I used to think the same. And then I got a non intel box (PPC). Suddenly the binary drivers from both ATI and nVidia were useless. And guess which chipset has better open source support? Hint: it isn't nVidia...
This is a bug in the draft licence which sun is actively working on. It won't be a problem in the final version. For some reason the summary forgot to mention that...
So flows the poster's thoughts... "It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality"... "[but] isn't that what all creative artists (writers, painters, programmers etc.) actually do?"
Yes, that is exactly what all creative artists do. But creative artists generally have lousy lives, especially the brilliant (=misunderstood) ones. Oh, sure, we may love the fruits of their labour (Ulysses, The Potato Farmers, Linux) but it is pretty rare to actually want to live their lives...
Well Mr. Ignorant... Try having a look at the definition of 'theory' sometime. You might find it means something a little different to 'proof'. Specifically, we don't know exactly what is going to happen. Ergo, saying "the theory" of makes as much sense as saying "the theory" of medicine. Would you refuse to take drugs because we don't know yet why they work?
Let me explain it to you simply: there are a shitload of people worried about this and as a rough trend, the smarter and more knowledgeable these people are, the more worried they are.
All of those people have slightly different ideas about what the effects are going to be. I doubt there is a single quantiative statement which you could get them all to agree on but if you just stick to the statements that say 80% of the people with PhDs in biology agree on, then you should get a pretty good working theory. Summary: We're in for a more volatile climate, and sea levels are going to rise.
How much? We don't know for sure yet. Maybe humanity is going to be wiped out and there is squat we can do about it so you may as well enjoy yourself. Maybe it will just mean your kids will choose different areas of the world to vacation in. Odds are, we're in for a lot of trouble.
There are also a few nutcases who, for whatever reason, still have their heads in the sand. Perhaps they're financially connected with denial, perhaps politically, or perhaps the denial is the only thing making them famous and they'd just lose too much face if they came clean. Predictably, there's a similar number of crackpots on the other side of the fence, perhaps you've read stuff from them.
Regardless of the crackpots, there is now an awful lot of literature which says we're going to be in for a hellova rough time and that there are some things we could do to make the time better. Now, depending on the literature you read you'll no doubt get different ideas of how rough it is going to get, the sad truth is we won't know until we have hindsight to tell us. Similarly, we don't really know how mcuh difference the preventative measures will make.
It is theoretically possible that we could just all play make-believe and some wonderful scientific discovery will make all the nasty problems go away before they burst your bubble. It is also possible that you'll win the lottery next week. Personally, I don't want to bet the future of humanity at such long odds.
Everybody knows that having MS as a compeditor is terrible news for a company. But if you're producing a product, say quicken, and MS comes along with Money, then you can hardly close up shop without a fight. And that means better prices for everyone buying commercial software.
That's not to say there is no compertition without MS, but everybody knows they're targeting the lower end of the market and that they'll fight dirty--being happy to lose money on a product for a few years. So it is really no surprise their more severe form of compertition results in better prices.
Much as I dislike your current president, I think you can blame the trend of americans to consume rather than produce for the current problem. Previously this didn't affect the dollar much due to it mainly being produced locally. Now most stuff is manufactured overseas you need to export something of the same value to whatever you inport and if you don't the dollar will drop.
Personally I think it could probably still be saved without any sweating by overweight americans. All that is really needed is to get a large amount of money (federal reserves, etc.) and buy lots of 3rd world country sweatshops &co. The profit they make will then automatically be returned to the US, raising the value of the dollar.
Is it a troll? I found it too confusing to say. The article is looking for technical differences between linux and SVR4. Consider this quote: "Specifically, what's needed here is the low level programmer view, not of what's out there by way of applications..."
The impression I got was the author was way over his depth writing it, and was largely aware of this. Consider the final conclusion "If there's a real bottom line here, the one thing I'm clear on is that I haven't found it yet". Now, that's either a very good troll or a genuine article.
As for answering the article. Well, the painfully obvious difference is in hardware support. SVR4 is a joke in terms of hardware support compared to linux.
In terms of 'features' like kgdb, ptrace, LVM, NUMA, SMP, well I don't think I even know enough to make an informed comment. I will note that the author's attempts to draw comparisons appear extremely weak to me (particularly WRT threading).
Also, the author also seemed to confuse a number of architectural weaknesses with kernel weaknesses. Run linux on a toy mainframe and it won't have mainframe hardware features. Well, Doh. Run Solaris on personal computer hardware and it won't either. Run linux on mainframe hardware and it will.
So, I consider the article very weak, and not worth the electrons it was distributed on. However, it is a fair enough question to ask. It is just a pity to ask it so badly and then slip in bits like the SCO lawsuit for extra hits.
How many computer or consumer-electronics companies do you know whose official, written company policy is "Sorry for the inconvenience, here's your new one?"
One (ascent.co.nz). They now get all my business, even though they cost more.
Yes, it is ugly. It integrates very badly into the rest of the system (e.g. you can't alt-tab to it properly). Copy-Paste doesn't work between other apps well. The whole UI feels like a unix application.
I guess it would be like running a windows app on linux and having the whole thing feel like a windows app. Sure, it runs and it is better than nothing, but compared to a true linux app it is awful.
A native (carbonised) OOo would be suitable for giving to people running OSX that ask for a word processor. An X11 OOo is suitable for linux users who also have a mac.
This has been explained numerous times before, and quite nicely on lwn.net. Sadly you're not the only person who has missed it so I'll repeat it here.
Using the kernel directly from kernel.org is (now) for hobbyists, not for people concerned about absolute stability. People concerned about stability should use the kernel from their distributor.
You say 2.6.5 was the last stable kernel. Personally I would have listed 2.6.10, and then 2.6.5 but that's irrelevant. Say you're running 2.6.5 and a vulnerability is discovered. You get an updated 2.6.5 from your distributor and the problem goes away. You do not get 2.6.11.
See how it works? From a distributor's perspective they now have more choice (should they base their distro off 2.6.5, 2.6.7, 2.6.10 or... but I don't know any distro that wants you to upgrade kernels to different versions.
Sadly, no. You might be right that admins knowing what they're doing are not using them, but admins who don't know what they're doing are.
Most people in North America use RedHat products, and for whatever reason they default to bind+sendmail. Few of these people change off these defaults, so a lot of people are installing and running bind and sendmail.
Seems crazy to me, but RH must have a reason. And I hope it isn't just politics...
Incidentially, the finding of exploits found in bind and sendmail has really slowed to a crawl.
It seems that, even though they were written in different times and without security as the first concern, a sufficiently large number of bug fixes will eventually result in code that is almost as secure.
You missed the G5 iMac which is working very well as a switching product. Sure, it isn't a bargain entry level computer but then neither is the iPod a bargain entry level music player.
At $1900 it costs a little more than a similar white box PC. The monitor will set you back almost $800, and the system will set you back about $900, then $100 for XP. And that's with a standard SFF box, not with the CPU integrated into the monitor.
Since when was ARM high performance? ARM is cheap, runs cool, doesn't use much power, and has a couple other advantages. But there is no way its big selling point is performance.
Indeed. The grandparent's argument worked about 10 years ago back when IBM computers had multiple buttons (2, 3, six in one case) and macs (and the 2GS) had one.
What were the extra buttons for? IBM users didn't really know: "Oh, in paintshop the second button does copy, the third does paste,...". Then came windows 95, 98, XP,... and the idea of a context menu went from obscure applications to standard.
Now, context menus are damn intuitive and very consistant. MacOS supports them nicely too. Apple really should start offering the mice.
"you can check the md5sums!" The 9.3 million of those 10.1 million Windows downloads probably won't bother. You're right, at least 9.3/10.1 wouldn't bother. But you can bet that some percentage, perhaps one in 1000, will. And those people will be really anal about it -- checking the.asc using a master key they get from gpg --recv-keys which is automatically verified through their web of trust.
And when that file doesn't match, you can bet they'll scream bloddy murder.
Contrast that to microsoft's setup. Every update is 'required' to pass an MD5 checksum, but what's the bet that the update is allowed to unpack itself first, and since it is running as administrator it will be allowed to overwrite the location of the system call for the checksum.
The point I'm making is that Microsoft's security is easy and automatic, but little more than a facade. Firefox's use of GPG makes it unbreakable, but it is so hard to use very few users will bother. I know I would rather have solid security than a veil of semi-security, but I can understand the journalist missing the superficial security.
Of course, Firefox could have integrated superficial security as well. And firefox could have made the true GPG security a little easier to test.
Curiously, that's pretty much how I feel about GE food. But everybody keeps trying to assure me it is safe and labelling their products as modified is a huge waste of money. *shrug*
You ever tried to sell to big corporate executives? It is damn hard, you have to very slick. Oh sure, you can be peddling crap, but unless you're a lot slicker than me, you won't get anywhere.
If you look, the grandparent only used caps twice in his whole post. The title was all in lower case. The first letter of the first word (I) was in upper case, and RIAA was in caps. That's only four presses of the caps-lock key, compared to 34 presses of the space bar.
One of the most effective uses I've seen of technology in similar situations is marketing. If people see flash webcams and the like, they may well be tempted to come even though you are making very little use of them in teaching. From this perspective, you should be looking for technology that has a real 'wow' factor about it. For instance, 'free' ipods with lessons and the like.
An alternative goal is technology that actually helps with education. There's plenty in this regard to. For instance, my lab is developing a talking head where you can chat in the language being learned. Mistakes are automatically detected and personal profiles are developed. The system starts with a lesson plan and develops dialogues around it. This is for a fairly obscure language (Maori) and I would expect major languages to already have such tools out of the research labs.
But my point is that if you're looking for the technologies that are useful, then you need to start with a clear goal (improve pronunciation, improve grammar, improve lexicon,...) and from there software and hardware will naturally follow. However, if your goal is marketing then you'll end up with a totally different set of solutions.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think the same. And then I got a non intel box (PPC). Suddenly the binary drivers from both ATI and nVidia were useless. And guess which chipset has better open source support? Hint: it isn't nVidia...
Yeah, it'll work fine. It is just the mouse apple ships with new computers. Multi-button mice are common, and work much like in windows.
Summary: There is a bug in the draft of the licence. With any luck it will be fixed when the licence is released.
This is a bug in the draft licence which sun is actively working on. It won't be a problem in the final version. For some reason the summary forgot to mention that...
So flows the poster's thoughts... "It's not a healthy thing to lock yourself in a room and create your own reality" ... "[but] isn't that what all creative artists (writers, painters, programmers etc.) actually do?"
Yes, that is exactly what all creative artists do. But creative artists generally have lousy lives, especially the brilliant (=misunderstood) ones. Oh, sure, we may love the fruits of their labour (Ulysses, The Potato Farmers, Linux) but it is pretty rare to actually want to live their lives...
Well Mr. Ignorant... Try having a look at the definition of 'theory' sometime. You might find it means something a little different to 'proof'. Specifically, we don't know exactly what is going to happen. Ergo, saying "the theory" of makes as much sense as saying "the theory" of medicine. Would you refuse to take drugs because we don't know yet why they work?
Let me explain it to you simply: there are a shitload of people worried about this and as a rough trend, the smarter and more knowledgeable these people are, the more worried they are.
All of those people have slightly different ideas about what the effects are going to be. I doubt there is a single quantiative statement which you could get them all to agree on but if you just stick to the statements that say 80% of the people with PhDs in biology agree on, then you should get a pretty good working theory. Summary: We're in for a more volatile climate, and sea levels are going to rise.
How much? We don't know for sure yet. Maybe humanity is going to be wiped out and there is squat we can do about it so you may as well enjoy yourself. Maybe it will just mean your kids will choose different areas of the world to vacation in. Odds are, we're in for a lot of trouble.
There are also a few nutcases who, for whatever reason, still have their heads in the sand. Perhaps they're financially connected with denial, perhaps politically, or perhaps the denial is the only thing making them famous and they'd just lose too much face if they came clean. Predictably, there's a similar number of crackpots on the other side of the fence, perhaps you've read stuff from them.
Regardless of the crackpots, there is now an awful lot of literature which says we're going to be in for a hellova rough time and that there are some things we could do to make the time better. Now, depending on the literature you read you'll no doubt get different ideas of how rough it is going to get, the sad truth is we won't know until we have hindsight to tell us. Similarly, we don't really know how mcuh difference the preventative measures will make.
It is theoretically possible that we could just all play make-believe and some wonderful scientific discovery will make all the nasty problems go away before they burst your bubble. It is also possible that you'll win the lottery next week. Personally, I don't want to bet the future of humanity at such long odds.
Everybody knows that having MS as a compeditor is terrible news for a company. But if you're producing a product, say quicken, and MS comes along with Money, then you can hardly close up shop without a fight. And that means better prices for everyone buying commercial software.
That's not to say there is no compertition without MS, but everybody knows they're targeting the lower end of the market and that they'll fight dirty--being happy to lose money on a product for a few years. So it is really no surprise their more severe form of compertition results in better prices.
Much as I dislike your current president, I think you can blame the trend of americans to consume rather than produce for the current problem. Previously this didn't affect the dollar much due to it mainly being produced locally. Now most stuff is manufactured overseas you need to export something of the same value to whatever you inport and if you don't the dollar will drop.
Personally I think it could probably still be saved without any sweating by overweight americans. All that is really needed is to get a large amount of money (federal reserves, etc.) and buy lots of 3rd world country sweatshops &co. The profit they make will then automatically be returned to the US, raising the value of the dollar.
Yeah, they started the last price drop about a year ago. I'm guessing they can still drop a little further, but we'll see.
Is it a troll? I found it too confusing to say. The article is looking for technical differences between linux and SVR4. Consider this quote: "Specifically, what's needed here is the low level programmer view, not of what's out there by way of applications..."
The impression I got was the author was way over his depth writing it, and was largely aware of this. Consider the final conclusion "If there's a real bottom line here, the one thing I'm clear on is that I haven't found it yet". Now, that's either a very good troll or a genuine article.
As for answering the article. Well, the painfully obvious difference is in hardware support. SVR4 is a joke in terms of hardware support compared to linux.
In terms of 'features' like kgdb, ptrace, LVM, NUMA, SMP, well I don't think I even know enough to make an informed comment. I will note that the author's attempts to draw comparisons appear extremely weak to me (particularly WRT threading).
Also, the author also seemed to confuse a number of architectural weaknesses with kernel weaknesses. Run linux on a toy mainframe and it won't have mainframe hardware features. Well, Doh. Run Solaris on personal computer hardware and it won't either. Run linux on mainframe hardware and it will.
So, I consider the article very weak, and not worth the electrons it was distributed on. However, it is a fair enough question to ask. It is just a pity to ask it so badly and then slip in bits like the SCO lawsuit for extra hits.
How many computer or consumer-electronics companies do you know whose official, written company policy is "Sorry for the inconvenience, here's your new one?"
One (ascent.co.nz). They now get all my business, even though they cost more.
Yes, it is ugly. It integrates very badly into the rest of the system (e.g. you can't alt-tab to it properly). Copy-Paste doesn't work between other apps well. The whole UI feels like a unix application.
I guess it would be like running a windows app on linux and having the whole thing feel like a windows app. Sure, it runs and it is better than nothing, but compared to a true linux app it is awful.
A native (carbonised) OOo would be suitable for giving to people running OSX that ask for a word processor. An X11 OOo is suitable for linux users who also have a mac.
This has been explained numerous times before, and quite nicely on lwn.net. Sadly you're not the only person who has missed it so I'll repeat it here.
... but I don't know any distro that wants you to upgrade kernels to different versions.
Using the kernel directly from kernel.org is (now) for hobbyists, not for people concerned about absolute stability. People concerned about stability should use the kernel from their distributor.
You say 2.6.5 was the last stable kernel. Personally I would have listed 2.6.10, and then 2.6.5 but that's irrelevant. Say you're running 2.6.5 and a vulnerability is discovered. You get an updated 2.6.5 from your distributor and the problem goes away. You do not get 2.6.11.
See how it works? From a distributor's perspective they now have more choice (should they base their distro off 2.6.5, 2.6.7, 2.6.10 or
Corrin
Sadly, no. You might be right that admins knowing what they're doing are not using them, but admins who don't know what they're doing are.
Most people in North America use RedHat products, and for whatever reason they default to bind+sendmail. Few of these people change off these defaults, so a lot of people are installing and running bind and sendmail.
Seems crazy to me, but RH must have a reason. And I hope it isn't just politics...
Incidentially, the finding of exploits found in bind and sendmail has really slowed to a crawl.
It seems that, even though they were written in different times and without security as the first concern, a sufficiently large number of bug fixes will eventually result in code that is almost as secure.
You missed the G5 iMac which is working very well as a switching product. Sure, it isn't a bargain entry level computer but then neither is the iPod a bargain entry level music player.
At $1900 it costs a little more than a similar white box PC. The monitor will set you back almost $800, and the system will set you back about $900, then $100 for XP. And that's with a standard SFF box, not with the CPU integrated into the monitor.
Since when was ARM high performance? ARM is cheap, runs cool, doesn't use much power, and has a couple other advantages. But there is no way its big selling point is performance.
Indeed. The grandparent's argument worked about 10 years ago back when IBM computers had multiple buttons (2, 3, six in one case) and macs (and the 2GS) had one.
...". Then came windows 95, 98, XP, ... and the idea of a context menu went from obscure applications to standard.
...
What were the extra buttons for? IBM users didn't really know: "Oh, in paintshop the second button does copy, the third does paste,
Now, context menus are damn intuitive and very consistant. MacOS supports them nicely too. Apple really should start offering the mice.
Of course 3rd party mice work fine, but
"you can check the md5sums!" The 9.3 million of those 10.1 million Windows downloads probably won't bother. .asc using a master key they get from gpg --recv-keys which is automatically verified through their web of trust.
You're right, at least 9.3/10.1 wouldn't bother. But you can bet that some percentage, perhaps one in 1000, will. And those people will be really anal about it -- checking the
And when that file doesn't match, you can bet they'll scream bloddy murder.
Contrast that to microsoft's setup. Every update is 'required' to pass an MD5 checksum, but what's the bet that the update is allowed to unpack itself first, and since it is running as administrator it will be allowed to overwrite the location of the system call for the checksum.
The point I'm making is that Microsoft's security is easy and automatic, but little more than a facade. Firefox's use of GPG makes it unbreakable, but it is so hard to use very few users will bother. I know I would rather have solid security than a veil of semi-security, but I can understand the journalist missing the superficial security.
Of course, Firefox could have integrated superficial security as well. And firefox could have made the true GPG security a little easier to test.
Curiously, that's pretty much how I feel about GE food. But everybody keeps trying to assure me it is safe and labelling their products as modified is a huge waste of money. *shrug*
Closer to a PIII@600MHz, not that it matters.
Er, no. A single web site with all the programs I want to download sounds ideal. Having a tracker only serving one program really sucks.
You ever tried to sell to big corporate executives? It is damn hard, you have to very slick. Oh sure, you can be peddling crap, but unless you're a lot slicker than me, you won't get anywhere.
If you look, the grandparent only used caps twice in his whole post. The title was all in lower case. The first letter of the first word (I) was in upper case, and RIAA was in caps. That's only four presses of the caps-lock key, compared to 34 presses of the space bar.
One of the most effective uses I've seen of technology in similar situations is marketing. If people see flash webcams and the like, they may well be tempted to come even though you are making very little use of them in teaching. From this perspective, you should be looking for technology that has a real 'wow' factor about it. For instance, 'free' ipods with lessons and the like.
...) and from there software and hardware will naturally follow. However, if your goal is marketing then you'll end up with a totally different set of solutions.
An alternative goal is technology that actually helps with education. There's plenty in this regard to. For instance, my lab is developing a talking head where you can chat in the language being learned. Mistakes are automatically detected and personal profiles are developed. The system starts with a lesson plan and develops dialogues around it. This is for a fairly obscure language (Maori) and I would expect major languages to already have such tools out of the research labs.
But my point is that if you're looking for the technologies that are useful, then you need to start with a clear goal (improve pronunciation, improve grammar, improve lexicon,