nasty surprises, right now).
They fail to mention any real advanatges of why should one want to go from Linux, which they clasify as the 'kernel', to FreeBSD,
FreeBSD is distributed as an entire OS - there is no "distribution" concept, it arrives and works. The advantage is in the reduced amount of fragmentation, and ultimately a reduction in the time it takes to get anything working.
While the mention the linux compatiblity layer, they fail to point out a list of all the programs that run just on Linux and which ones ARE compatible
It'd be a big list! But, yes, some highlights would've been good. A good example would be Oracle, which aparrently can be made to run under Linux emulation, but it's a bit of a fight. Probably easier to just use Linux
rpm is also a open source program that if one wanted they could probably install it under FreeBSD and get it to work.
You certainly could, and in fact the Linux emulation layer does include a bunch of symlinks to make the FreeBSD file system look distinctly like a Linux one. Anyway, there's nothing wrong with the ports and packages systems.
Does FreeBSD have a journaling file system?
Kind of, it has a system called soft updates. To cut a long story short it runs the advantages of a journaling file system without the journal. There is only one of them.
(Video is done mostly through XFree so both are about equal in that respect).
Yes and no. It's only recently that FreeBSD has started to ship with XFree4.x.x (due to deeply conservative release engineering). Also FreeBSD does not have access to closed source video drivers, i.e. closed source nVidia drivers. Linux is ahead in video, but then so is Windows.
Dave
Neither, it's a layer 2 network.
http://draenor.org/securebsd/secure.txt
A clear simple guide to securing FreeBSD, including use of secure levels.
Two links off the homepage, so it's blatant whoring.
Dave
Const defaults to int. You're doing a direct comparison of a floating point with an integer.
It's a shitty piece of coding because it's non-intuitive and a bastard to maintain. It should never pass a code review.
I have a PhD in Visual C++.
No you don't. You just failed to pass a BS review.
Dave
I know that there certainly were some... ahhh... issues with the Intel 8255x driver for Linux. There was a bunfight a while back when FreeBSD wasn't compatible with the embedded version of the 82559 (82559er), and the suggestion was made that someone look at the Linux driver to see what the command we were missing was. This led to a big stream of mails about how bad Linux's 8255x driver was, see.
Or something like that.
Anyway, I'd look at the changelogs for the network driver between 2.2.17 and 2.4.1, you may learn something.
Dave
Well, crush is strong
No, crush is usual.
Dave
I was including the JVM, webserver it is undoutoubly behind, database, any component overhead etc.
:)
Yeah, 95% was a bit much
Dave
Now, I know that Rational can generate UML from code.
And, indeed, many moons ago the software company I worked for had need for such a thing. We had built a suite of programs on MFC and it had grown to beyond it's original design - which sucked. The PHB's wanted diagrams so that the code may be "maintainable" and Mr Rational was called in to help.
The troops arrived, laptops, projectors, suits, the whole team spoke to them for a whole day. We got the product and pointed it at our code and it went completely mad... started running around MFC producing UML diagrams, badly. Anyway, those who have used MFC know that the last thing you want is a class diagram.
Mr Rational was sent home, tail between legs, and we had to fend off their salesmen's calls for months after.
Moral of the story? Don't believe the hype.
Dave
One upped, a mate of mine did it with a Mac classic and a 9 inch monitor.
http://www.cooljazzmotherfucker.com/PCMods/
We played rocket arena off it (serving) for several hours the other day. It rocks.
Dave
Me too! I've used doxygen in real world projects, and managed to convert my source with scratty "when I feel like it" comments over to lovely shiny HTML docs that nobody will ever look at in, ohhh, a day? About that.
Dead easy and doesn't interfere with writing code.
Dave
this is a great example of a post from a passive-religious-java-coder
Wrong, from Wrongsville Alabama. I'm a C++ (systems) coder. There's just no point in trying to get C++ bespoke work any more since most projects are done in Java.
meeting 50% of c++ speeds which is pretty sad
Well, Java on a 1GHz Athlon is going to be about as fast as C++ on a 500MHz - which sounds fine to me. Don't use it for anything computationally expensive and you'll be fine.
Dave
Java runs slowly (which is true, but not a new observation).
It's not even that true any more, certainly within 50% of C++ in most cases. What is true is that it doesn't allow any 'low down' control, and that it bloats out a treat. But, it is generally believed here (NZ) and quite possibly the rest of the world that Java is the near term future of internal applications (which accounts for perhaps 95% of software development) but certainly not systems programming (which accounts for perhaps 95% of CPU cycles executed).
Dave
Loved it, Microsoft astroturfers ramping it up once again. "Developers! Developers! Developers!"
Dave
CV's, job applications, it's all a question of marketing. Like all marketing you have to paint a picture. By saying that your uncle has shut down his manufacturing business and is now looking to work as a programmer... but I've not held a job in it before... but I've not had any formal training. See, it doesn't sound good.
Your uncle has some VAST advantages over a new graduate. New grads, entry level programmers: You're not going to like this so block your ears. For one he has real world experience in how businesses work, how financing a business (particularly cashflows) work, of dealing with customers, of what deadlines mean and the fact that they are important. These are hugely rare skills in the software engineering world and he would do well to bring them to the fore when talking to potential employers.
From a purely programming perspective you also have to remember that even if his projects were small and ad hoc, they: Shipped; Fulfilled the business requirements; Were on budget and on time. Again, all three of these are actually very rare. All three at once is virtually unheard of.
He's in a very good position, but I wouldn't be going for a coding job. Personally, I'd like to see him paint himself as a project lead or business analyst. If he approaches some outsourcing companies offering to be an interface between their clients and the coding teams, leveraging his real world (non IT industry) experience to his advantage, they'd be hard pressed to turn him down.
Dave
I play practically nothing else at Lan's now. Get a rocket arena server up and going (this may take some time, do this the day before), or for a more inclusive game play jailbreak.
:)
Jailbreak is definately easier to set up and has some unique properties: The score of the team is the score of the middle ranking player in the team - this encourages genuine teamplay rather than individual heroics; The game also presents numerous opportunities for the lamer players to be heroes by rescuing their more gung-ho mates from jail.
Once you're in to rocket arena though, point of no return
There's also some mileage in bringing a PS2 along for something more chilled out. SSX and beer, for instance.
Dave
The Reg's IP and the latest rumours on their demise were discussed here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25327&cid=2751 007
Dave
I went to these as a kid, very cool lectures covering some suprisingly difficult stuff with the usual obfuscating crap removed. It was also the only time I got to see TV crews and the amount of hassle it takes to make television, so a learning process on two fronts. If you can get to see one or two of these lectures, do.
Downside: Eventually you get to university and get taught exactly the same thing with the obfuscating crap put back in again. By the same people.
Dave
The majority of gain can probably be had from really simple stuff. Take the stairs once or twice a day instead of the lift. Walk to the park to have lunch. We recently had an adverising campaign here (NZ) where some government agency stuck stickers on bus stops urging you to walk the last two stops. If you drive in, maybe find some parking 15-20 minutes walk away.
:)
Try the simple dietary stuff too - grill instead of fry. Water instead of Coke.
If this doesn't work, then you might need to start on the heavy stuff, but the simple things don't need to suck. Anyway, it's not like I would know, I'm on the beanpole half of the IT industry
Dave
So these devout Christian morals don't have a problem with spying on people then?
Just for the record.
Dave
Didn't you post exactly the same thing about three weeks back? I believe at the time the conclusion was that the legal deparment fscked up because all you had to do was put a link to the kernel patches on your website.
So, what's the problem with embedded NetBSD? Have you talked to the core team about it?
Dave
Oh, OK. I am the lamer :)
Dave
BTW: "Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment.
It's been 19 seconds since you hit 'reply'!"
FFS.
Y'know, it's not that hard. You can just buy a moderately high end ADSL or cable modem router, and once that's set up it's more or less plug and play.
All the home powerline networking means is that the plug and play aspect is made even easier. Once the early adopters are dealt with, you can expect to find ADSL / cable routers that just plug into the power and to the cable - and that's it. Internet access to the whole house.
Dave
Seriously. A PSU with built in networking... plugs into the USB headers on the motherboard.
Too sensible, it'll never happen.
Dave