The reason many people whouldn't directly compare linux/BSD with Solaris, Irix, TRUE64.... is that these Unixes scale well on systems with hundreds of processors, have more sophisticated thread handling, and have many other internal differences that are better for big iorn computers. Another example of a difference is kernel locking. Linux has one kernal lock function. IRIX has over a hundred, which allows you to tell the OS that it may do some thinks while in some critical section of your code, but not other things. This makes a big performance difference on a system with hundreds of processors if you have the mashiene configured so that the program thinks it is running on a single CPU.
Linux and BSD have the UNIX user interface, but the internals of the OS are VERY different from the big comersial UNIXes because of the sort of hardware that they are intended to run on.
is here:
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-201-4997526-0.htm l
Can anyone name any large peice of software (as in more than 10 people working on it) that has come out within 6 months of it's target reliece date fully functional?
I went to an SGI information sesion at my collage a while back. They talked about the chalanges of getting linux to run on 128+ processor systems. They talked about things in linux that were hurting performance, like the single kernel lock in linux, as opposed to the 10^9 different locks you can invoke in IRIX. But they stressed that they whould not even consider forking.
The reason they started useing linux rather than IRIX was that application vendors wanted them to fund ports of there software from other unixes to IRIX, and convincing some vendors to port to IRIX at all was imposible. Linux solves this problem because every company on the planet seems to be coming out with a linux port of their software.
You can't seriosly argue that linux is better than IRIX or AIX on big computers. Linux was made with single processor systems in mind, and when a design desision in the kernel will slow down every computer with less than a hundred processors but speed up an Origin 2000, guess what's gona happen? But it makes sence for SGI to give it's customers the option of running an OS that will run lots of unix software. If they don't, and the app they want is only certified on Solaris and linux.......
Hmm. Did the person you quoted mean ISA the bus that was replased with PCI, or Instruction Set Archetecture, the set of instructions a processor can do? Both make sence.....
I understand that $3.50 may as well be nothing, and the idea that you are part of the suit unless you opt out is stupid. But I don't think the point of a class action law suit is to pay you money. It is to make the company at fault pay damages.
If the company did something realy bad to someone with the resorces to fight back in court, then they whould get sued. But if a company costs lots of people a small amount of money, then it's not worth any one person's time and resorces to sue them. If there were no class action law suits, then companies whould screw people constantly, but only in ways that whould not make a law suit worth it. Because of the posibility of a class action law suit, companies have to be more carefull. Yes, some lawers get ritch. That's better than the alternitive: every company in existance trying to rip me off for an amout of money just under the leage fees nessisary to sue that company.
Um... Go to the Apearance control panel. You can change the way windows colapse, the location of the scrole buttons, and several other things like color schemes. Apple created some wild schemes ( one of which was called "gismo" ), but didn't ship them with the OS. This didn't stop anyone from useing them, since you can download them and a million other themes that people create. The format of a theme file is well documented and it is not hard to make one.
The general pattern of apple's software is that a user who knows nothing can only do things that are not going to supprize them too much. I whould bet that the wilder themes were axed because a user who wandered into the control panel and clicked on gizmo whould probably freak out when all of the borders on every window became bright orange with yellow stripes and the menus made a loud clacking sound.
But as someone who knows what he is doing, I can make my mac look and behave any way I want. In the Ars Technica report on dp4, it was mentioned that Aqua is dependant on a bundle, and removing that bundle changes the UI to something closer to OS 9. If you were working on OS X, and had made the OS read a bunch of files to know what the UI should look like, whould you ever consider going back and hardcoding all of the data in those files into the apropreate parts of the OS? Of course not. Even if Steve insisted, the fact that they want a beta out the door in ~20 days whoud make it fairly unlikely that it will happen at least with the beta. And if everyone who runs the beta changes the interface, I doubt Steve whould risk pissing off all of his users by locking out interface changes in the final reliece.
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The reason many people whouldn't directly compare linux/BSD with Solaris, Irix, TRUE64.... is that these Unixes scale well on systems with hundreds of processors, have more sophisticated thread handling, and have many other internal differences that are better for big iorn computers. Another example of a difference is kernel locking. Linux has one kernal lock function. IRIX has over a hundred, which allows you to tell the OS that it may do some thinks while in some critical section of your code, but not other things. This makes a big performance difference on a system with hundreds of processors if you have the mashiene configured so that the program thinks it is running on a single CPU.
Linux and BSD have the UNIX user interface, but the internals of the OS are VERY different from the big comersial UNIXes because of the sort of hardware that they are intended to run on.
is here: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-201-4997526-0.htm l
Can anyone name any large peice of software (as in more than 10 people working on it) that has come out within 6 months of it's target reliece date fully functional?
I went to an SGI information sesion at my collage a while back. They talked about the chalanges of getting linux to run on 128+ processor systems. They talked about things in linux that were hurting performance, like the single kernel lock in linux, as opposed to the 10^9 different locks you can invoke in IRIX. But they stressed that they whould not even consider forking.
The reason they started useing linux rather than IRIX was that application vendors wanted them to fund ports of there software from other unixes to IRIX, and convincing some vendors to port to IRIX at all was imposible. Linux solves this problem because every company on the planet seems to be coming out with a linux port of their software.
You can't seriosly argue that linux is better than IRIX or AIX on big computers. Linux was made with single processor systems in mind, and when a design desision in the kernel will slow down every computer with less than a hundred processors but speed up an Origin 2000, guess what's gona happen? But it makes sence for SGI to give it's customers the option of running an OS that will run lots of unix software. If they don't, and the app they want is only certified on Solaris and linux.......
Hmm. Did the person you quoted mean ISA the bus that was replased with PCI, or Instruction Set Archetecture, the set of instructions a processor can do? Both make sence.....
I understand that $3.50 may as well be nothing, and the idea that you are part of the suit unless you opt out is stupid. But I don't think the point of a class action law suit is to pay you money. It is to make the company at fault pay damages.
If the company did something realy bad to someone with the resorces to fight back in court, then they whould get sued. But if a company costs lots of people a small amount of money, then it's not worth any one person's time and resorces to sue them. If there were no class action law suits, then companies whould screw people constantly, but only in ways that whould not make a law suit worth it. Because of the posibility of a class action law suit, companies have to be more carefull. Yes, some lawers get ritch. That's better than the alternitive: every company in existance trying to rip me off for an amout of money just under the leage fees nessisary to sue that company.
Um... Go to the Apearance control panel. You can change the way windows colapse, the location of the scrole buttons, and several other things like color schemes. Apple created some wild schemes ( one of which was called "gismo" ), but didn't ship them with the OS. This didn't stop anyone from useing them, since you can download them and a million other themes that people create. The format of a theme file is well documented and it is not hard to make one.
The general pattern of apple's software is that a user who knows nothing can only do things that are not going to supprize them too much. I whould bet that the wilder themes were axed because a user who wandered into the control panel and clicked on gizmo whould probably freak out when all of the borders on every window became bright orange with yellow stripes and the menus made a loud clacking sound.
But as someone who knows what he is doing, I can make my mac look and behave any way I want. In the Ars Technica report on dp4, it was mentioned that Aqua is dependant on a bundle, and removing that bundle changes the UI to something closer to OS 9. If you were working on OS X, and had made the OS read a bunch of files to know what the UI should look like, whould you ever consider going back and hardcoding all of the data in those files into the apropreate parts of the OS? Of course not. Even if Steve insisted, the fact that they want a beta out the door in ~20 days whoud make it fairly unlikely that it will happen at least with the beta. And if everyone who runs the beta changes the interface, I doubt Steve whould risk pissing off all of his users by locking out interface changes in the final reliece.