This article is littered with blanket statements that really detract from any value the article might have to offer.
HP says it's not robust enough for mission critical applications. Great. That makes perfect sense coming from a large Unix vendor. How about some evidence to back the argument up?
The article also says there are no apps for Linux. This argument is getting tired, and fast. We've got professional development tools like SGI's Jessie, Borland's C++Builder, JBuilder, and Delphi (on the way) in addition to the MetroWerks stuff and the Cygnus products. We've got several bullshit office suites (overrated pieces of software if you ask me) and a few other pieces individually - StarOffice, ApplixWare, WordPerfect 8, with KOffice on the horizon. We've loads of server software - Apache, MySQL, Samba. Theres even lots of games out there too - Civilization, the recent announcement that Loki would continue to port many games, and of course the venerable Quake family. This argument is quickly becoming a non-issue.
The article also uses the classic line that Linux's primary draw is the price, but that companies are afraid of freeware. This is just plain uninformed. Look at the dominance of Apache in the WWW server market. Think about the penetration sendmail continues to achieve.
The fact is, these studies (and consequently, these articles) only reveal small bits of truth and insight. They are largely uninformed, largely unsupported, and dated. Look at the kernel, for instance. This year Linux made incredible strides to become "scalable" with the 2.2 kernel. 2.4 is already on the horizon, with marked improvements in store. Most of these are the same old arguments that we have heard time and time and time again, and sadly, they aren't getting any more true. In fact, they are becoming wrong.
Carry on. don't put much store by this sort of FUD. Soon we will prove them wrong anyways.
Well of course RedHat is expanding into Europe. This is something Bob Young explicity said he wanted to do with the IPO bucks: expand into the international market.
Frankly, this just makes sense. Linux has had a strong history of being an international effort. Linus, Alan Cox, etc etc etc. There's lots of users in Europe (and lots in Japan too, I might add.) Look for Redhat to expand there in the coming months.
So what does this mean for RedHat? Look for an increased prescence in Europe (read: ads, offices, new hires), as well as increased international features in the distribution. Support packages worldwide will also be stepped up and enhanced if RedHat is sensible. Their current support model is terrible, IMO. Perhaps moving to new markets will lead them to streamline and refine it.
What does it mean for Linux? Obviously, more users, and thus more bugs get fixed, more apps get written, and the usual benefits of increased market share will result. Increased acceptance in Europe can only be good for Linux on the whole.
In short, I applaud RedHat for moving forward. This is what commercialization of Linux is good for: moving things forward in ways the community alone cannot, or not at least not rapidly enough. The next few months will be exciting indeed.
You know, I am inclined to agree. At my job we just replaced a whole bunch of Sparc5-110s and 170s with Ultra 5-300s (I think they were 300mhz anyways). Now, the Ultra5s were faster, definitely, but the difference just wasn't that great. Netscape STILL sucked on the Ultra 5s. What a disappointment! I requested to be allowed to work on a P2-400 w/Linux, and my boss had no problem with that, as long as I could get my work done. Talk about a speed improvement. Just set up some NFS mounts, and in a couple of hours I was getting some real work done. As someone else said, Ultra5s aren't bad if you have to do Sparc development. But don't expect performance anything like a modern PIII will give you.
This whole discussion is certainly interesting, but it does lead me to ask, why do we have two desktop standards?
The most obvious answer is for competition, since many believe that increased competition leads to higher quality software.
Others believe that since you have to use your desktop environment, you should be able to personalize it: choose the colors, choose the widgets, choose the window manager.
However, with the recent moves to popularize Linux, I begin to wonder about the wisdom of this philosophy.
Developers don't want to support 2 desktops. It doubles the amount of effort needed to build the user interface, and could impact other areas of the application as well. This thread is evidence that some care about having their program work with GNOME and KDE. However, how reasonable is it to ask that programmers support both environments? How reasonable is it to ask companies interested in selling Linux software to support two environments? One obvious answer is, it's not, that's why we have Gcalendar/Kcalendar, etc... That strikes me as silly; now we are advocating duplicating ALL the code instead of just the user inteface!
Additionally, many users don't care about having two desktops. Corporate environments immediately come to mind. If a large company wants to roll out linux for its desktops, they will choose a standard configuration of applications on standard, supported hardware. They don't really care if it's GNOME or KDE, just as long as it gets the work done.
This adds up to the idea that maybe having 2 desktops isn't such a good idea any more. GNOME has made some fantastic advancements, and KDE too has begun to really push technology. Why not work together and achieve a Common Linux Desktop Environment (CLIDE?).
This would of course have advantages and disadvantages, but perhaps it is time to re-evaluate where we are going.
I was considering purchasing the standard edition (read: I'm a broke college student and can't afford more than $30 to support RedHat.) However, I had some questions regarding the new update utility.
First, do you have to be a registered user to use up2date? If, for example, I were to purchase it from CheapBytes, would I not be able to use up2date?
Second, does the new auto update feature only let you connect to the priority site? I would think it would be a real bummer if I only got updates automatically for the first 30 days, since thats the amount of time you get to use priority.redhat.com with the standard edition. Also, it would be annoying if I really needed an update but the priority site was down/unavailable (due to either their machine crashing, or a new outage like the one we saw last week.)
(Disclaimer: I've had most of my Linux experience with RedHat, so most of my comments about my usage apply to that.)
I've seen a lot of talk about "make a server-only distribution." That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Today, pretty much every Linux distribution uses the same "super duty" philosophy: put every package known to man on the user's computer, start the same set of services, and there you go. Instant server. Instant workstation. Instant anything, Instant everything.
This is troubling to me. I know that for my server installation, I don't WANT X, I don't want Netscape, I don't want GNOME or KDE or any of that other client-oriented, workstation stuff installed. It just wastes space sitting on my hard drive. However, Redhat's server install is the biggest of the 3 options, throwing EVERYTHING on the drive, leaving me with perhaps 300 megabytes of crap I just don't need. I even deselected X, and I still got some of the X11 packages installed!
So why don't distribution makers make server oriented distributions and workstation oriented ones, keeping the 2 separate? Simple. Linux users are stubborn people, perhaps the most stubborn of any in the industry. CUPS comes out, and there is lots of talk about how the current system works fine, we don't need a new system. Berlin is in development, but a mere mention of that brings up the X zealots, ready to kill anyting anywhere close to being modern. About the only thing Linux users will upgrade for is the kernel, and only because it's chic to run Linus' latest and greatest. The current set of Linux users is a rather small subset of all the types of users out there. Mom doesn't need Apache, wu-ftpd, or nfs. Mom just needs StarOffice, X, GNOME/KDE/wtahever, and Netscape. Why force it on her?
The fact is, separating workstations and servers makes a whole lot of sense. A lot of the security holes you see in servers come from client-oriented apps (Some of the GNOME bugs come to mind.) Similarly, for machines that only run workstation stuff, server stuff causes problems (wu-ftpd is an excellent example here). Why install stuff that won't be used?
I wish distribution makers would realize this. The world doesn't need 50 distributions that can do it all; how about one that does one thing really, really well? It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense.
Just think about it...a lean distribution, optimized to do what it does well. Now that would be something.
Disclaimer: these opinions are my own, and are not indicitive of those of my employer.
I work at Ericsson US (our design center is based in Richardson TX) and they are just beginning to understand the benefits of Linux. I installed it on my workstation, and use it here and there to get stuff done. We are split between NT and Solaris (with the NT people pusing it slowly but surely to replace Solaris), so I can't really use it for everything.
The main problem is, many people (my group included) see Linux only as a cheap way to breathe life into older hardware. While we all know that Linux can run reasonably well on older machines, we also know that it just rocks on modern stuff. However, our design center is of the belief that if we want to run Linux, lets do it on some old hardware so we can save money. They aren't really looking at Linux as an alternative to other solutions with the same hardware; rather, they are looking at Linux as a way to put off buying new hardware.
I see this as a problem in the community at large; many times we emphasize the ability of Linux to use legacy stuff. Perhaps we should put more emphasis on just how awesome Linux is on modern stuff.
On a side note, I am definitely glad that my employer sees Linux as useful. Count Ericsson among the Enlightened:)
Guys, sorry to rain on the parade, but I really don't see Sony going out and supporting MP3. Why? One word: Minidisc.
Sony has LOTS and LOTS of money invested in Minidisc, and unfortunately, they seem to be about the only ones who care about the format. Consumers don't want them (I know a lot of people who hate the idea of having to rebuy their CDs; these people would probably never invest in a Minidisc recorder.) Other electronics manufacturers don't really care, since there isn't enough demand. And retail outlets can't be bothered.
MP3 is going somewhere, and a lot faster than Minidisc could ever dream. Rio sold like hotcakes, Nomad won't be bad, and by Spring we will be on the verge of REAL mp3 hardware (USB and IBM microdrive...now that would be sweet.)
In short, expect Sony to seriously lag behind everyone else when it comes to MP3.
Looking at the other 50 or so comments today, I'm obviously not the only one fed up with perpetual Amiga vaporware. The last few months have been meaningless announcement after meaningless announcement, and now the end result is that an executive says nothing is happening currently. You know what I say? Who cares!
Sure Amiga was interesting 14 years ago. But what about now? All we have seen from Amiga has been one "Breaking News" bit after another. They change the OS, the change the CPU, they even change what the hell the Amiga is. Look! It's a computer, it's a set-top, no, it's Amiga! Think superman here folks. Hearing Look! It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's Superman never amde him real. Reading these releases won't make Amiga reality either.
Let's all move on to something interesting that might actually happen: Transmeta.
I really hate those stupid "how can I get from here to there through Kevin Bacon" things. Ultimate silliness if you ask me. The graphic is excellent however:)
This is offtopic I know, but I was wondering what came of the Mindcraft result that Linux's network code isn't multithreaded? I remember hearing that Andrea was working on something to do with the Mindcraft results, and I was wondering if that issue is being addressed.
The KDE path weirdness is inherited from RedHat 6. A few months ago one of the KDE guys wrote a comment on why he packaged it like that, and it made sense (something to do with being able to work on many distributions I believe? But, it has been a while, and I don't quote remember, so I might be wrong.)
Anyway, one fix is to just symlink/opt/kde to/usr. Simple.
Some of these comments I see on here really make me sick. The idea that some schools are "second-tier" and are therefore just full of unimaginative, uncreative, boring people. What kind of elitist attitudes are these "first-tier" schools fostering?
Academia should be about learning and sharing that knowledge with others, not about who goes to the most expensive school with the most prestige.
It's a damn good thing I don't intend to go further than M.S in CS (perhaps not even past B.S.) I certainly don't want to deal with this level of idiocy and elitism.
RAD is extremely useful. Being able to draw out the UI alone is wonderful. Java is an excellent example of this. Coding up the UI manually is really annoying (even the code is a lot cleaner than the code a GUI Builder Tool will generate). But they save SOOO much time. I spent perhaps 20 hours on UI code for a recent Java project. The entire rest of the project, including writing a user guide and documenting the code, took only 60 hours. Thats a long time to write a User Interface. If I had a good RAD tool at the time, I could have easily cut that time in half, and probably down to only 4 or 5 hours to get the same interface. Also, RAD goes much futher than just Ui development. Properly written delphi code is veyr easy to understand. For one reason, a lot of the code that you don't really care about (and is bug prone) you never write; I'm talking about code to set up screen controls, and getting backend stuff working. In Delphi, I just drop some components in, set some properties, and then make some event handlers to actually do the work. I can't think of anything sweeter than that. I never have to mess with the UI code (unless of course I want to for some reason) and setting up the backend (datasources, etc) is as easy as connecting a few components together. This is what RAD is all about. getting rid of the stuff you just don't need to worry about so you can get the product done quicker. I can't see many problems with this philosophy.
I've been a big fan of Xing for a while. Their MP3 encoder just owns. I can get a 5 minute song into a 128kbps MP3 in around 1:30 or less.
IMO if you arew going to convert a whole lot of CDs to MP3s, speed will be an issue....add 1-2 minutes per song onto the encode time, and then multiply that by ~12 per CD, and then multiply that by the number of CDs and you start to get a lot of time saved.
I highly recommend Xing. Their Linux encoder is a simple console app (read: script friendly, ready to have a GUI built around it). Check it out.
Can we please stop using this annoying term "boxen?" AFAIK, the correct plural of "box" is "boxes". Hearing something so blatantly incorrect (and thorougly annoying) so often just grates on my ears.
Thanks for your cooperation,
The Society for the Protection of English Language Linguistics (SPELL)
I've used Delphi and C++Builder (several versions of each) for a few years, so here is my perspective on this.
From the looks of this survey, it definitely looks like Borland will consider Delphi for Linux. I like Delphi (from an OO standpoint I think it is fairly strong) but I don't like ObjectPascal.
On the other hand, C++Builder is a great product IMO, but the biggest drawback is that Borland treats it as a second-class citizen. They upgrade Delphi about every 14 months or so, but C++Builder lags way behind....if C++Builder 3 came out only a few months before Delphi 4. Why isnt the development synchronized? Also, all the libraries and stuff are geared towards Delphi; C++Builder is an afterthought. I ran into this problem when I was unable to use one VCL (the Delphi/C++Builder components) because of problems in the C++Builder Winsock code. The component worked fine in Delphi, but wouldn't work in C++Builder. Problems like that made me reconsider using C++Builder over Delphi, but the simple fact is that I like C++ a lot more.
Let's hope that Borland does the intelligent thing and develops Delphi and C++Builder for Linux.
Move along folks, nothing to see here. Just more of the same from our good friends at ZDNet.
Berst sets the tone of the "alert" with the first few lines, a pile of sickening drivel about how he is our friend for warning us about Linux. His silly metaphor equating Linux with trailblazing and the frontiersmen is absolutely disgusting as well. Give us a break.
The article has no technical merit; think manager speak here. This kind of crap is written for your boss, not for an engineer or a programmer. As other/.ers have mentioned, I do wish he would clarify just what a "workhorse" departmental server is. Does he mean internal web sites, file serving, and printing? Hello Apache and Samba. I wish Jesse would be a little clearer here.
He is dead-on about Linux on the Desktop. That isn't happening yet, mostly due to the kinks that need to be worked out with the Gnome/KDE, and the general infancy of the useful applications for Linux (StarOffice being one notable exception.) I do expect this situation to change dramatically in the next 9 months, as KDE 2 is readied, and Gnome continues to mature into the marvelous desktop environment it is destined to be.
All in all, it may actually be a useful article for us. Manager types that actually read his brand of trash, thinking it the Holy Word, will start considering Linux now. His cautious tone (ever so careful not to step on MS' feet) may end up easing our bosses into agreement with us for a change. Only time will tell. Fortunately, that means Jesse won't.
Replacing X seems like a good idea at first, as it would solve the issues numerous others have pointed out, notably ancient font handling and colormaps, the over-abstraction of networking, and the lack of at least a semi-consistent user interface. Just drop in a new windowing system that simplifies coding, still allows the useful parts of networking, and has hooks into localhost for fast access at the console. Seems simple right?
Unfortunately, there are terrible barriers to overcome, not the least of which are current X users. X users are accustomed to the levels of customization afforded by the myriad window managers currently available. Don't get me wrong, I like choice just as much as anyone else, but how reasonable is it to expect support for KDE, GNOME, and Motif in every application? How reasonable is it to expect support for each of these environments by vendors? And how reasonable is it to expect users to choose the environment which makes the most sense for them to use, and then to choose applications which properly support the environment? The answer is it's not. There have to be baseline standards in a modern windowing system that is so widely used. This logic applies to more than just toolkits and window managers (think protocols like DND, and the idea of double clicking on a document to open it, rather than opening the program first.)
The problem is, standards don't come easy. Nobody wants to change if the current system works (or more precisely, is **perceived** to work.) Power Users want their current level of control (even if it steps on other's toes unnecessarily, and ends up stunting the growth of the windowing environment as a whole.) Application programmers don't want to invest the time to learn a new system, even if the benefits are enormuous. For many, learning a new system would involve learning new paradigms (like OOP, or component models like CORBA which Berlin relies upon.) They'd rather keep with the status quo and slowly plod along. Finally, hardware vendors really don't want to move to something new. It has taken years to get support for modern video cards in X...how long will it take them to support something new?
In short, don't expect things to change anytime soon. Berlin is full of wonderful ideas, and if it lives up to its promises, will be vastly superior to X. However, Microsoft proved (and continues to prove) that it just doesn't matter if the product is superior. XF4 will solve a number of issues, but these are simply symptoms of the problem. After 15 years, it is time to retire the codebase and start anew. However, users, vendors, and programmers have simply invested TOO much time to change.
Pardon my idiocy, but I have a few questions since I am so thoroughly confused. Is EGCS going to replace GCC? Is it going to be/already is GCC? Is it going to live side by side with GCC?
My confusion stems from the fact that I seem to remember something about a name change for EGCS being posted on Slashdot not too long ago, and being fairly confused then. Now I can't remember what the name of my favorite compiler will be, and what neat new tricks it will have nestled inside.
What I have a problem with is the outright deception on the part of @home. They don't even tell their customers that an upstream cap has been put in place, and they totally ignore the issue. And what's more, they continue to send out the same promotional literature! Sure, I can't expect my cable to be blazingly fast forever. But I do expect to get what I paid for, that is, what was advertised.
I've been a subscriber for TCI@Home in Dallas since Early January, and by now I am getting disgusted with the thing. Let me explain.
TCI had a huge rollout party for cable modem trying to tell people why it is so much better. Of course, there were loads and loads of soccer moms there, wanting to free up the phone lines, but I went to ask what they planned to do about bandwidth problems. TCI claimed they had enginneers that watched the transfer rates, and if it got too low, they would split a node. Of course, this ignores the whole issue of @Home not having enough bandwidth. But I took their word for it. We got it installed, and I was very happy with the service for about a month. Then things changed.
All of a sudden, TCI couldn't keep up with the demand. The speeds in my apartment building started falling and falling (to the point where I couldn't use it during the day without getting really angry.) What used to be 40-60k/sec suddenly fell to 10-20k/sec. I felt cheated.
Furthermore, TCI's customer service was totally inept. Extremely Frequent emails about billing problems was the only way to solve an $100 overbilling, and even then it took 2 and a half months.
We've had the 128k cap installed in Dallas for most of the 1999, AFAIK, and it sucks. We have a small network setup here, and even registered for multiple IPs. If I try to FTP a file from wuarchive, while my roommate is playing Everquest or Quake or some other online game, the FTP really really lags. We didn't have that problem before the upstream cap.
It's just not fair how they have cheated existing customers and new ones as well. We continue to get promotional materials from TCI, with all the silly graphs displaying how Cable is 100x as fast as 28.8. I know from experience it just isn't true. They keep signing customers up without upgrading the network, and then turn a deaf ear on complaints. It's really too bad DSL is still so much here. It's really too bad poor college students don't have another choice.
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This article is littered with blanket statements that really detract from any value the article might have to offer.
HP says it's not robust enough for mission critical applications. Great. That makes perfect sense coming from a large Unix vendor. How about some evidence to back the argument up?
The article also says there are no apps for Linux. This argument is getting tired, and fast. We've got professional development tools like SGI's Jessie, Borland's C++Builder, JBuilder, and Delphi (on the way) in addition to the MetroWerks stuff and the Cygnus products. We've got several bullshit office suites (overrated pieces of software if you ask me) and a few other pieces individually - StarOffice, ApplixWare, WordPerfect 8, with KOffice on the horizon. We've loads of server software - Apache, MySQL, Samba. Theres even lots of games out there too - Civilization, the recent announcement that Loki would continue to port many games, and of course the venerable Quake family. This argument is quickly becoming a non-issue.
The article also uses the classic line that Linux's primary draw is the price, but that companies are afraid of freeware. This is just plain uninformed. Look at the dominance of Apache in the WWW server market. Think about the penetration sendmail continues to achieve.
The fact is, these studies (and consequently, these articles) only reveal small bits of truth and insight. They are largely uninformed, largely unsupported, and dated. Look at the kernel, for instance. This year Linux made incredible strides to become "scalable" with the 2.2 kernel. 2.4 is already on the horizon, with marked improvements in store. Most of these are the same old arguments that we have heard time and time and time again, and sadly, they aren't getting any more true. In fact, they are becoming wrong.
Carry on. don't put much store by this sort of FUD. Soon we will prove them wrong anyways.
Well of course RedHat is expanding into Europe. This is something Bob Young explicity said he wanted to do with the IPO bucks: expand into the international market.
Frankly, this just makes sense. Linux has had a strong history of being an international effort. Linus, Alan Cox, etc etc etc. There's lots of users in Europe (and lots in Japan too, I might add.) Look for Redhat to expand there in the coming months.
So what does this mean for RedHat? Look for an increased prescence in Europe (read: ads, offices, new hires), as well as increased international features in the distribution. Support packages worldwide will also be stepped up and enhanced if RedHat is sensible. Their current support model is terrible, IMO. Perhaps moving to new markets will lead them to streamline and refine it.
What does it mean for Linux? Obviously, more users, and thus more bugs get fixed, more apps get written, and the usual benefits of increased market share will result. Increased acceptance in Europe can only be good for Linux on the whole.
In short, I applaud RedHat for moving forward. This is what commercialization of Linux is good for: moving things forward in ways the community alone cannot, or not at least not rapidly enough. The next few months will be exciting indeed.
You know, I am inclined to agree. At my job we just replaced a whole bunch of Sparc5-110s and 170s with Ultra 5-300s (I think they were 300mhz anyways). Now, the Ultra5s were faster, definitely, but the difference just wasn't that great. Netscape STILL sucked on the Ultra 5s. What a disappointment!
I requested to be allowed to work on a P2-400 w/Linux, and my boss had no problem with that, as long as I could get my work done. Talk about a speed improvement. Just set up some NFS mounts, and in a couple of hours I was getting some real work done.
As someone else said, Ultra5s aren't bad if you have to do Sparc development. But don't expect performance anything like a modern PIII will give you.
This whole discussion is certainly interesting, but it does lead me to ask, why do we have two desktop standards?
The most obvious answer is for competition, since many believe that increased competition leads to higher quality software.
Others believe that since you have to use your desktop environment, you should be able to personalize it: choose the colors, choose the widgets, choose the window manager.
However, with the recent moves to popularize Linux, I begin to wonder about the wisdom of this philosophy.
Developers don't want to support 2 desktops. It doubles the amount of effort needed to build the user interface, and could impact other areas of the application as well. This thread is evidence that some care about having their program work with GNOME and KDE. However, how reasonable is it to ask that programmers support both environments? How reasonable is it to ask companies interested in selling Linux software to support two environments? One obvious answer is, it's not, that's why we have Gcalendar/Kcalendar, etc... That strikes me as silly; now we are advocating duplicating ALL the code instead of just the user inteface!
Additionally, many users don't care about having two desktops. Corporate environments immediately come to mind. If a large company wants to roll out linux for its desktops, they will choose a standard configuration of applications on standard, supported hardware. They don't really care if it's GNOME or KDE, just as long as it gets the work done.
This adds up to the idea that maybe having 2 desktops isn't such a good idea any more. GNOME has made some fantastic advancements, and KDE too has begun to really push technology. Why not work together and achieve a Common Linux Desktop Environment (CLIDE?).
This would of course have advantages and disadvantages, but perhaps it is time to re-evaluate where we are going.
I was considering purchasing the standard edition (read: I'm a broke college student and can't afford more than $30 to support RedHat.) However, I had some questions regarding the new update utility.
First, do you have to be a registered user to use up2date? If, for example, I were to purchase it from CheapBytes, would I not be able to use up2date?
Second, does the new auto update feature only let you connect to the priority site? I would think it would be a real bummer if I only got updates automatically for the first 30 days, since thats the amount of time you get to use priority.redhat.com with the standard edition. Also, it would be annoying if I really needed an update but the priority site was down/unavailable (due to either their machine crashing, or a new outage like the one we saw last week.)
Any answers would be greatly appreciated.
(Disclaimer: I've had most of my Linux experience with RedHat, so most of my comments about my usage apply to that.)
I've seen a lot of talk about "make a server-only distribution." That's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
Today, pretty much every Linux distribution uses the same "super duty" philosophy: put every package known to man on the user's computer, start the same set of services, and there you go. Instant server. Instant workstation. Instant anything, Instant everything.
This is troubling to me. I know that for my server installation, I don't WANT X, I don't want Netscape, I don't want GNOME or KDE or any of that other client-oriented, workstation stuff installed. It just wastes space sitting on my hard drive. However, Redhat's server install is the biggest of the 3 options, throwing EVERYTHING on the drive, leaving me with perhaps 300 megabytes of crap I just don't need. I even deselected X, and I still got some of the X11 packages installed!
So why don't distribution makers make server oriented distributions and workstation oriented ones, keeping the 2 separate? Simple. Linux users are stubborn people, perhaps the most stubborn of any in the industry. CUPS comes out, and there is lots of talk about how the current system works fine, we don't need a new system. Berlin is in development, but a mere mention of that brings up the X zealots, ready to kill anyting anywhere close to being modern. About the only thing Linux users will upgrade for is the kernel, and only because it's chic to run Linus' latest and greatest. The current set of Linux users is a rather small subset of all the types of users out there. Mom doesn't need Apache, wu-ftpd, or nfs. Mom just needs StarOffice, X, GNOME/KDE/wtahever, and Netscape. Why force it on her?
The fact is, separating workstations and servers makes a whole lot of sense. A lot of the security holes you see in servers come from client-oriented apps (Some of the GNOME bugs come to mind.) Similarly, for machines that only run workstation stuff, server stuff causes problems (wu-ftpd is an excellent example here). Why install stuff that won't be used?
I wish distribution makers would realize this. The world doesn't need 50 distributions that can do it all; how about one that does one thing really, really well? It seems to me that it would make a lot more sense.
Just think about it...a lean distribution, optimized to do what it does well. Now that would be something.
out of curiosity, why is mae-east, such an important box, located in a parking garage? amd who maintains it?
Check out this reply on the TalkBack to see what I am talking about. Apparently Mr. Dvorak isn't quite as correct as he thinks.
Disclaimer: these opinions are my own, and are not indicitive of those of my employer.
:)
I work at Ericsson US (our design center is based in Richardson TX) and they are just beginning to understand the benefits of Linux. I installed it on my workstation, and use it here and there to get stuff done. We are split between NT and Solaris (with the NT people pusing it slowly but surely to replace Solaris), so I can't really use it for everything.
The main problem is, many people (my group included) see Linux only as a cheap way to breathe life into older hardware. While we all know that Linux can run reasonably well on older machines, we also know that it just rocks on modern stuff. However, our design center is of the belief that if we want to run Linux, lets do it on some old hardware so we can save money. They aren't really looking at Linux as an alternative to other solutions with the same hardware; rather, they are looking at Linux as a way to put off buying new hardware.
I see this as a problem in the community at large; many times we emphasize the ability of Linux to use legacy stuff. Perhaps we should put more emphasis on just how awesome Linux is on modern stuff.
On a side note, I am definitely glad that my employer sees Linux as useful. Count Ericsson among the Enlightened
Guys, sorry to rain on the parade, but I really don't see Sony going out and supporting MP3. Why? One word: Minidisc.
Sony has LOTS and LOTS of money invested in Minidisc, and unfortunately, they seem to be about the only ones who care about the format. Consumers don't want them (I know a lot of people who hate the idea of having to rebuy their CDs; these people would probably never invest in a Minidisc recorder.) Other electronics manufacturers don't really care, since there isn't enough demand. And retail outlets can't be bothered.
MP3 is going somewhere, and a lot faster than Minidisc could ever dream. Rio sold like hotcakes, Nomad won't be bad, and by Spring we will be on the verge of REAL mp3 hardware (USB and IBM microdrive...now that would be sweet.)
In short, expect Sony to seriously lag behind everyone else when it comes to MP3.
Looking at the other 50 or so comments today, I'm obviously not the only one fed up with perpetual Amiga vaporware. The last few months have been meaningless announcement after meaningless announcement, and now the end result is that an executive says nothing is happening currently. You know what I say? Who cares!
Sure Amiga was interesting 14 years ago. But what about now? All we have seen from Amiga has been one "Breaking News" bit after another. They change the OS, the change the CPU, they even change what the hell the Amiga is. Look! It's a computer, it's a set-top, no, it's Amiga! Think superman here folks. Hearing Look! It's a bird, it's a plane, no, it's Superman never amde him real. Reading these releases won't make Amiga reality either.
Let's all move on to something interesting that might actually happen: Transmeta.
I really hate those stupid "how can I get from here to there through Kevin Bacon" things. Ultimate silliness if you ask me. The graphic is excellent however :)
This is offtopic I know, but I was wondering what came of the Mindcraft result that Linux's network code isn't multithreaded? I remember hearing that Andrea was working on something to do with the Mindcraft results, and I was wondering if that issue is being addressed.
The KDE path weirdness is inherited from RedHat 6. A few months ago one of the KDE guys wrote a comment on why he packaged it like that, and it made sense (something to do with being able to work on many distributions I believe? But, it has been a while, and I don't quote remember, so I might be wrong.)
/opt/kde to /usr. Simple.
Anyway, one fix is to just symlink
If you are going to add more hardware for speed, then run MySQL on it and it would be THAT MUCH FASTER.
I like MySQL's speed, and for me the license is not a problem.
Some of these comments I see on here really make me sick. The idea that some schools are "second-tier" and are therefore just full of unimaginative, uncreative, boring people. What kind of elitist attitudes are these "first-tier" schools fostering?
Academia should be about learning and sharing that knowledge with others, not about who goes to the most expensive school with the most prestige.
It's a damn good thing I don't intend to go further than M.S in CS (perhaps not even past B.S.) I certainly don't want to deal with this level of idiocy and elitism.
RAD is extremely useful. Being able to draw out the UI alone is wonderful. Java is an excellent example of this. Coding up the UI manually is really annoying (even the code is a lot cleaner than the code a GUI Builder Tool will generate). But they save SOOO much time. I spent perhaps 20 hours on UI code for a recent Java project. The entire rest of the project, including writing a user guide and documenting the code, took only 60 hours. Thats a long time to write a User Interface. If I had a good RAD tool at the time, I could have easily cut that time in half, and probably down to only 4 or 5 hours to get the same interface.
Also, RAD goes much futher than just Ui development. Properly written delphi code is veyr easy to understand. For one reason, a lot of the code that you don't really care about (and is bug prone) you never write; I'm talking about code to set up screen controls, and getting backend stuff working. In Delphi, I just drop some components in, set some properties, and then make some event handlers to actually do the work. I can't think of anything sweeter than that. I never have to mess with the UI code (unless of course I want to for some reason) and setting up the backend (datasources, etc) is as easy as connecting a few components together. This is what RAD is all about. getting rid of the stuff you just don't need to worry about so you can get the product done quicker. I can't see many problems with this philosophy.
I've been a big fan of Xing for a while. Their MP3 encoder just owns. I can get a 5 minute song into a 128kbps MP3 in around 1:30 or less.
IMO if you arew going to convert a whole lot of CDs to MP3s, speed will be an issue....add 1-2 minutes per song onto the encode time, and then multiply that by ~12 per CD, and then multiply that by the number of CDs and you start to get a lot of time saved.
I highly recommend Xing. Their Linux encoder is a simple console app (read: script friendly, ready to have a GUI built around it). Check it out.
Can we please stop using this annoying term "boxen?" AFAIK, the correct plural of "box" is "boxes". Hearing something so blatantly incorrect (and thorougly annoying) so often just grates on my ears.
Thanks for your cooperation,
The Society for the Protection of English Language Linguistics (SPELL)
I've used Delphi and C++Builder (several versions of each) for a few years, so here is my perspective on this.
From the looks of this survey, it definitely looks like Borland will consider Delphi for Linux. I like Delphi (from an OO standpoint I think it is fairly strong) but I don't like ObjectPascal.
On the other hand, C++Builder is a great product IMO, but the biggest drawback is that Borland treats it as a second-class citizen. They upgrade Delphi about every 14 months or so, but C++Builder lags way behind....if C++Builder 3 came out only a few months before Delphi 4. Why isnt the development synchronized? Also, all the libraries and stuff are geared towards Delphi; C++Builder is an afterthought. I ran into this problem when I was unable to use one VCL (the Delphi/C++Builder components) because of problems in the C++Builder Winsock code. The component worked fine in Delphi, but wouldn't work in C++Builder. Problems like that made me reconsider using C++Builder over Delphi, but the simple fact is that I like C++ a lot more.
Let's hope that Borland does the intelligent thing and develops Delphi and C++Builder for Linux.
Move along folks, nothing to see here. Just more of the same from our good friends at ZDNet.
/.ers have mentioned, I do wish he would clarify just what a "workhorse" departmental server is. Does he mean internal web sites, file serving, and printing? Hello Apache and Samba. I wish Jesse would be a little clearer here.
Berst sets the tone of the "alert" with the first few lines, a pile of sickening drivel about how he is our friend for warning us about Linux. His silly metaphor equating Linux with trailblazing and the frontiersmen is absolutely disgusting as well. Give us a break.
The article has no technical merit; think manager speak here. This kind of crap is written for your boss, not for an engineer or a programmer. As other
He is dead-on about Linux on the Desktop. That isn't happening yet, mostly due to the kinks that need to be worked out with the Gnome/KDE, and the general infancy of the useful applications for Linux (StarOffice being one notable exception.) I do expect this situation to change dramatically in the next 9 months, as KDE 2 is readied, and Gnome continues to mature into the marvelous desktop environment it is destined to be.
All in all, it may actually be a useful article for us. Manager types that actually read his brand of trash, thinking it the Holy Word, will start considering Linux now. His cautious tone (ever so careful not to step on MS' feet) may end up easing our bosses into agreement with us for a change. Only time will tell. Fortunately, that means Jesse won't.
Replacing X seems like a good idea at first, as it would solve the issues numerous others have pointed out, notably ancient font handling and colormaps, the over-abstraction of networking, and the lack of at least a semi-consistent user interface. Just drop in a new windowing system that simplifies coding, still allows the useful parts of networking, and has hooks into localhost for fast access at the console. Seems simple right?
Unfortunately, there are terrible barriers to overcome, not the least of which are current X users. X users are accustomed to the levels of customization afforded by the myriad window managers currently available. Don't get me wrong, I like choice just as much as anyone else, but how reasonable is it to expect support for KDE, GNOME, and Motif in every application? How reasonable is it to expect support for each of these environments by vendors? And how reasonable is it to expect users to choose the environment which makes the most sense for them to use, and then to choose applications which properly support the environment? The answer is it's not. There have to be baseline standards in a modern windowing system that is so widely used. This logic applies to more than just toolkits and window managers (think protocols like DND, and the idea of double clicking on a document to open it, rather than opening the program first.)
The problem is, standards don't come easy. Nobody wants to change if the current system works (or more precisely, is **perceived** to work.) Power Users want their current level of control (even if it steps on other's toes unnecessarily, and ends up stunting the growth of the windowing environment as a whole.) Application programmers don't want to invest the time to learn a new system, even if the benefits are enormuous. For many, learning a new system would involve learning new paradigms (like OOP, or component models like CORBA which Berlin relies upon.) They'd rather keep with the status quo and slowly plod along. Finally, hardware vendors really don't want to move to something new. It has taken years to get support for modern video cards in X...how long will it take them to support something new?
In short, don't expect things to change anytime soon. Berlin is full of wonderful ideas, and if it lives up to its promises, will be vastly superior to X. However, Microsoft proved (and continues to prove) that it just doesn't matter if the product is superior. XF4 will solve a number of issues, but these are simply symptoms of the problem. After 15 years, it is time to retire the codebase and start anew. However, users, vendors, and programmers have simply invested TOO much time to change.
Pardon my idiocy, but I have a few questions since I am so thoroughly confused.
Is EGCS going to replace GCC? Is it going to be/already is GCC? Is it going to live side by side with GCC?
My confusion stems from the fact that I seem to remember something about a name change for EGCS being posted on Slashdot not too long ago, and being fairly confused then. Now I can't remember what the name of my favorite compiler will be, and what neat new tricks it will have nestled inside.
What I have a problem with is the outright deception on the part of @home. They don't even tell their customers that an upstream cap has been put in place, and they totally ignore the issue. And what's more, they continue to send out the same promotional literature! Sure, I can't expect my cable to be blazingly fast forever. But I do expect to get what I paid for, that is, what was advertised.
I've been a subscriber for TCI@Home in Dallas since Early January, and by now I am getting disgusted with the thing. Let me explain.
TCI had a huge rollout party for cable modem trying to tell people why it is so much better. Of course, there were loads and loads of soccer moms there, wanting to free up the phone lines, but I went to ask what they planned to do about bandwidth problems. TCI claimed they had enginneers that watched the transfer rates, and if it got too low, they would split a node. Of course, this ignores the whole issue of @Home not having enough bandwidth. But I took their word for it. We got it installed, and I was very happy with the service for about a month. Then things changed.
All of a sudden, TCI couldn't keep up with the demand. The speeds in my apartment building started falling and falling (to the point where I couldn't use it during the day without getting really angry.) What used to be 40-60k/sec suddenly fell to 10-20k/sec. I felt cheated.
Furthermore, TCI's customer service was totally inept. Extremely Frequent emails about billing problems was the only way to solve an $100 overbilling, and even then it took 2 and a half months.
We've had the 128k cap installed in Dallas for most of the 1999, AFAIK, and it sucks. We have a small network setup here, and even registered for multiple IPs. If I try to FTP a file from wuarchive, while my roommate is playing Everquest or Quake or some other online game, the FTP really really lags. We didn't have that problem before the upstream cap.
It's just not fair how they have cheated existing customers and new ones as well. We continue to get promotional materials from TCI, with all the silly graphs displaying how Cable is 100x as fast as 28.8. I know from experience it just isn't true. They keep signing customers up without upgrading the network, and then turn a deaf ear on complaints. It's really too bad DSL is still so much here. It's really too bad poor college students don't have another choice.