The author makes little to no suggestions as to what we can do to solve this problem. Even more useless is that he does not even describe the problem he's trying to present. Like another poster mentioned, just because a group of people use Windows does not make them united.
I believe the Linux wave is going great. Linux software is farther ahead than it's ever been (since it's been given time and hard work), and we're gradually coming to accept a certain number of features as "standard" for any given distribution. Making his comparison to Microsoft, he seems to suggest that all the distributions should "unite together" and make one big distribution. But then... where's the choice? Where's the variety that shows us alternatives and suggests ways to improve our systems even more? There is no one solution, and I'm happy that all these distributions exist, as it allows me to find my own solution based upon the work of a dedicated group of people. Without Mandrake and Suse, who's to say Red Hat Linux is the right solution? Likewise, without RH and Mandrake, who's to say Suse is the right solution?
The only thing I can think of, and something he didn't touched on, is the rippling of changes back to the original maintainers. There's nothing more frustrating than adding a component to your own custom system and thinking, "How did Red Hat put this all together?" Of course, you can always grab their source and figure out how they did it. I find a lot of these changes that the individual distributions make are bug fixes or feature improvements (patches so the software installs properly, or extra data to allow better integration into GNOME/KDE menus). It frustrates me that these changes don't make it back to the original package maintainers as often as they could. I would love to see the pam_stack module make it back into the Linux pam distribution so it can provide base level authentication services without the need for lengthy post-package patches and other tweaks.
Granted, there are some modifications that come with the territory. I see no reason for maintainers to have to adopt the Blue Curve theme that Red Hat uses to dress KDE and GNOME like each other. But at the same time, it would be nice to be able to pick and choose software packages and not have to worry about re-doing common work that all the distributions have already done.
Anyways, back to the article. I think this guy spouts a whole lot of nothing. There is nothing wrong with the way things are going with Linux and if there is, we'll get there soon. But keep in mind that Linux users are not Microsoft any more than Windows users are Microsoft. I use Linux because I feel comfortable and secure using the environment. I built my own server system from scratch because I wasn't happy with the choices offered by the different distributions. And that's the luxury of using an open system, to pick and choose exactly what you want.
Am I missing something?
on
The New IT Crisis
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Since when do telephone systems maintain themselves? Last I heard, my voice was still running along wires and branching about in switching stations. Unless I'm mistaken, they still require maintenance. Granted that the operating costs have been reduced (fewer operators = fewer wages), but you could take a similar stance on IT. What about self-help forums where you can search a knowledge base to find answers? These can replace a lot of man hours of technical support work. There's always going to be some kind of human element to whatever equation. We're never going to find empty power plants that can generate their own electricity indefinitely, because there's always going to have to be human intervention.
Some businesses demand complex solutions, and I fail to see how these complex solutions are going to be met by turnkey solutions -- where a manager can go out, purchase a server, turn it on, and have it run his business for a year without any kind of customization whatsoever.
There's a report on it in the New England Journal of Medicine (1998). It's not a capsule of plutonium or anything, it's a radioactive iodine. I didn't believe it myself until I saw the kind of treatment he was undergoing.
...got nailed twice. He was driving around the U.S. late at night, heading back into Canada, and a patrol unit pulled him over, threw everything out of the back of his trunk, then interrogated him for a little while. He drank some kind of radioactive fluid to treat his cancer after his surgery, and it had set off an alarm in the patrol car.
Same thing happened once he got to the border. The border guard let him go, then some guy came running out of the customs building screaming at the top of his lungs. They stopped him and he had to read them the same story all over again. This drug is so powerful he can only take it once every six months.
Mozilla.org now has xft RPMs available for RH8. Check a mirror (mozilla.org is slow right now), but in any case it should be around/mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft/RPMS/i386
You can replace "xft" with "vanilla" if you want (to get the non-xft support), and RPMS with SRPMS if you want to build RPMS from source (perhaps for a different arch, remove the i386).
Note that Mozilla isn't exactly dependent directly on KDE. To get smoothing, you actually use XFT, with is unrelated to KDE (KDE uses it through QT, but neither are a part of each other).
Another poster mentioned the xft support is experimental. He's probably right, so ymmv. I've been running the RPMS I mentioned above for a few hours with 0 problems on RH8, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Two words: Metroid Prime. If you've played it (Gamecube), you'll know what console FPS is all about.
I played Red Faction II on the PS2 with a keyboard/mouse. It was better than using the controller, but it still seemed kind of clumsy (the movement with the mouse was slow to respond). I find the best console games are ones that are designed directly for that specific console -- instead of having multi-platform engines adding bulky overhead to an otherwise fine game. Additionally, games targetted to a specific platform can take advantage of features only that platform has. Kind of the opposite of the Java philosophy, but when I have a game running at 20fps on a console with graphics that could arguably run at 60fps, I notice a difference (a la Gran Turismo 3)...
I believe Sun is having a hard time finding a direction, right now.
Maybe Sun has found their direction. I'm only speculating, but when Microsoft wants to improve their PR, they dump $100 million into India to fight AIDS. I look at Sun in a different light given their contributions to open source. Granted, their may be genuine interest by their employees to donate work and code to the open source community, which leads me to believe that this may not be simply a PR stunt. It's advantageous to Sun to be able to place their mark in software that they believe will eventually be in use by a great number of people (is that a run-on sentence?). I say bring it on. Whatever benefits us as a community benefits the whole, whether it's a group of individuals, or a giant corporation, donating their time and effort.
I don't like my PDA because the screen is too small.
I like my PDA because the screen IS too small. When I have to pound in somebody's address, grab a note or hit play in the media player, I don't want to whip out this giant tablet. I want something small, like a little black book. It doesn't need to be able to display 1024x768 on a 15" diagonal landscape, it needs to be small and subtle.
"Your phone number is...? Just a second while I mount my giant tablet PC with its huge screen on my arm...- give me room, OK, ready..."
It's not a matter of "Linux" having service packs. I'm assuming you use a specific distribution. You have to trust that distribution to release updates for your system as necessary. You can't binary patch the Linux kernel, because no binaries are released, only source. Red Hat, for example, has binary releases of the kernel (included in their distribution), but doesn't bother releasing service packs, instead they release updates as they see fit (pretty much the same thing).
I don't quite understand the obsession with using the latest and greatest. I'm not going to grab this and compile it for my machine; a) 2.4.19 works fine and b) I skimmed through the changelog and didn't really see anything that affected my situation, and c) My roommate will scream at me if I take down the server just to update the kernel by a double-point revision.
You mentioned when you update the kernel/compiler it breaks a lot of applications. You'll have to be more specific. I can see problems when migrating from a 2.2 kernel to a 2.4 kernel, or from gcc 2.x to gcc 3.x, but if you use one of the major distributions, this is trivial. The thought of using "service packs" on an open source operating system indicates to me that you don't have a clear handle on the way things work in Linux.
One of the biggest fixed I've noticed is that warning about the system include path. When you specify something like -I/usr/include (redundant, which often happens when you configure with your prefix as/usr instead of/usr/local), you'll get warnings about the system include path search order being changed. Sometimes it's treated as an error, other times just a warning, but I've had 20-30 packages fail to compile because of this, and it's a bitch to get rid of when you have to sift through about 10-20 makefiles. I upgraded to 3.2.1 and haven't looked back.
Are you OK with all the Web sites, and people walking around wearing your face on their T-shirts? Oh, whatever, I think it's kind of funny. These people don't have lives.
That's it, I'm taking this T-shirt off. And you can have my mug back.
Get a clue. We recognize the win2k common criteria certification was announced before. This post directs us to a paper with an analysis on what the certification means.
Re:Wow. How disgusting.
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 5, Funny
The U.S. General Accounting Office has estimated states lose nearly $13 billion each year on untaxed Internet transactions.
Yeah, and I lose several grand a year by not skimming funds off a local company's treasury. "Lose" is too misleading. It's like buying a can of beans with a coupon and saving 49 whole cents.
West Nile is a virus. There are no antibiotics for viruses, only treatments and immune shots. Immune shots allow our own bodies to make antibodies against viruses, so they shouldn't be susceptible to a similar problem with viruses (although immune shots must be taken at least several weeks before exposure to the virus).
Slashdot Mirror
The author makes little to no suggestions as to what we can do to solve this problem. Even more useless is that he does not even describe the problem he's trying to present. Like another poster mentioned, just because a group of people use Windows does not make them united.
I believe the Linux wave is going great. Linux software is farther ahead than it's ever been (since it's been given time and hard work), and we're gradually coming to accept a certain number of features as "standard" for any given distribution. Making his comparison to Microsoft, he seems to suggest that all the distributions should "unite together" and make one big distribution. But then... where's the choice? Where's the variety that shows us alternatives and suggests ways to improve our systems even more? There is no one solution, and I'm happy that all these distributions exist, as it allows me to find my own solution based upon the work of a dedicated group of people. Without Mandrake and Suse, who's to say Red Hat Linux is the right solution? Likewise, without RH and Mandrake, who's to say Suse is the right solution?
The only thing I can think of, and something he didn't touched on, is the rippling of changes back to the original maintainers. There's nothing more frustrating than adding a component to your own custom system and thinking, "How did Red Hat put this all together?" Of course, you can always grab their source and figure out how they did it. I find a lot of these changes that the individual distributions make are bug fixes or feature improvements (patches so the software installs properly, or extra data to allow better integration into GNOME/KDE menus). It frustrates me that these changes don't make it back to the original package maintainers as often as they could. I would love to see the pam_stack module make it back into the Linux pam distribution so it can provide base level authentication services without the need for lengthy post-package patches and other tweaks.
Granted, there are some modifications that come with the territory. I see no reason for maintainers to have to adopt the Blue Curve theme that Red Hat uses to dress KDE and GNOME like each other. But at the same time, it would be nice to be able to pick and choose software packages and not have to worry about re-doing common work that all the distributions have already done.
Anyways, back to the article. I think this guy spouts a whole lot of nothing. There is nothing wrong with the way things are going with Linux and if there is, we'll get there soon. But keep in mind that Linux users are not Microsoft any more than Windows users are Microsoft. I use Linux because I feel comfortable and secure using the environment. I built my own server system from scratch because I wasn't happy with the choices offered by the different distributions. And that's the luxury of using an open system, to pick and choose exactly what you want.
Since when do telephone systems maintain themselves? Last I heard, my voice was still running along wires and branching about in switching stations. Unless I'm mistaken, they still require maintenance. Granted that the operating costs have been reduced (fewer operators = fewer wages), but you could take a similar stance on IT. What about self-help forums where you can search a knowledge base to find answers? These can replace a lot of man hours of technical support work. There's always going to be some kind of human element to whatever equation. We're never going to find empty power plants that can generate their own electricity indefinitely, because there's always going to have to be human intervention.
Some businesses demand complex solutions, and I fail to see how these complex solutions are going to be met by turnkey solutions -- where a manager can go out, purchase a server, turn it on, and have it run his business for a year without any kind of customization whatsoever.
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/345/region/FBI_sig ns_first_of_its_kind_de:.shtml_ guys_but_I_prefer_shorter_links_ on_boston_daily_news.html
/g
I_dunno_about_you
s/_/
There's a report on it in the New England Journal of Medicine (1998). It's not a capsule of plutonium or anything, it's a radioactive iodine. I didn't believe it myself until I saw the kind of treatment he was undergoing.
...got nailed twice. He was driving around the U.S. late at night, heading back into Canada, and a patrol unit pulled him over, threw everything out of the back of his trunk, then interrogated him for a little while. He drank some kind of radioactive fluid to treat his cancer after his surgery, and it had set off an alarm in the patrol car.
Same thing happened once he got to the border. The border guard let him go, then some guy came running out of the customs building screaming at the top of his lungs. They stopped him and he had to read them the same story all over again. This drug is so powerful he can only take it once every six months.
You mean... Harry and the Hendersons.... WASN'T a documentary?
Mozilla.org now has xft RPMs available for RH8. Check a mirror (mozilla.org is slow right now), but in any case it should be around /mozilla/releases/mozilla1.2.1/Red_Hat_8x_RPMS/xft /RPMS/i386
You can replace "xft" with "vanilla" if you want (to get the non-xft support), and RPMS with SRPMS if you want to build RPMS from source (perhaps for a different arch, remove the i386).
Note that Mozilla isn't exactly dependent directly on KDE. To get smoothing, you actually use XFT, with is unrelated to KDE (KDE uses it through QT, but neither are a part of each other).
Another poster mentioned the xft support is experimental. He's probably right, so ymmv. I've been running the RPMS I mentioned above for a few hours with 0 problems on RH8, and it looks absolutely gorgeous.
Two words: Metroid Prime. If you've played it (Gamecube), you'll know what console FPS is all about.
I played Red Faction II on the PS2 with a keyboard/mouse. It was better than using the controller, but it still seemed kind of clumsy (the movement with the mouse was slow to respond). I find the best console games are ones that are designed directly for that specific console -- instead of having multi-platform engines adding bulky overhead to an otherwise fine game. Additionally, games targetted to a specific platform can take advantage of features only that platform has. Kind of the opposite of the Java philosophy, but when I have a game running at 20fps on a console with graphics that could arguably run at 60fps, I notice a difference (a la Gran Turismo 3)...
Yeah, a toilet with a respirator.
I like how if you actually HAD a valid point, you wouldn't have posted AC.
I believe Sun is having a hard time finding a direction, right now.
Maybe Sun has found their direction. I'm only speculating, but when Microsoft wants to improve their PR, they dump $100 million into India to fight AIDS. I look at Sun in a different light given their contributions to open source. Granted, their may be genuine interest by their employees to donate work and code to the open source community, which leads me to believe that this may not be simply a PR stunt. It's advantageous to Sun to be able to place their mark in software that they believe will eventually be in use by a great number of people (is that a run-on sentence?). I say bring it on. Whatever benefits us as a community benefits the whole, whether it's a group of individuals, or a giant corporation, donating their time and effort.
I don't like my PDA because the screen is too small.
I like my PDA because the screen IS too small. When I have to pound in somebody's address, grab a note or hit play in the media player, I don't want to whip out this giant tablet. I want something small, like a little black book. It doesn't need to be able to display 1024x768 on a 15" diagonal landscape, it needs to be small and subtle.
"Your phone number is...? Just a second while I mount my giant tablet PC with its huge screen on my arm...- give me room, OK, ready..."
Oh yeah? Well beat this!
./fib.sh 40
# cat fib.sh
fib() {
n=$1
if [ "$n" -lt "2" ]; then
echo -n "1"
else
first=$(fib $((n-1)))
second=$(fib $((n-2)))
echo -n $((first+second))
fi
}
fib $1
# time
(it's been 10 minutes and I'm still waiting...)
It's not a matter of "Linux" having service packs. I'm assuming you use a specific distribution. You have to trust that distribution to release updates for your system as necessary. You can't binary patch the Linux kernel, because no binaries are released, only source. Red Hat, for example, has binary releases of the kernel (included in their distribution), but doesn't bother releasing service packs, instead they release updates as they see fit (pretty much the same thing).
I don't quite understand the obsession with using the latest and greatest. I'm not going to grab this and compile it for my machine; a) 2.4.19 works fine and b) I skimmed through the changelog and didn't really see anything that affected my situation, and c) My roommate will scream at me if I take down the server just to update the kernel by a double-point revision.
You mentioned when you update the kernel/compiler it breaks a lot of applications. You'll have to be more specific. I can see problems when migrating from a 2.2 kernel to a 2.4 kernel, or from gcc 2.x to gcc 3.x, but if you use one of the major distributions, this is trivial. The thought of using "service packs" on an open source operating system indicates to me that you don't have a clear handle on the way things work in Linux.
Check at the -1 level... something about a goat, I think...
One of the biggest fixed I've noticed is that warning about the system include path. When you specify something like -I/usr/include (redundant, which often happens when you configure with your prefix as /usr instead of /usr/local), you'll get warnings about the system include path search order being changed. Sometimes it's treated as an error, other times just a warning, but I've had 20-30 packages fail to compile because of this, and it's a bitch to get rid of when you have to sift through about 10-20 makefiles. I upgraded to 3.2.1 and haven't looked back.
Are you OK with all the Web sites, and people walking around wearing your face on their T-shirts?
Oh, whatever, I think it's kind of funny. These people don't have lives.
That's it, I'm taking this T-shirt off. And you can have my mug back.
Get a clue. We recognize the win2k common criteria certification was announced before. This post directs us to a paper with an analysis on what the certification means.
No, YOU download ME.
I would tend to agree.
Have you seen the price of CMYK ink cartridges? They're ridiculous!
The U.S. General Accounting Office has estimated states lose nearly $13 billion each year on untaxed Internet transactions.
Yeah, and I lose several grand a year by not skimming funds off a local company's treasury. "Lose" is too misleading. It's like buying a can of beans with a coupon and saving 49 whole cents.
West Nile is a virus. There are no antibiotics for viruses, only treatments and immune shots. Immune shots allow our own bodies to make antibodies against viruses, so they shouldn't be susceptible to a similar problem with viruses (although immune shots must be taken at least several weeks before exposure to the virus).
Nonetheless, I can't wait to see a bug that causes the voting system to count down and give 4294967295 votes to a single candidate.
all the complexities of a normal home
Does it have a Beowulf cluster of... uh...