If people don't want to call GNU by it's proper name, no one can force them. But don't let the issue be sidetracked into trying to label what percentage is GNU and what is X and so forth - it doesn't matter. GNU was the vision, and the FSF produced the pieces no one else would, to make that vision reality. I, for one, think we all owe them a debt we can never repay. Calling the OS by it's proper name is only fair.
And how is my saying that "Linux" really ought to be called "GNU" as far as I'm concerned? (Not GNU/Linux) "missing the point?"
The reason I don't (something we really haven't discussed) is purely pragmatic, no-one would know what I was on about if I did. It's not as if I didn't know the difference. I've been using GNU software long before I ever took up Linux. But in the end it's just a name, and if it's known under a name that may not be the "best" one from all perspectives, unfortunately that's the way it is.
I respect Stallmans perceverance in going against the tide though, even to the point of trying to change a name of a system into something that won't work (from purely a lexicograpical standpoint; GNU/Linux is just too much of a mouthful). If he hadn't persevered we wouldn't know free software the way we do.
No, but as I said I don't even call it GNU/Linux either, so what's your point?
But they're running Windows. For operating systems, they have standardized on Windows. For document creation, they have standardized on Office.
Yes, that's what they'll tell you. But when it comes to replacement, the cost of chucking Office is a lot higher than that of chucking windows. Believe me. I've also run crossover office in such an environment, and that's OK. Even in the eyes of the IT-dept as long as I don't expect any support from them. If I had started sending around LaTeX documents though, that would have had me summoned to my boss faster than you could say "supercali...". Since that's actually important to the everyday operation of the company, that's a no-no.
but that's like replacing the shell on Windows and claiming it's not Windows anymore.
Exactly. It wouldn't be, in the sense of the word that Stallman and I are using it (and most others to). Just as taking a bare bones Linux kernel, put it on a floppy and port the freedos tools to it would hardly be "Linux" anymore. It'd run a Linux kernel, but fat lot of good that would do to the users who expected that their knowledge of how to get actuall work done using that system would carry over.
That doesn't mean you're still not running Linux. A non-stop Quake gamer could change from Linux to Windows and still use Quake on either one, but he doesn't use Quake/Linux or Quake/Windows...
Which really brings us back to my point. Just as "Quake" would really be the apt term for what he's running. "GNU" is closer to the truthful name for what most of us are running. Closer than "GNU/Linux" and "Linux".
I've met very few workstation users (well I've met quite a few actually, but only because the guys doing OS-research is on the next floor) where the specific kernel made much difference (given that they supported the same hardware).
I haven't met any user that was happy with a 'superior' OS that didn't support the applications he needed to run. (Well actually I've met a few of those as well, testament to the same skewed company I keep as I mentioned above).
I still call it Linux though, but I don't really include the Linux kernel in the equation, it's just a name after all. I realise it's the one piece of the puzzle i could easiest do without. A BSD kernel with the GNU toolchain and all the other tools I use would do just as nicely.
I have the feeling we may have ended (or perhaps always was in) a rather dreary semantic quibble over what the term "operating system" means. I use the Tannenbaums definition (paraphrased):
"An operating system does two things. First it arbitrates the access to system resources such as memory/disk/printers etc, such that users get their fair share, and doesn't get in each others way. Secondly they provide the user with an abstraction to the underlying hardware, since that is too tedious to use directly, i.e. they provide the users with a abstract virtual machine that is much more powerful (and hence less generally useful) than the iron."
I have a feeling your focus is on the first part, while I'm more interested in the second.
even when linux started, most PCs were running 286s, where linux wouldn't run. the stated aim of minix was to make a unix like OS available that ran on machines that students could afford.
Minix even required less of a platform than that. It ran on 8086 systems without a harddisk. Though you could install on a harddisk if you wished. I remember running it on my 8086 Amstrad with two 5.25 inch floppys before I could lay my hands on a 20 Meg hardcard. Those were the days.;-)
Someone maintained "386"-patches, that would use the MMU etc, but they always had to be distributed as patches, there could (as you say) never be a Minix-386 distribution. Which made it a bit of a pain to work with it.
The problem with Minix as a teaching tool was that it was too sucessful IMHO. People learned too much and immediately wanted to put their knowledge to good use, i.e. by extending Minix. Tannenbaum wouldn't have any of it, which is understandable given the goal of keeping Minix a teaching system.
Linux is running all my drivers, talking to all my hardware, managing my memory and my processes. It is controlling my computer as an operational system. You can take GNU out of the equation with a bit of work and Linux will still go at it.
You know it's the complete oposite for me. Having had to spend time both in BSD (4.3) and Solaris/SunOS land, I cannot get work done without the GNU toolchain. Solaris without GNU is such a hassle that it does not bear thinking about.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's really the same thing for you. You don't actually use the kernel, just the services it provides. And most of the difference between kernels in UNIX-land (if not all that matters) is in the non-functional specs, i.e. how fast/much memory you can handle etc. BUT for most uses that doesn't matter much. My workstation keeps on chugging whether the memory management routines can be tweeked or not.
About the only functional difference between kernels is the hardware support, and that's indeed the reason I run linux on most my machines as well. The oposite is true of the old SPARC boxen I have the misfortune to work with though. Linux doesn't cut it there. Solaris with the GNU toolchain is virtually impossible to tell apart though (for non server type loads) as a workstation since they both support the same free software we all love and use.
I use Office and Dev-Cpp almost exclusively on Windows, but I don't say Office/Bloodshed/Windows, because I'm choosing to use Windows, and I just happen to have to use those apps all the time under Windows to get anything done.
That's were we differ. Whether it's Linux/Solaris/Windows I still run Emacs/LaTeX to get work done. To me it's really the application that's important for the "getting things done part", not the iron we run it on. That's why many shops who say they have standardised on windows are wrong, what they really have standardised on is MS Office. They still call it Windows though. And I have the feeling it's what's going on here as well. You call it Linux, but without GNU (or the newer BSD toolchain to be fair) you wouldn't think of it as "Linux", we could easily put toghether a system running the Linux kernel that wouldn't be recognisable as "Linux", and no-one would think of it as "Linux" either.
Now, I make the same fallacy, I call what I run "Linux", even though Stallman perfers GNU/Linux. Truth be told I should really call it "GNU" since even though that would be just a wrong (parts such as X-Windows aren't GNU, and the Linux kernel isn't even part of it), it would be closer to the truth. I could make do without the Linux kernel a lot easier than I could make do without the GNU toolchain. And I suspect that is true for most users with the possible exception of kernel programmers.
By and large, slashdotters are probably not in the herd, but it might be interesting for many of them to look back in 20 years time, and question whether the man-months they invested in getting their linux distros installed, and their case-modded machines running with their own custom blend of browsers and email clients would have been better spent just using IE...
You know that's funny. And exactly the reason I run Linux. My WinXP installation (on the same machine) has no end of troubles, locking up, drivers going missing etc, etc. Linux OTOH just works. And keeps on working.
Now, I'll admit there was a time I recompiled the kernel and whatnot, but since I don't really have the time for that anymore, it's straight RedHat (with apt-rpm), and NVidia's drivers and that's it. Mozilla as mail/browser (got tired of Evolution mucking up), LaTeX/BIBTex for writing papers and I haven't lost a single hour to OS or application problems.
A far cry from the MS/IE/Word mess I have to put up with at the multinational I'm on sabattical from. And yes I actually duly time reported the "IS f**k-ups" so I have the statistics to demonstrate it.
A typical GA craft (including executive jets), even loaded to the spars with explosive, would never be more than a minor threat to a commercial building. It would surely cause a mess, but nothing approaching the total devastation (a la 9/11) contemplated by this prevention system.
If you really think that no small plane "including executive jets" can carry enough explosives to be more than a "minor threat" to a commercial building you need to study exactly how big some of the more spectacular truck bombs have been. Start with Oklahoma for something close to home, then go on to the one that killed the marines in Lebanon. (And they didn't even use commercially available explosives). Or compare the damage done by WWII bombs and their weight.
Hint: it's a lot less than you think. An old pilatus porter would be able to carry more than enough.
The need to have high enough strength and low enough mass to get anything useful out of it seems some pretty severe engineering requirements.
Well, then again they don't have to fight gravity. Compare building a bridge on the moon, where the weight of the bridge would be much lower, and hence the tensile strength of your building material could be used for supporting a working load instead of the weight of the building material.
Same thing here but even better since the gravity gradients are even smaller.
Also, and that's another beauty of sailing is that you don't have to carry your own fuel, hence the craft can be made much lighter. You don't have to carry the engine convert the fuel into acceleration, etc. So it's a win-win situation.
Compare the sudden interest in ion engines, which develop a thrust on the order of the weight of a stamp at sea level. Since they can deliver that thrust over extended periods of time (they have a very respectable specific impulse), the maximum thrust isn't as important as the integral of that thrust over time (impulse). Same with solar sails, those photons just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, it adds up to a respectable impulse before you know it.
We probably won't see solar sails for manned space flight though. People doesn't have the same staying power that machines do. We get bored too quickly, with a very sharp boredom gradient when the breathable air runs out.;-)
Yes 95 and ME were buggy but most bugs any user will ever encounter on a NT/2K/XP system today is due to 3d party drivers/software and NOT MS related. MS is actually QUITE savant when it comes to coding.
And yet, as an end user I don't care one bit if it's someone elses code that locks up my XP when Linux runs beautifully on the same machine, without ever hanging.
You see, I have to run those third party drivers (NVidia's graphics drivers in this case) in order to get the same functionality on both platforms. If I went with MS' graphics driver there goes TV-out.
Now, it's interesting that (if it's indeed the case that it's the only third party driver I'm running on this system that keeps locking it up) the same company can botch their most important Windows driver, and produce a beautyfully running driver under Linux. To say the least.
I'm not surprised though, that if the driver docs for Windows haven't shaped up since NT 3.51 (which was the last time I had to write one for Windows), third party driver writers have a hard time producing correctly working drivers for Windows, while they don't seem to have the same problems with Linux due to the transparency of the latter. And note that we're comparing closed source drivers here.
Or maybe it's just the same old Windows crap as always. I know it's not hardware, I've never had a Linux crash on this machine.
The second is usually the suppresion of the wish to throttle the guy.
I'm with you there. While it's comforing that he's going be sat on by IBM, it's getting to take too long; 800 pound gorillas move slowly, even if they pack a mighty heavy arse.
I'm wishing it was Tony Soprano and his crew that were betting on Linux for their future business needs. I have a feeling this would have been "taken care of" by now...
I know he's a cute and cuddly penguin but what we all want to know is: Where's the mob connection?
Well, that's because the academic world operates on free labor and little money. Nobody's going to "go backwards" from Frame to Latex.
And yet, in the multi national I work for the techwriters did just that (sort of). It's still FrameMaker for us engineers, but the real techwriters write SGML straight up. A lot closer in spirit to LaTeX than Frame for sure.
And you have the docbook tools for Linux should you want them.
So I'm not too sure about "going backwards". What You See Is All You've Got, remember. The techwriters here seems to have caught on. SGML is the shit today or so they tell me.
A few-dozen page research paper is kinderspiel next to what tech writers have to produce (in terms of formatting that is).
Maybe, but a thesis (100-200 pages) is getting there. I started out in FrameMaker doing research, but switched to LaTeX, mainly for the much better handling of citations (though I know about BiBTeX for Frame). Now I just find that concentrating on the content first and layout second leads to a better final result.
Though, I've found that to be true when it comes to techwriting as well. In the multinational I work for the engineers use FrameMaker, the tech writers write SGML these days. A lot closer to LaTeX than FramMaker for sure.
Bombing of civilians who have nothing to do with the issue was terrorism when the IRA did it, and it's terrorism when Hamas do it. Being impoverished doesn't make random mass murder with the intent to cause terror any less of a terrorist act, you know.
So the bombing of Germany during WWII by the US and UK was terrorism then? Or the US bombing Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign, that was terrorism to?
I think the original poster's point was that if blowing up random civilians by straping a bomb around your waist is called terrorism, then so should doing the same by firing hellfire missiles.
The moral justification (or lack thereof) cannot be based on the difference in delivery system! And to claim so is outrageous.
I'm still there, but only a day a week. The rest of the week I'm at Chalmers Computer Science department, which is quite famous in functional programming circles. (That's not my field though; I'm doing computer security).
And while we're on the subject of functional programming with a practical bent, be sure to check out O'Caml as well. It has static typing with automatic type inference, what static typing should always be like.
Hans' answer especially hit home to me, because I've been contemplating grad school as well as of late. However, I know for a fact that I've done way more learning (at least CS-related) since I graduated and got OUT of undergrad than I ever did slaving through a Programming Languages course (Sorry Prof. Allen, Scheme will never be fun no matter what you say). Does anyone else feel like they've learned more on their own than in school?
Well, two points. The first is that grad school is a bit different than undergrad in that you decide yourself to a much higher degree what to work on. I.e. it's not so much an education as time to pursue your own interests. (And time is scarce when you have to work for a living). This is perhaps more true here in Sweden where a PhD position (a Master's degree is at undergrad level in Europe) is a salaried position which pays decently. (You USians make it up in spades when you graduate though).
The other point is that while you'll always learn more when you're really interested (especially when you're interested enough to spend every waking hour learning more about your subject) you'll tend not to bother at all with the stuff that does not interest you. That's where a University education comes in handy; in forcing you to learn about the areas of your chosen field that you aren't interested in, or even don't agree much with.
This brings perspective, which IMHO is much lacking in industry. In your case even though you still might hate Scheme you now know something about functional programming, which is an important paradigm. Having made the switch myself (from hating SML which is was we studied) to embracing the functional programming paradigm as superior (compared to OO) in my field, that perspective was important, even though I didn't much care for it at the time. The same was also true when I took psychology, I don't care for Freud one iota, and I still don't, but now I at least know what I don't like about his theories, something I would never had studied with out the pressure to do so.
Perhaps ironically, when taking the grad course in operating systems, I had to learn something about filesystems, something I couldn't be bothered with when hacking Minix in the late eighties since filesystems are boooring. Little did I know, and I've since mended my ways.:-)
P.S. If you're ready for some practical industrial strength functional programing check out Erlang.
I wonder if there was any other evidence that showed that he was going 114mph? I doubt if they felt it was not needed. Computers never make mistakes, do they?
In this case the accident investigators estimated his speed at impact to circa 98mph. Judging from how the cars looked after impact, length of brake marks etc. I imagine. So in this case the EDR just corroborated the evidence that was already there.
This is a concern though. These devices weren't designed to produce data to stand up in court, and hence cannot be relied on to do so with impunity. There's always risk involved in pressing technology into service it wasn't designed for.
First, XP, without the SQL or CLR is still not a microkernel. It's less of a microkernel than Linux (which isn't a microkernel) because it runs more stuff in kernel space.
Hear, hear. With XP even having the windowing system in the kernel, it's indeed less of a microkernel than Linux which keeps that in user space.
It's really a pity that the Mach guys are the ones that coined the term, since Mach is more like NT/XP than QNX or other true microkernels.
That the EU has put up large numbers of regulations that make it impossible for US companies to penetrate the EU markets? For example the bans on GM food (even for animal feed), US Beef, forcing US companies to comply with VAT, and forbidding an EU subsidiary to even share customer names with their US owners!
Well, the effect may be that US has a harder time to export to the EU, but the reasons for all those are actually having politicians that aren't bought and paid for by the corporations but instead actually (sometimes) do what their constituents want.
Now the GM food and US beef are two of those. We don't want GM food, or beef that's been produced by the use of hormones. We don't care that you want to sell that to us and by 'us' I mean consumers. And this is not hypocrisy btw, we don't produce these ourselves, even for export to you. You want to sell to us, you better start producing what we want, not what you want.
The VAT thing is to curtail the tax haven effect, as a consumer I'm not too thrilled, but I cannot really fault it either.
The ban on the exportation of personal data is actually a good one. On slashdot I've seen story after story of how corporations in the US abuse the data they have registered on their customers (and others). This is much less the case here, because it's against the law. The government may or may not do certain data processing or storage, but neither is corporations. No sniffing the network to see that I'm surfing slashdot for example. Now, the personal data protection directive has it's flaws, plenty of them in fact, but by and large the reasons for its existance are the right ones.
There is actually very little true protectionism against the US from the EU, quite simply because we are the ones with more to lose. We export much more to you than we import in return. So if we started to play that game (at least in ernest) we'd be hurting much more than you. That's why were putting up with your steel nonsense for example while we have already taken that hit, had the layoffs and taken the cost for restructuring our own steel industry, that as a result is now competitive on the world market.
That'll push unemployment to about 30%, and destroy about $10 trillion in capital. Fantastic.
Just like the automobile destroyed the buggy industry, or refrigeration totally obliterated the ice harvesting industry right? Any yet no-one is complaining about that today are they? Things change, deal with it.
And that's not even considering that it's not the same. By your reasoning consumer demand for music and film would vanish overnight if RIAA doesn't have their way completely and utterly? That will not even be remotely true.
Demand for music in particular will always exist. It is a part of being human. All societies (and tribes) on earth now and in the past have always had music, and that will continue. In your case to the tune of trillions of dollars no doubt.
Now, N'Sync or whatever the boy-band of the week is called these days may not survive, but that is no cause for concern on the whole. (Most would even say good riddance).
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The CIA can not take risks that a business can, as lives, not dollars, are at stake in the work they do. Any actual security consultant who made that mistake would (should) be fired on the spot.
Actually, they not only can they should just because lives are at stake. You completely fail to see the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis. C.f. if the CIA had taken greater security risks prior to 9/11 and as a result had lost ten people but that that would have thwarted the attack then 2990 (or so) more people would be alive today than is currently the fact. Clearly a positive outcome. Even in terms of PR since you would never have heard about those ten...
The author (who is an ex CIA officer and hence not naive in these matters) is spot on. What he points out is that today the CIA doesn't even perform a cost benefit analysis when dealing with IT-security risks, instead going for risk elimination. That way they wouldn't even know of the potential benefits.
This is of course not new. General Groves was dismayed at the lax security at Los Alamos, chastising Oppenheimer that the researchers were discussing secrets with each other left and right. Groves wanted to put everybody in uniform and get them disciplined. Oppenheimer responded that he was all for it, but that Groves could then forget about the bomb; science doesn't work that way. Formalise everything, and the free flow of ideas and information will stop, leading to no science getting done.
At a lower level Feinmann observed the same thing, he leaked to his team what it was that they were actually doing (test yield calculations, instead of just crunching incomprehensible numbers). His group increased performance ten times as a result.
These two things undoubtedly increased the risk of serious leaks in the organisation, but the benefits far outweighed the exposure (depending on what world view you subscribe to), and hence the right thing to do.
By your reasoning, the army could never advance since defensive battle is safer than offensive, and life is after all at stake...
SCO is not "locking down their IP rights". THey are trying to assert IP rights they do NOT have.
You CANNOT claim to have a "trade secret" if everyone and his pet duck has had virtually unfettered access to it for TEN years. SCO did not have anything that EVERYONE did not already know, was taught in universities, etcetera.. that's the point.
The original poster displays just the kind of confusion that has RMS rant on why you should not call anything intellectual property.
The difference here is between copyright and trade secrets (I don't think that patents are an issue, and SCO doesn't even have the trademark). While SCO has copyright to the UNIX sources, as the parent poster so eloquently puts it; they clearly cannot claim trade secret status, since the cat (or pet duck) was let out of the bag several years ago. Once it's been known it's not secret, per definition.
SCO most certainly will be trying to argue that they have trade secrets in court (that's what their press releases sounds like), and having a good defence against that (whether it comes from SCO or others) is hence of great interest.
To fall into the trap of banding about 'Intellectual property' is playing into the hands of the FUD-meisters at Microsoft and others, there's really no such thing.
The permission thing. Having to map the user and group names is inconvenient. For one, you have to maintain those users and groups.
Well, as I said you can use numeric id's if that's more convenient. Doing that they may (or may not) make sense no the target system, but there's really no other way to do it besided using a specific backup solution (that maintains its own internal mapping/whatever). A bit much to ask from a file syncronisation program IMHO.
Change sets. There is no sense of history: I can't go back to a certain date and get a snapshot of the data as it was then. This is absolutely required in certain scenarios. Of course, you could rotate among several different target directories, just like you would rotate tapes, but that wastes disk space that you might not possess.
That's supported by rsync, and quite nicely I might add. You can do differential backups, with your last backup being the full backup, and earlier ones being saved. Granted it won't do diffs of the contents of files, but rdiff-backup doesn't do that either, does it?
The root issue. It would be much nicer if there was a server component running as root, which permitted specific users to connect and backup files.
Oh, but there is. You can run an rsync daemon as root on your backup machine. It ever supports authentication. But you lose the 'ssh' capabilities so you'd better run it on an internal trusted network.
Incidentally, rsync seems to not care about file name character encoding, which is a big minus. The port of rsync to Mac OS X will not transfer files containing 8-bit characters (eg., accented characters, Scandinavian letters), barfing with an "operation not permitted"-style I/O error. It seems that the Mac OS X APIs want UTF-8 file names. A simple internal translation should work.
Never came accross that one as I only sync between linux and linux (and I'm Swedish so the odd LATIN-1 char has slipped in from time to time). IMHO, converting filenames as text to and from different binary formats having to consider differing locales and whatnot is fraught with peril, and a gargantuan task. I'm happy with the current "just copy the binary" strategy. And UTF-8 should die BTW...;-)
To do a true backup, you must copy permissions. To copy permissions, the target system needs to have the same UIDs and GIDs as the source system.
Use rsync. Default is to map user and group names at both ends of the connection, unless you specify --numeric-ids. Of course you have to have at least the names right, otherwise there's nothing to work with. And you need rooteness on the receiving end, but that's also to be expected.
I've been using rsync for some time now to manage moving research data between home and school and I'm thoroughly impressed. Great piece of software.
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And how is my saying that "Linux" really ought to be called "GNU" as far as I'm concerned? (Not GNU/Linux) "missing the point?"
The reason I don't (something we really haven't discussed) is purely pragmatic, no-one would know what I was on about if I did. It's not as if I didn't know the difference. I've been using GNU software long before I ever took up Linux. But in the end it's just a name, and if it's known under a name that may not be the "best" one from all perspectives, unfortunately that's the way it is.
I respect Stallmans perceverance in going against the tide though, even to the point of trying to change a name of a system into something that won't work (from purely a lexicograpical standpoint; GNU/Linux is just too much of a mouthful). If he hadn't persevered we wouldn't know free software the way we do.
No, but as I said I don't even call it GNU/Linux either, so what's your point?
Yes, that's what they'll tell you. But when it comes to replacement, the cost of chucking Office is a lot higher than that of chucking windows. Believe me. I've also run crossover office in such an environment, and that's OK. Even in the eyes of the IT-dept as long as I don't expect any support from them. If I had started sending around LaTeX documents though, that would have had me summoned to my boss faster than you could say "supercali...". Since that's actually important to the everyday operation of the company, that's a no-no.
Exactly. It wouldn't be, in the sense of the word that Stallman and I are using it (and most others to). Just as taking a bare bones Linux kernel, put it on a floppy and port the freedos tools to it would hardly be "Linux" anymore. It'd run a Linux kernel, but fat lot of good that would do to the users who expected that their knowledge of how to get actuall work done using that system would carry over.
Which really brings us back to my point. Just as "Quake" would really be the apt term for what he's running. "GNU" is closer to the truthful name for what most of us are running. Closer than "GNU/Linux" and "Linux".
I've met very few workstation users (well I've met quite a few actually, but only because the guys doing OS-research is on the next floor) where the specific kernel made much difference (given that they supported the same hardware).
I haven't met any user that was happy with a 'superior' OS that didn't support the applications he needed to run. (Well actually I've met a few of those as well, testament to the same skewed company I keep as I mentioned above).
I still call it Linux though, but I don't really include the Linux kernel in the equation, it's just a name after all. I realise it's the one piece of the puzzle i could easiest do without. A BSD kernel with the GNU toolchain and all the other tools I use would do just as nicely.
I have the feeling we may have ended (or perhaps always was in) a rather dreary semantic quibble over what the term "operating system" means. I use the Tannenbaums definition (paraphrased):
I have a feeling your focus is on the first part, while I'm more interested in the second.
Minix even required less of a platform than that. It ran on 8086 systems without a harddisk. Though you could install on a harddisk if you wished. I remember running it on my 8086 Amstrad with two 5.25 inch floppys before I could lay my hands on a 20 Meg hardcard. Those were the days. ;-)
Someone maintained "386"-patches, that would use the MMU etc, but they always had to be distributed as patches, there could (as you say) never be a Minix-386 distribution. Which made it a bit of a pain to work with it.
The problem with Minix as a teaching tool was that it was too sucessful IMHO. People learned too much and immediately wanted to put their knowledge to good use, i.e. by extending Minix. Tannenbaum wouldn't have any of it, which is understandable given the goal of keeping Minix a teaching system.
You know it's the complete oposite for me. Having had to spend time both in BSD (4.3) and Solaris/SunOS land, I cannot get work done without the GNU toolchain. Solaris without GNU is such a hassle that it does not bear thinking about.
I have a sneaking suspicion it's really the same thing for you. You don't actually use the kernel, just the services it provides. And most of the difference between kernels in UNIX-land (if not all that matters) is in the non-functional specs, i.e. how fast/much memory you can handle etc. BUT for most uses that doesn't matter much. My workstation keeps on chugging whether the memory management routines can be tweeked or not.
About the only functional difference between kernels is the hardware support, and that's indeed the reason I run linux on most my machines as well. The oposite is true of the old SPARC boxen I have the misfortune to work with though. Linux doesn't cut it there. Solaris with the GNU toolchain is virtually impossible to tell apart though (for non server type loads) as a workstation since they both support the same free software we all love and use.
That's were we differ. Whether it's Linux/Solaris/Windows I still run Emacs/LaTeX to get work done. To me it's really the application that's important for the "getting things done part", not the iron we run it on. That's why many shops who say they have standardised on windows are wrong, what they really have standardised on is MS Office. They still call it Windows though. And I have the feeling it's what's going on here as well. You call it Linux, but without GNU (or the newer BSD toolchain to be fair) you wouldn't think of it as "Linux", we could easily put toghether a system running the Linux kernel that wouldn't be recognisable as "Linux", and no-one would think of it as "Linux" either.
Now, I make the same fallacy, I call what I run "Linux", even though Stallman perfers GNU/Linux. Truth be told I should really call it "GNU" since even though that would be just a wrong (parts such as X-Windows aren't GNU, and the Linux kernel isn't even part of it), it would be closer to the truth. I could make do without the Linux kernel a lot easier than I could make do without the GNU toolchain. And I suspect that is true for most users with the possible exception of kernel programmers.
You know that's funny. And exactly the reason I run Linux. My WinXP installation (on the same machine) has no end of troubles, locking up, drivers going missing etc, etc. Linux OTOH just works. And keeps on working.
Now, I'll admit there was a time I recompiled the kernel and whatnot, but since I don't really have the time for that anymore, it's straight RedHat (with apt-rpm), and NVidia's drivers and that's it. Mozilla as mail/browser (got tired of Evolution mucking up), LaTeX/BIBTex for writing papers and I haven't lost a single hour to OS or application problems.
A far cry from the MS/IE/Word mess I have to put up with at the multinational I'm on sabattical from. And yes I actually duly time reported the "IS f**k-ups" so I have the statistics to demonstrate it.
If you really think that no small plane "including executive jets" can carry enough explosives to be more than a "minor threat" to a commercial building you need to study exactly how big some of the more spectacular truck bombs have been. Start with Oklahoma for something close to home, then go on to the one that killed the marines in Lebanon. (And they didn't even use commercially available explosives). Or compare the damage done by WWII bombs and their weight.
Hint: it's a lot less than you think. An old pilatus porter would be able to carry more than enough.
Well, then again they don't have to fight gravity. Compare building a bridge on the moon, where the weight of the bridge would be much lower, and hence the tensile strength of your building material could be used for supporting a working load instead of the weight of the building material.
Same thing here but even better since the gravity gradients are even smaller.
Also, and that's another beauty of sailing is that you don't have to carry your own fuel, hence the craft can be made much lighter. You don't have to carry the engine convert the fuel into acceleration, etc. So it's a win-win situation.
Compare the sudden interest in ion engines, which develop a thrust on the order of the weight of a stamp at sea level. Since they can deliver that thrust over extended periods of time (they have a very respectable specific impulse), the maximum thrust isn't as important as the integral of that thrust over time (impulse). Same with solar sails, those photons just keep pushing and pushing and pushing, it adds up to a respectable impulse before you know it.
We probably won't see solar sails for manned space flight though. People doesn't have the same staying power that machines do. We get bored too quickly, with a very sharp boredom gradient when the breathable air runs out. ;-)
And yet, as an end user I don't care one bit if it's someone elses code that locks up my XP when Linux runs beautifully on the same machine, without ever hanging.
You see, I have to run those third party drivers (NVidia's graphics drivers in this case) in order to get the same functionality on both platforms. If I went with MS' graphics driver there goes TV-out.
Now, it's interesting that (if it's indeed the case that it's the only third party driver I'm running on this system that keeps locking it up) the same company can botch their most important Windows driver, and produce a beautyfully running driver under Linux. To say the least.
I'm not surprised though, that if the driver docs for Windows haven't shaped up since NT 3.51 (which was the last time I had to write one for Windows), third party driver writers have a hard time producing correctly working drivers for Windows, while they don't seem to have the same problems with Linux due to the transparency of the latter. And note that we're comparing closed source drivers here.
Or maybe it's just the same old Windows crap as always. I know it's not hardware, I've never had a Linux crash on this machine.
I'm with you there. While it's comforing that he's going be sat on by IBM, it's getting to take too long; 800 pound gorillas move slowly, even if they pack a mighty heavy arse.
I'm wishing it was Tony Soprano and his crew that were betting on Linux for their future business needs. I have a feeling this would have been "taken care of" by now...
I know he's a cute and cuddly penguin but what we all want to know is: Where's the mob connection?
And yet, in the multi national I work for the techwriters did just that (sort of). It's still FrameMaker for us engineers, but the real techwriters write SGML straight up. A lot closer in spirit to LaTeX than Frame for sure.
And you have the docbook tools for Linux should you want them.
So I'm not too sure about "going backwards". What You See Is All You've Got, remember. The techwriters here seems to have caught on. SGML is the shit today or so they tell me.
Maybe, but a thesis (100-200 pages) is getting there. I started out in FrameMaker doing research, but switched to LaTeX, mainly for the much better handling of citations (though I know about BiBTeX for Frame). Now I just find that concentrating on the content first and layout second leads to a better final result.
Though, I've found that to be true when it comes to techwriting as well. In the multinational I work for the engineers use FrameMaker, the tech writers write SGML these days. A lot closer to LaTeX than FramMaker for sure.
Bird brains the lot of them!
So the bombing of Germany during WWII by the US and UK was terrorism then? Or the US bombing Belgrade during the Kosovo campaign, that was terrorism to?
I think the original poster's point was that if blowing up random civilians by straping a bomb around your waist is called terrorism, then so should doing the same by firing hellfire missiles.
The moral justification (or lack thereof) cannot be based on the difference in delivery system! And to claim so is outrageous.
I'm still there, but only a day a week. The rest of the week I'm at Chalmers Computer Science department, which is quite famous in functional programming circles. (That's not my field though; I'm doing computer security).
And while we're on the subject of functional programming with a practical bent, be sure to check out O'Caml as well. It has static typing with automatic type inference, what static typing should always be like.
Well, two points. The first is that grad school is a bit different than undergrad in that you decide yourself to a much higher degree what to work on. I.e. it's not so much an education as time to pursue your own interests. (And time is scarce when you have to work for a living). This is perhaps more true here in Sweden where a PhD position (a Master's degree is at undergrad level in Europe) is a salaried position which pays decently. (You USians make it up in spades when you graduate though).
The other point is that while you'll always learn more when you're really interested (especially when you're interested enough to spend every waking hour learning more about your subject) you'll tend not to bother at all with the stuff that does not interest you. That's where a University education comes in handy; in forcing you to learn about the areas of your chosen field that you aren't interested in, or even don't agree much with.
This brings perspective, which IMHO is much lacking in industry. In your case even though you still might hate Scheme you now know something about functional programming, which is an important paradigm. Having made the switch myself (from hating SML which is was we studied) to embracing the functional programming paradigm as superior (compared to OO) in my field, that perspective was important, even though I didn't much care for it at the time. The same was also true when I took psychology, I don't care for Freud one iota, and I still don't, but now I at least know what I don't like about his theories, something I would never had studied with out the pressure to do so.
Perhaps ironically, when taking the grad course in operating systems, I had to learn something about filesystems, something I couldn't be bothered with when hacking Minix in the late eighties since filesystems are boooring. Little did I know, and I've since mended my ways. :-)
P.S. If you're ready for some practical industrial strength functional programing check out Erlang.
In this case the accident investigators estimated his speed at impact to circa 98mph. Judging from how the cars looked after impact, length of brake marks etc. I imagine. So in this case the EDR just corroborated the evidence that was already there.
This is a concern though. These devices weren't designed to produce data to stand up in court, and hence cannot be relied on to do so with impunity. There's always risk involved in pressing technology into service it wasn't designed for.
Hear, hear. With XP even having the windowing system in the kernel, it's indeed less of a microkernel than Linux which keeps that in user space.
It's really a pity that the Mach guys are the ones that coined the term, since Mach is more like NT/XP than QNX or other true microkernels.
Well, the effect may be that US has a harder time to export to the EU, but the reasons for all those are actually having politicians that aren't bought and paid for by the corporations but instead actually (sometimes) do what their constituents want.
Now the GM food and US beef are two of those. We don't want GM food, or beef that's been produced by the use of hormones. We don't care that you want to sell that to us and by 'us' I mean consumers. And this is not hypocrisy btw, we don't produce these ourselves, even for export to you. You want to sell to us, you better start producing what we want, not what you want.
The VAT thing is to curtail the tax haven effect, as a consumer I'm not too thrilled, but I cannot really fault it either.
The ban on the exportation of personal data is actually a good one. On slashdot I've seen story after story of how corporations in the US abuse the data they have registered on their customers (and others). This is much less the case here, because it's against the law. The government may or may not do certain data processing or storage, but neither is corporations. No sniffing the network to see that I'm surfing slashdot for example. Now, the personal data protection directive has it's flaws, plenty of them in fact, but by and large the reasons for its existance are the right ones.
There is actually very little true protectionism against the US from the EU, quite simply because we are the ones with more to lose. We export much more to you than we import in return. So if we started to play that game (at least in ernest) we'd be hurting much more than you. That's why were putting up with your steel nonsense for example while we have already taken that hit, had the layoffs and taken the cost for restructuring our own steel industry, that as a result is now competitive on the world market.
Oh, don't say that;
Just like the automobile destroyed the buggy industry, or refrigeration totally obliterated the ice harvesting industry right? Any yet no-one is complaining about that today are they? Things change, deal with it.
And that's not even considering that it's not the same. By your reasoning consumer demand for music and film would vanish overnight if RIAA doesn't have their way completely and utterly? That will not even be remotely true.
Demand for music in particular will always exist. It is a part of being human. All societies (and tribes) on earth now and in the past have always had music, and that will continue. In your case to the tune of trillions of dollars no doubt.
Now, N'Sync or whatever the boy-band of the week is called these days may not survive, but that is no cause for concern on the whole. (Most would even say good riddance).
Actually, they not only can they should just because lives are at stake. You completely fail to see the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis. C.f. if the CIA had taken greater security risks prior to 9/11 and as a result had lost ten people but that that would have thwarted the attack then 2990 (or so) more people would be alive today than is currently the fact. Clearly a positive outcome. Even in terms of PR since you would never have heard about those ten...
The author (who is an ex CIA officer and hence not naive in these matters) is spot on. What he points out is that today the CIA doesn't even perform a cost benefit analysis when dealing with IT-security risks, instead going for risk elimination. That way they wouldn't even know of the potential benefits.
This is of course not new. General Groves was dismayed at the lax security at Los Alamos, chastising Oppenheimer that the researchers were discussing secrets with each other left and right. Groves wanted to put everybody in uniform and get them disciplined. Oppenheimer responded that he was all for it, but that Groves could then forget about the bomb; science doesn't work that way. Formalise everything, and the free flow of ideas and information will stop, leading to no science getting done.
At a lower level Feinmann observed the same thing, he leaked to his team what it was that they were actually doing (test yield calculations, instead of just crunching incomprehensible numbers). His group increased performance ten times as a result.
These two things undoubtedly increased the risk of serious leaks in the organisation, but the benefits far outweighed the exposure (depending on what world view you subscribe to), and hence the right thing to do.
By your reasoning, the army could never advance since defensive battle is safer than offensive, and life is after all at stake...
The original poster displays just the kind of confusion that has RMS rant on why you should not call anything intellectual property.
The difference here is between copyright and trade secrets (I don't think that patents are an issue, and SCO doesn't even have the trademark). While SCO has copyright to the UNIX sources, as the parent poster so eloquently puts it; they clearly cannot claim trade secret status, since the cat (or pet duck) was let out of the bag several years ago. Once it's been known it's not secret, per definition.
SCO most certainly will be trying to argue that they have trade secrets in court (that's what their press releases sounds like), and having a good defence against that (whether it comes from SCO or others) is hence of great interest.
To fall into the trap of banding about 'Intellectual property' is playing into the hands of the FUD-meisters at Microsoft and others, there's really no such thing.
Reminds me of a sig I saw once: "Support democracy and congress, buy a congressman".
Well, as I said you can use numeric id's if that's more convenient. Doing that they may (or may not) make sense no the target system, but there's really no other way to do it besided using a specific backup solution (that maintains its own internal mapping/whatever). A bit much to ask from a file syncronisation program IMHO.
That's supported by rsync, and quite nicely I might add. You can do differential backups, with your last backup being the full backup, and earlier ones being saved. Granted it won't do diffs of the contents of files, but rdiff-backup doesn't do that either, does it?
Oh, but there is. You can run an rsync daemon as root on your backup machine. It ever supports authentication. But you lose the 'ssh' capabilities so you'd better run it on an internal trusted network.
Never came accross that one as I only sync between linux and linux (and I'm Swedish so the odd LATIN-1 char has slipped in from time to time). IMHO, converting filenames as text to and from different binary formats having to consider differing locales and whatnot is fraught with peril, and a gargantuan task. I'm happy with the current "just copy the binary" strategy. And UTF-8 should die BTW... ;-)
Use rsync. Default is to map user and group names at both ends of the connection, unless you specify --numeric-ids. Of course you have to have at least the names right, otherwise there's nothing to work with. And you need rooteness on the receiving end, but that's also to be expected.
I've been using rsync for some time now to manage moving research data between home and school and I'm thoroughly impressed. Great piece of software.