For example, within RedHat, they can have one (or many) child branches from Linus's branch (or any other developer's branches); and "reparent" the branches as needed to merge in the various pieces they need. Other employes' repositories may point to one inside RedHat; or they may point to Linus's; and of course they can "reparent" their repository to switch between the two as needed.
How would you know, Mr. Anonymous Coward? The fact is, very few employees at Red Hat use Bitkeeper at all. I should know, I work there. Of the handful that do use BitKeeper, most are maintainers for whom BitKeeper is the route of least resistance. They would all probably switch if Linus switched. The vast majority of Red Hat developers do not use BitKeeper and would violently object to using BitKeeper on any project. This is because of the silly license, and because of a rather natural distrust of closed source tools in the open source toolchain, which BitMover has done their level best to confirm.
"Simply for my own edification, and hence the anonymous posting - this is ctr2sprt - would you care to elaborate on the mechanisms used to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen?"
Admittedly, this is largely a matter of lore since one seldom runs into a Seagate or IBM disk engineer, and when one does, one seldom gets strong drink into her to reveal the arcana of disk drive internals. However:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rywang/berkeley/pap er s/idisk/idisk/node8.html#SECTION000320000000000000 00
"Modern disk drives use residual power to park their heads in a landing zone at the outer perimeter of the disks prior to spinning down the drives."
If you've got time to park the heads, you've certainly got time to complete writing the current sector in progress, which only takes a few tens of microseconds even on slow disks. Does the residual power come from the spinning platter, or capcitors, or does it come from the PC power supply? Good question, I'm speculating above. If you turn up some hard data, post it somewhere please.:-)
I'm sorry, but when you're talking about hard drives, there is no "atomic." It's as simple as a power failure while the disk drive is in the middle of writing a block (albeit a block sent atomically by the OS).
Think again. Either "dancing trees" or traditional journalling can checksum the commit block of the transaction, so that if it's only partly written to disk the final transaction isn't committed. If your disk hardware is so broken that it could trash a sector that's not being written, you need to switch vendors.
And anyway, typical modern disks don't even trash the last few sectors in flight, there's enough power coming in through the drive motor from the mechanical energy of the platter to get the sectors actually under the write heads safely onto the medium.
That was interesting to read. It made me wonder who the people are who come up with these exploits. This person is obviously very immature, but also very knowlegable about programming to spot something so quickly in so much code. The question is, is this a ridiculously knowledgable 13 year old, or a well-seasoned older programmer who has the social skills of a 13 year old?
Actually, I wonder who you are, somebody whining about immature programmers to avoid the uncomfortable thought that their Windows system is full of technical flaws, and that the company who is supposed to fix them is incapable or unwilling to do it.
Granted, when the thing is turned on, it does give a huge WHOOOSH you described - but it's not anything on the motherboard. The hideous noise comes from CD-ROM drive that spins to its full speed and maintains that until the boot-sequence has gone far enough.
That is incorrect. You can plainly hear it's the power supply/heat pipe fan. My unit doesn't even have a CDROM and still makes the whoosh.
Non-Windows (Lindows, SuSE, etc) PC's are not really cheaper at Walmart than Windows PC's. Look at equivalent spec machines, and the difference is very, very little. Don't believe me? Look it up.
Looks like Walmart has to pay about $80 for the OS. Despite their buying power, Microsoft clearly has even more monopoly power.
Interesting side note: it was very, very difficult to find two models offered by Walmart similar enough to factor out the cost of Windows. I seriously doubt this is coincidence, I suspect that Microsoft still has illegal contractual restrictions in place to make it difficult for customers to assess the true cost of Windows.
You have to realize that the US is by far the biggest software market, so this won't be a problem money wise - at least for the next few years.
Well, no. The EU is already a larger market for PCs than the U.S. and the EU software market is not far behind. By numbers but not by dollars, China is nearly equal as well, and is expanding rapidly. The developing world in general is by far the fastest growing market.
Losing the European and Asian markets will inflict severe financial pain on Microsoft. Losing the developing world puts a cap on long-term growth.
If it turns out that these switches effect the MS bottom line one of two things will happen.
1) MS will increase their investments in non software fields like media (in which they have substantial holdings) and make a bigger push into their hardware business.
2) The stock will nosedive like a rocket.
I don't see #2 happening though. They have 40 billion in the bank and if push comes to shove they can manipulate their own stock price if they want to.
Both (1) and (2) will happen. Microsoft's stock can indeed nosedive, to nearly the per-share value of its cash, about $5. The cash doesn't help manipulate the stock because, for one thing, it's inside the company and Microsoft can't freely trade with it. Never mind that doing so would be highly illegal. Share buybacks don't help either, unless the stock is trading below its intrisic business value, with will not be the case if fundamentals are severely weakened.
If Microsoft is unsuccessful at establishing any new monopolies then its stock will surely drift slowly to earth as the realization sinks in. It already took a pretty big hit last month when it was revealed that new contracts for both Windows and MS Office were much lower than expected.
Why not do the traditional thing like evaluate competing solutions on their relative merits
It seems they already did that concluded that in their own interest they'd better make free software a matter of policy. It's simple reallly, if they don't take this step it's only a matter of time before the BSA goon squads arrive, backed up by U.S. trade representatives. There's just no way they can afford to build an information infrastructure if they have to pay Microsoft's asking price.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft offers their $36 Thailand bundle. Personally, I don't think that would be enough, it's 15% of the cost of a new machine these days.
MS offering a discount in response to not being chosen is, in fact, a prime exame of competition. It is competition at work.
When profits in one market segment are used to subsidize sales in another it is called "predatory pricing" and is illegal, particularly when practiced by a monopoly.
I've been thinking about the XML document format problem, and I don't think there will ever be a "pure and beautiful implementation" that will ever be perfect.
Perhaps you want to share your thoughts by joining the OASIS Openoffice XML file format standardization effort
The only problem is that people are used to just switching off their machines, and don't shut down correctly. This seems to have caused a couple of machines to loose configurations.
If you are running Ext3, make sure you're mounted with data=journal so you get full data journalling. My wife and I have been operating several machines for more than a year that way, without problems. Standard nighttime shutdown is, just hit the power switch. Every now and then I run a forced fsck just to be sure nothing broke, and nothing ever has.
given that we are seeing lots of governments adopting or considering adopting F/OSS, how long before document and data interchange in its current form (read: MS Office) becomes enough of a hassle that consumers and businesses will demand software that conforms to open data interchange standards?
The problem is, there isn't really a suitable format for office documents available just now. The leading candidate there is probably the OASIS Open Office XML Format standardization effort, however I have no idea if that project is progressing in a timely way.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, within RedHat, they can have one (or many) child branches from Linus's branch (or any other developer's branches); and "reparent" the branches as needed to merge in the various pieces they need. Other employes' repositories may point to one inside RedHat; or they may point to Linus's; and of course they can "reparent" their repository to switch between the two as needed.
How would you know, Mr. Anonymous Coward? The fact is, very few employees at Red Hat use Bitkeeper at all. I should know, I work there. Of the handful that do use BitKeeper, most are maintainers for whom BitKeeper is the route of least resistance. They would all probably switch if Linus switched. The vast majority of Red Hat developers do not use BitKeeper and would violently object to using BitKeeper on any project. This is because of the silly license, and because of a rather natural distrust of closed source tools in the open source toolchain, which BitMover has done their level best to confirm.
By the way, it's Red Hat, not RedHat.
"Simply for my own edification, and hence the anonymous posting - this is ctr2sprt - would you care to elaborate on the mechanisms used to ensure that this sort of thing doesn't seem to happen?"
p er s/idisk/idisk/node8.html#SECTION000320000000000000 00
:-)
Admittedly, this is largely a matter of lore since one seldom runs into a Seagate or IBM disk engineer, and when one does, one seldom gets strong drink into her to reveal the arcana of disk drive internals. However:
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rywang/berkeley/pa
"Modern disk drives use residual power to park their heads in a landing zone at the outer perimeter of the disks prior to spinning down the drives."
If you've got time to park the heads, you've certainly got time to complete writing the current sector in progress, which only takes a few tens of microseconds even on slow disks. Does the residual power come from the spinning platter, or capcitors, or does it come from the PC power supply? Good question, I'm speculating above. If you turn up some hard data, post it somewhere please.
I'm sorry, but when you're talking about hard drives, there is no "atomic." It's as simple as a power failure while the disk drive is in the middle of writing a block (albeit a block sent atomically by the OS).
Think again. Either "dancing trees" or traditional journalling can checksum the commit block of the transaction, so that if it's only partly written to disk the final transaction isn't committed. If your disk hardware is so broken that it could trash a sector that's not being written, you need to switch vendors.
And anyway, typical modern disks don't even trash the last few sectors in flight, there's enough power coming in through the drive motor from the mechanical energy of the platter to get the sectors actually under the write heads safely onto the medium.
Our atomicity does not provide isolation or rollback, it is only atomic in the sense of whether it survives a crash.
Hi Hans,
That's called "durable", the D in ACID.
By the way, huge props for getting R4 out the door and into -mm.
Regards,
Daniel
I've found Ext3 to be slow when you have more than about 5000 files in a directory.
Now that Ext3 has the HTree directory index patch, that should no longer be the case.
That was interesting to read. It made me wonder who the people are who come up with these exploits. This person is obviously very immature, but also very knowlegable about programming to spot something so quickly in so much code. The question is, is this a ridiculously knowledgable 13 year old, or a well-seasoned older programmer who has the social skills of a 13 year old?
Actually, I wonder who you are, somebody whining about immature programmers to avoid the uncomfortable thought that their Windows system is full of technical flaws, and that the company who is supposed to fix them is incapable or unwilling to do it.
Granted, when the thing is turned on, it does give a huge WHOOOSH you described - but it's not anything on the motherboard. The hideous noise comes from CD-ROM drive that spins to its full speed and maintains that until the boot-sequence has gone far enough.
That is incorrect. You can plainly hear it's the power supply/heat pipe fan. My unit doesn't even have a CDROM and still makes the whoosh.
The only difference between the machines is the Win box has 128 MB ram, and the Lin box has 265.
The Windows box also has no modem or floppy drive.
Non-Windows (Lindows, SuSE, etc) PC's are not really cheaper at Walmart than Windows PC's. Look at equivalent spec machines, and the difference is very, very little. Don't believe me? Look it up.
That is blatantly false.
Do you know how much Walmart will be paying for an OEM version of WinXP? I'm going to guess with their buying power: not much.
You'd be mistaken. Compare these two very similar machines:
1.2 GHz Duron, 30 GB, 128 MB, No O/S: $199.98
1.3 GHz Duron, 40 GB, 128 MB, Windows XP home: $308.00
Looks like Walmart has to pay about $80 for the OS. Despite their buying power, Microsoft clearly has even more monopoly power.
Interesting side note: it was very, very difficult to find two models offered by Walmart similar enough to factor out the cost of Windows. I seriously doubt this is coincidence, I suspect that Microsoft still has illegal contractual restrictions in place to make it difficult for customers to assess the true cost of Windows.
Though I am happy to see Gnome getting this much deserved recognition, your article is way over the top and deserves to be modded into oblivion.
Here, read.
It's Linux-based. It will ship with a JVM. It makes Sun happy to call it Java Desktop, why not.
You have to realize that the US is by far the biggest software market, so this won't be a problem money wise - at least for the next few years.
Well, no. The EU is already a larger market for PCs than the U.S. and the EU software market is not far behind. By numbers but not by dollars, China is nearly equal as well, and is expanding rapidly. The developing world in general is by far the fastest growing market.
Losing the European and Asian markets will inflict severe financial pain on Microsoft. Losing the developing world puts a cap on long-term growth.
If it turns out that these switches effect the MS bottom line one of two things will happen.
1) MS will increase their investments in non software fields like media (in which they have substantial holdings) and make a bigger push into their hardware business.
2) The stock will nosedive like a rocket.
I don't see #2 happening though. They have 40 billion in the bank and if push comes to shove they can manipulate their own stock price if they want to.
Both (1) and (2) will happen. Microsoft's stock can indeed nosedive, to nearly the per-share value of its cash, about $5. The cash doesn't help manipulate the stock because, for one thing, it's inside the company and Microsoft can't freely trade with it. Never mind that doing so would be highly illegal. Share buybacks don't help either, unless the stock is trading below its intrisic business value, with will not be the case if fundamentals are severely weakened.
If Microsoft is unsuccessful at establishing any new monopolies then its stock will surely drift slowly to earth as the realization sinks in. It already took a pretty big hit last month when it was revealed that new contracts for both Windows and MS Office were much lower than expected.
I bet you got a boner while writing that, didn't you?
I laughed until I cried.
Time to protect the monopoly. Once in that phase, funds are diverted away from R&D and into protectionism -- the great money pit.
In fact, according to Microsoft's latest quarterly report R&D was the only expense that shrunk year-on-year.
Research and development ($millions)
Jul-Sep 2002: 1,707
Jul-Sep 2003: 1,611
Why not do the traditional thing like evaluate competing solutions on their relative merits
It seems they already did that concluded that in their own interest they'd better make free software a matter of policy. It's simple reallly, if they don't take this step it's only a matter of time before the BSA goon squads arrive, backed up by U.S. trade representatives. There's just no way they can afford to build an information infrastructure if they have to pay Microsoft's asking price.
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft offers their $36 Thailand bundle. Personally, I don't think that would be enough, it's 15% of the cost of a new machine these days.
The thing is just a rerelease of mozilla composer man.
I love Mozilla composer (now called "editor"). Anything that builds on it or makes it better is fine by me.
MS offering a discount in response to not being chosen is, in fact, a prime exame of competition. It is competition at work.
When profits in one market segment are used to subsidize sales in another it is called "predatory pricing" and is illegal, particularly when practiced by a monopoly.
I've been thinking about the XML document format problem, and I don't think there will ever be a "pure and beautiful implementation" that will ever be perfect.
Perhaps you want to share your thoughts by joining the OASIS Openoffice XML file format standardization effort
The only problem is that people are used to just switching off their machines, and don't shut down correctly. This seems to have caused a couple of machines to loose configurations.
;-)
If you are running Ext3, make sure you're mounted with data=journal so you get full data journalling. My wife and I have been operating several machines for more than a year that way, without problems. Standard nighttime shutdown is, just hit the power switch. Every now and then I run a forced fsck just to be sure nothing broke, and nothing ever has.
This may come as a surprise to Andrew Morton
If you can't figure out how to tune the OS, you sure as hell should not be benchmarking it. That line makes this whole "benchmark" worthless to me
With your superior knowledge you should run your own, improved benchmarks and post the results.
given that we are seeing lots of governments adopting or considering adopting F/OSS, how long before document and data interchange in its current form (read: MS Office) becomes enough of a hassle that consumers and businesses will demand software that conforms to open data interchange standards?
The problem is, there isn't really a suitable format for office documents available just now. The leading candidate there is probably the OASIS Open Office XML Format standardization effort, however I have no idea if that project is progressing in a timely way.
Its more likely a bluff to see what MS will do for them.
Just like Munich's bluff?