Or just remain Linux
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Cant Linux remain Linux. I can appreciate X becuase its the same as it was 10 years ago, and it will remain the same.
There will always be typewriters, toasters, mobile phones, audio players, video players, game consoles and Macintoshes that will be better than Linux in some aspects and for some groups of people (that said, they could of course be made Linux-based, thats another thing).
I want Linux because it compils and runs the huge amount of useful and fun open source toys, tools and server programs I like. I like that the VIM/gcc/make-development environment is constant. I dont need to upgrade to the latest version before I continue with my hobby-projects. grep, sed and friends are always there, and they always make the same great job. That means a problem solved today, is a problem solved in ten years. If you throw X out, thousands of man-years are lost, just because we want to copy a desktop innovator.
For desktop purposes, BSD and Linux kernels would basically do the same great work. Apple chose the BSD kernel for license reasons. The Apple advantage is that they have great design, and full hardware control. That gives them the opportunity to create a superb user experience.
Linux should continue to be the plattform of choice for geeks who just want their "problems solved", for once and ever. Then companies and people will find amazing ways to use the great technology - and one day you'll find Linux in your toaster, game console or car...
And you assume it is easy for everyone to just "make a CD". Most users would have great trouble even with this simple task. It isn't at all obvious to Aunt Tillie like my uncle what formats are, how they are different, or even how to solve a problem like that.
That was really funny! You have never used a Macintosh with iTunes - right? There are other operating systems out there, where burning a CD could be complicated. On a Mac, in iTunes you do:
click on the playlist
click on the big "Burn" button
put blank CD in computer (when it asks for it)
Could it be easier? If you have been able to download songs from iTMS you are able to burn CDs as well - trust me.
I completely agree taht the user is not locked in to anything since he can create a compliant Audio CD - the defacto standard for digitial audio since 15 years.
I kind of think that MS dont want tabs in IE. They already GOT TAGS IN WINDOWS.
Its old wisdom that if put something on top of the OS, the OS will be obsoleted and replaced by this upper layer. So, if they intruduce tabs in IE, people will start thinking "Internet Explorer" instead of "Windows". They make money from Windows, not from IE.
Is it just me feels sorry for SGI? Silicon Graphics was once the symbol of excellence in performance and graphics workstations. They made the nicest boxes, the fastest graphics cards, and the most advanced high performance compilers. I remember many years ago, I saw a Silicon Graphics demo, that completely blew away all competion. Will they have a chance to recover from this Itanium disaster?
Will their customer base believe in them when they switch to a new architecture again? What arch should they switch to? POWER?
I remember no PII at 366 or 466Mhz. But there were PIIs at 350, 400 and 450MHz. Are those discontinued as well? There were Celerons at 366/400/433/466 though...
The fine thing with a shell is that when you have issued the same series of commands numerous times you can simply put them in a script - automation done!
However MSH seems (with its OO-influenced design) to be a bit too complex for ordinary work. If people dont use it for ordinary work, they cant write scripts "for free".
The problem today isnt that Windows cant be scripted - it can via VBScript.
UNIX shells are constructed the way they are because users should BOTH use them for scripting, and for every other task. M$ compromises with simplicity (with its OO-design), so MSH will never be as productive as, for example tcsh.
Of course it is Intel that needs to change. Hardly anyone cares about PC cpu MHz anylonger. The Itanium is such a magnificent failure. PC and server CPUs will soon cost less than $50, and nobody will care about brands anymore.
What should Intel do? They have to do something that makes the market believe Intel is at least part of the future. Pushing that Internet needs to change seems to be a way to get heard at all.
Maybe Intel is part of the future - and maybe they will revolutionise Internet. But primarily it Intel that needs to change - not the Internet.
I completely agree with you! Putting focus on the GUI also makes scripting/automation/remote admin etc more complex.
Ever seen anyone make a comment next to a setting in a GUI? Thats why text based config-files in many cases are superior. And you can backup the configuration easily.
What annoys me is that all eye candy tend to make people beleive that "computers are so much better and powerful nowadays", when in fact, building real functionality is not easier at all. More layers and more dependencies add complexity that in the end damages stability and correctness.
One thing that comes to mind is that computer produced heat is not always a problem.
In many parts of USA you have to cool the area where computers are located with AC. That means, if the computer consumes 1kW you might end up with a total energy cost of 3-4 kW.
In colder parts of the world the equation is fairly different. In a room that is heated anyway (often from electricity) leaving computers or lights on cost absolutely nothing - its just a way of using the energy twice. Both a radiator and a computer end up being 100% efficient when it comes to producing heat.
I think not. We are talking about the Linx service from Copenhagen to Sweden. You are probably talking about "Oresundstågen" - they are also nice, but I doubt they have WiFi.
The concept of RISC (that each instruction takes one cycle) is what makes pipelining possible in the first place. If you have instructions that take 2-35 cycles to execute its very hard to produce an efficient pipeline.
Also, things like Out-of-order-execution and Branch-prediction makes more sense for a RISC instruction set (so I was told;).
But I more or less agree with you that a long pipeline is somewhat contradictory to the idea of RISC.
The 64-bit PowerPC 970, a single-core version of the POWER4, can process 200 instructions at once at speeds of up to 2 GHz and beyond -- all while consuming just tens of watts of power. Its low power consumption makes it a favorite with notebooks and other portable applications on the one hand, and with large server and storage farms on the other.
That is of course a better way of computing the Fibonacci numbers (-;
I choose my stupid recursion algorithm just because it makes it possible to produce a small predictible program that takes long time to execute. I suppose you could compute fib2(x) for large values of x before the program took any measurable time at all to execute (that might explain your flukes/outliers).
Anyway, when I started programming Java back in 1998 execution times were typically 25 times slower than for C. Those days are over (and for amateurs, like me, who dont know how to produce optimal code with a c-compiler Java might in fact be the better choice).
In case you are curious I can tell you that C#/.NET is as fast as C/Java (x86, Win32, MS.NET).
The Java system time appears to come from loading the binary/VM (computing fib(4) gives about the same system time as fib(40)).
-fomit-frame-pointer does not affect performance (Mac OS X, PowerPC G4, gcc 3.3).
-O is like 10% faster than -O3, -O2, -Os
-O -mcpu=7400 made C as fast as Java (I am happy I found that out, otherwise I would have wondered what devilish optimizations Java was doing under the hood)
Conclusion: Java/.NET bytecode compiles to efficient machine-code.
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Cant Linux remain Linux. I can appreciate X becuase its the same as it was 10 years ago, and it will remain the same.
There will always be typewriters, toasters, mobile phones, audio players, video players, game consoles and Macintoshes that will be better than Linux in some aspects and for some groups of people (that said, they could of course be made Linux-based, thats another thing).
I want Linux because it compils and runs the huge amount of useful and fun open source toys, tools and server programs I like. I like that the VIM/gcc/make-development environment is constant. I dont need to upgrade to the latest version before I continue with my hobby-projects. grep, sed and friends are always there, and they always make the same great job. That means a problem solved today, is a problem solved in ten years. If you throw X out, thousands of man-years are lost, just because we want to copy a desktop innovator.
For desktop purposes, BSD and Linux kernels would basically do the same great work. Apple chose the BSD kernel for license reasons. The Apple advantage is that they have great design, and full hardware control. That gives them the opportunity to create a superb user experience.
Linux should continue to be the plattform of choice for geeks who just want their "problems solved", for once and ever. Then companies and people will find amazing ways to use the great technology - and one day you'll find Linux in your toaster, game console or car...
What do you mean "much higher specs".
I have the pleasure to have a 866MHz Powerbook G4, AND a 1Ghz Via Nehemiah C3 desktop computer.
I can tell the C3 is not superior to the G4. The Mac Mini comes with a faster G4 than my Powerbook has. The G4 has MUCH HIGHER specs!
With that logic commercial radio are also "locking customers in", becuase you cant put it onto your iPod without effort.
And you assume it is easy for everyone to just "make a CD". Most users would have great trouble even with this simple task. It isn't at all obvious to Aunt Tillie like my uncle what formats are, how they are different, or even how to solve a problem like that.
That was really funny! You have never used a Macintosh with iTunes - right? There are other operating systems out there, where burning a CD could be complicated. On a Mac, in iTunes you do:
Could it be easier? If you have been able to download songs from iTMS you are able to burn CDs as well - trust me.
I completely agree taht the user is not locked in to anything since he can create a compliant Audio CD - the defacto standard for digitial audio since 15 years.
I have asked for such a Mac for years... since they discontinued the cube...
I think it'd be a great decision... lets see how much it canablizes on Power Macs though.
I run my firewall on a Dual Pentium 90MHz.
Does that mean I am a geek?
I kind of think that MS dont want tabs in IE. They already GOT TAGS IN WINDOWS.
Its old wisdom that if put something on top of the OS, the OS will be obsoleted and replaced by this upper layer. So, if they intruduce tabs in IE, people will start thinking "Internet Explorer" instead of "Windows". They make money from Windows, not from IE.
Is it just me feels sorry for SGI? Silicon Graphics was once the symbol of excellence in performance and graphics workstations. They made the nicest boxes, the fastest graphics cards, and the most advanced high performance compilers. I remember many years ago, I saw a Silicon Graphics demo, that completely blew away all competion. Will they have a chance to recover from this Itanium disaster?
Will their customer base believe in them when they switch to a new architecture again? What arch should they switch to? POWER?
What will their selling point be without Itanium?
I remember no PII at 366 or 466Mhz. But there were PIIs at 350, 400 and 450MHz. Are those discontinued as well? There were Celerons at 366/400/433/466 though...
Not that I read the article...
I dont really know what you are asking for...
www.pegasosppc.com has cheap PPC hardware.
A Power-processor/system can hardly be cheap, simply because it is a more powerful and advanced chip than cheap chips (like x86/PPC).
The fine thing with a shell is that when you have issued the same series of commands numerous times you can simply put them in a script - automation done!
However MSH seems (with its OO-influenced design) to be a bit too complex for ordinary work. If people dont use it for ordinary work, they cant write scripts "for free".
The problem today isnt that Windows cant be scripted - it can via VBScript.
UNIX shells are constructed the way they are because users should BOTH use them for scripting, and for every other task. M$ compromises with simplicity (with its OO-design), so MSH will never be as productive as, for example tcsh.
Of course it is Intel that needs to change. Hardly anyone cares about PC cpu MHz anylonger. The Itanium is such a magnificent failure. PC and server CPUs will soon cost less than $50, and nobody will care about brands anymore.
What should Intel do? They have to do something that makes the market believe Intel is at least part of the future. Pushing that Internet needs to change seems to be a way to get heard at all.
Maybe Intel is part of the future - and maybe they will revolutionise Internet. But primarily it Intel that needs to change - not the Internet.
Java lacks structs (I hate to get an extra .classfile for each inner class), gotos and enums. Those are cool features.
However C# is even less cool since you cant fall-through inside a switch (without the use of goto).
Lack of unsigned integer types makes java really uncool!
As I write this I feel I somehow must have got this completely wrong...
I completely agree with you! Putting focus on the GUI also makes scripting/automation/remote admin etc more complex.
Ever seen anyone make a comment next to a setting in a GUI? Thats why text based config-files in many cases are superior. And you can backup the configuration easily.
What annoys me is that all eye candy tend to make people beleive that "computers are so much better and powerful nowadays", when in fact, building real functionality is not easier at all. More layers and more dependencies add complexity that in the end damages stability and correctness.
You should not be moderated Troll!
I beleive I work for a company where MS is choosen because they are the low-price player.
One thing that comes to mind is that computer produced heat is not always a problem.
In many parts of USA you have to cool the area where computers are located with AC. That means, if the computer consumes 1kW you might end up with a total energy cost of 3-4 kW.
In colder parts of the world the equation is fairly different. In a room that is heated anyway (often from electricity) leaving computers or lights on cost absolutely nothing - its just a way of using the energy twice. Both a radiator and a computer end up being 100% efficient when it comes to producing heat.
I think not. We are talking about the Linx service from Copenhagen to Sweden. You are probably talking about "Oresundstågen" - they are also nice, but I doubt they have WiFi.
Yes. There are like 7 daily trains from Copenhagen to Gothenburg. One of them continues to Oslo.
Also there are other trains from Copenhagen to Gothenburg, that do not have WiFi.
On the train service from Copanhagen to Gothenburg (Oslo) we already have WiFi - free of charge (-:
Dont SCSI drives do this themselves?
The concept of RISC (that each instruction takes one cycle) is what makes pipelining possible in the first place. If you have instructions that take 2-35 cycles to execute its very hard to produce an efficient pipeline.
;).
Also, things like Out-of-order-execution and Branch-prediction makes more sense for a RISC instruction set (so I was told
But I more or less agree with you that a long pipeline is somewhat contradictory to the idea of RISC.
Can anyone tell me where I can buy a G5 laptop?
That is of course a better way of computing the Fibonacci numbers (-;
.NET).
I choose my stupid recursion algorithm just because it makes it possible to produce a small predictible program that takes long time to execute. I suppose you could compute fib2(x) for large values of x before the program took any measurable time at all to execute (that might explain your flukes/outliers).
Anyway, when I started programming Java back in 1998 execution times were typically 25 times slower than for C. Those days are over (and for amateurs, like me, who dont know how to produce optimal code with a c-compiler Java might in fact be the better choice).
In case you are curious I can tell you that C#/.NET is as fast as C/Java (x86, Win32, MS
The Java system time appears to come from loading the binary/VM (computing fib(4) gives about the same system time as fib(40)).
-fomit-frame-pointer does not affect performance (Mac OS X, PowerPC G4, gcc 3.3).
-O is like 10% faster than -O3, -O2, -Os
-O -mcpu=7400 made C as fast as Java (I am happy I found that out, otherwise I would have wondered what devilish optimizations Java was doing under the hood)
Conclusion: Java/.NET bytecode compiles to efficient machine-code.