MS have abandoned it for the end-user platform. It's done poorly in the web-server space, and losing out lately in the general server space. The workstation market has shunned it.
Despite all this, 2/3 of all the jobs I see go something like this "NT, IIS, IE, VB, COM" etc. I'm a bit confused about how well/badly NT is doing. My best guess is that a lot of people still see an all-MS solution as a safe way to go. I reckon they're going to get burned in a couple of years when everybody accepts that open standards based on UNIX are the right thing and nobody wants to maintain all that asp crap.
Let me get this straight. The server port of linux is 2.0.36 and will be abandoned in favour of 2.2.X when it's ported. The mach kernel is falling behind in hardware support and will have to have bits ported from Mac OS X. Isn't this going to become a bit unmanagable?
And if you're a fan of Mach kernels why not get behind Hurd? To port Linux to Mach, you'll be in a forever catch-up mode with Linux proper. To do it on Mac hardware is to play forever catch-up with whatever Apple is so kind as to bestow on you.
Hey, if they're having fun hacking on this, good on them. But it will always be slower than real Linux. And it will always be less "pure" and nice and micro-kernel-ish than Hurd. So what's the point?
Photography News, Stuff that Matters
on
35mm Handbook
·
· Score: 3
Larry is a cool guy, but I really hate perl. Despite that I find myself using it - mostly because there is a perl module that talks to everything.
But perl makes for buggy code. Languages like Eiffel have endeavoured to make coding more rigourous. And the power, conciseness and structured way of thinking of Lisp makes for elegant and thus maintainable code.
But perl it's too easy to write bad code. In some cases it just plain encourages bad code. I think the main reason perl is popular is just because it talks to everything. And it talks to everything because it's popular. It lulls you into a false sense of security. Doing something small in perl is quick. So you start using it. Soon you're doing something big and serious and still using it. And then you're in a bit of a mess.
If perl is post-modern - then give me modern please. The purity of careful thinking really is better than a hap-hazard, do it in hundreds of different ways thinking.
I try to use Scheme and Guile whenever I can. I think it can do as good or better job for everything (I'm not a post-modern thinker). But to do everything better it needs to have as many modules as Perl. It's got quite a few, but not as many as perl yet. So that's why I use perl.
Come to Australia. We have flat rate calls too. You can get a permanent connection for $AUD 20 per month. The line will probably drop out once per day so you'll end up paying about another $6.00 per month for calls. Add $10 for a dedicated phone line thats say $AUD 40 per month for 24x7 net access. That equates to about $US 25/month. Not too bad I think.
Well Telstra don't have a complete monopoly. And seeing as UU-Net / MCI have just bought out OzEmail and have plans to lay fibre all over the place, things can only get better.
Postgres has 90% of what's needed to make a true object database. Unfortunately that missing 10% is pretty critical as far as making postgresql be able to do what Versant or ObjectStore or Objectivity does. One day I'll have to put together a list of changes that would need to be made. I doubt it would be much work, but it would be needed.
The main problem with software projects is not bad coders (although they are plentiful too), but bad management.
Managers have very little understanding of both how hard software development really is and the need for maintenance. Managers think in terms of "when will this software be finished". In reality, even a modest project will need probably years of maintenance to bring it to a bug free, reasonably complete state.
That's one area where free software does tend to win out - the author will often maintain it for many many years slowly ironing out the glitches. A lot of proprietry software get's slapped together. When it looks sort of like it works the coder gets shunted onto the next project. (Then he gets fed up and moves onto the next job). Meanwhile the code undergoes severe bit-rot.
I'm in the market for a sound card right now. If SBLive had source drivers I would be getting it because it's a great card. But no source, no purchase, so I'll be getting something else.
The glove sounds interesting, but moving your thumb to the base of your fingers sounds unnatural. Handykey sounds better right now (I ordered one a while back and should be getting it soon). The twiddlers look awesome to me and I can't wait to get mine.
Don't forget that Linus Torvalds computer is something like a Quad-Xeon. I've got confidence that Linux on 4 processors would be pretty competitive. Better or worse than NT I don't know, but it wouldn't have to hide.
If RedHat can be got for free and is a fraud, then just what is SCO which costs $thousands and sucks.
SCO is and always has been the worst UNIX on the market. Being UNIX it wasn't too bad (not stinking like NT), but pretty buggy nevertheless. NOTHING ported particularly easy to SCO.
I've never quite understood the grumbling about the divisions between different UNIXes. While the differences between HPUX and SunOS were never desirable, they are nothing compared to what has existed in the PC world. I mean look at it. You had DOS, then OS/2, then Windows and Win32 (of various flavours) and then NT. And if you were serious you would want to support Mac too. Even the differences between different Win32 flavours were at least as bad as what UNIX ever had.
By contrast, UNIX code from 1972 would run unchanged in 1998. 10 year old code just keeps on running. 25 year old code too.
I forget how old X is, but it's pretty old and still backwards compatible from way way back. An old OpenWindows program will still run with no problems.
Having said that, yes standards are important. Personally I think the Gnome vs KDE divide is a massive problem. Joe User doesn't care about diversity. He wants to be able to take a shrink wrapped package (or rpmed package) and have it fit in with his desktop. He's not going to be happy if he's using Gnome and the program he wants to use only works half right because it was designed for KDE (or vice versa).
I also don't see a problem with one distribution dominating provided they do a good job. I don't see the need for so many. I mean it's just putting a whole lot of free code together and making sure it all works together. It has to be done, but it's not really productive for 10 different groups to all be doing it. They'd be better off building something new and useful.
KDE or Gnome will die. Some of the distributions will die. It's a shame to see the code go to waste, but it's better than the alternative - bad interoperability.
What innovations has MS given us anyway? 1) A reasonably easy to use GUI (although not ground breaking in usability and pretty boring) 2) Some quite sophisticated office apps.
BIG DEAL! Gnome is not just copying MS, they have got some true innovations there. Themes are something MS doesn't have. Virtual desktops and remote GUI built in. Guile, and TCL - extension languages, something MS has never done. scwm - Extensible window manager. Apache - Beat MS before they even had a server. Emacs - Extensible editor, something MS has never caught up with. 24x7 OS - all the MS OSes require rebooting for certain re-configurations. Linux et al never absolutely requires a reboot. I could probably go on and on, but hey
If they had to change their name, something like Silicon Gear Inc would much cooler than a stupid acronym.
And the new logo is just as lame as they come. The lower case letters combined with the non-classy typewriter font makes the statement "I have no class whatsoever". The IBM logo may be boring but the font and style has a "power" look. This sgi logo has a corner store unprofessional look. If you're trying to sell jeans or something - maybe.
Ummm. I thought the reason they want to get rid of #5 is to stop it being so Linux specific. If that's the case why consider a Logo which is a stylised DL - Debian Linux.
Quote: "Which is all very interesting, but the point is this: if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak is not worth paying."
Wow, these economist people are real scientists aren't they? It takes about 2 weeks to learn dvorak. The benefit will be received for the rest of your life. If they pulled their little economic formulas out they might learn something at this point.
The Dvorak keyboard also tends to alternate between left and right because the vowels are on one side and the consonants on the other. If anything Dvorak does a better job here.
The typing records are held on dvorak, and anybody who has given dvorak a go can testify that your hands don't move anywhere near as far leading to less hand strain.
But I'd like to see how the TWIDDLER keyboard does. It might not be faster, but it sure would be relaxing and easy on the hands. I can't wait to try one out.
Remember way back when the first pentium came out? It was pretty slow, but the word was it would speed up heaps when applications were re-built for the pentium and optimised with re-order of instructions and stuff.
Of course no-one ever did this. In the early days it was probably mostly because everyone needed it to run on the old processors too. These days it is partly because nobody probably remembers this anymore, or not many people have bothered to do _that_ good a job of optimising for exactly how the pentium works anyway.
This time around, the same thing will happen, EXCEPT that probably Intel will come out with a proper VLIW gcc based compiler for Linux/UNIX. They have to do this for the chip to survive.
Now sure, MS and Borland or whoever will make their own compilers but nobody will use the VLIW stuff for years because of backward compatibility. They will stick with whatever x86 compatibility box Merced has.
But any Linux vendor can just do a re-build of everything (use the source Luke). This might be a big win for Linux to take a speed leap over Windows.
Well I struggled through the whole rambling article and I have NO idea what it was about. The author spends so much time commenting on his boring life and apologising for putting forward his point of view that I must have missed what his point of view actually was.
With your "Open Source Thingy" book, I have some advice. Don't quit your day job just yet. Keep at it and practicing.
Don't tell us what you've been doing until you've made your point and want to back it up with experiences. Don't apologise for your point of view or try and say who you are targeting. Say what you've got to say.
What was that thing Mark Twain(?) said, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one?
Slashdot Mirror
MS have abandoned it for the end-user platform. It's done poorly in the web-server space, and losing out lately in the general server space. The workstation market has shunned it.
Despite all this, 2/3 of all the jobs I see go something like this "NT, IIS, IE, VB, COM" etc. I'm a bit confused about how well/badly NT is doing. My best guess is that a lot of people still see an all-MS solution as a safe way to go. I reckon they're going to get burned in a couple of years when everybody accepts that open standards based on UNIX are the right thing and nobody wants to maintain all that asp crap.
I don't think XML solves anything that can replace a database. If RDBMS doesn't cut it you need an object database or some other sort of database.
Let me get this straight. The server port of linux is 2.0.36 and will be abandoned in favour of 2.2.X when it's ported. The mach kernel is falling behind in hardware support and will have to have bits ported from Mac OS X. Isn't this going to become a bit unmanagable?
And if you're a fan of Mach kernels why not get behind Hurd? To port Linux to Mach, you'll be in a forever catch-up mode with Linux proper. To do it on Mac hardware is to play forever catch-up with whatever Apple is so kind as to bestow on you.
Hey, if they're having fun hacking on this, good on them. But it will always be slower than real Linux. And it will always be less "pure" and nice and micro-kernel-ish than Hurd. So what's the point?
Check it out.
TechPhoto.org - Photography News, Stuff that matters Check it out.
Larry is a cool guy, but I really hate perl. Despite that I find myself using it - mostly because there is a perl module that talks to everything.
But perl makes for buggy code. Languages like Eiffel have endeavoured to make coding more rigourous. And the power, conciseness and structured way of thinking of Lisp makes for elegant and thus maintainable code.
But perl it's too easy to write bad code. In some cases it just plain encourages bad code. I think the main reason perl is popular is just because it talks to everything. And it talks to everything because it's popular. It lulls you into a false sense of security. Doing something small in perl is quick. So you start using it. Soon you're doing something big and serious and still using it. And then you're in a bit of a mess.
If perl is post-modern - then give me modern please. The purity of careful thinking really is better than a hap-hazard, do it in hundreds of different ways thinking.
I try to use Scheme and Guile whenever I can. I think it can do as good or better job for everything (I'm not a post-modern thinker). But to do everything better it needs to have as many modules as Perl. It's got quite a few, but not as many as perl yet. So that's why I use perl.
Come to Australia. We have flat rate calls too. You can get a permanent connection for $AUD 20 per month. The line will probably drop out once per day so you'll end up paying about another $6.00 per month for calls. Add $10 for a dedicated phone line thats say $AUD 40 per month for 24x7 net access. That equates to about $US 25/month. Not too bad I think.
Well Telstra don't have a complete monopoly. And seeing as UU-Net / MCI have just bought out OzEmail and have plans to lay fibre all over the place, things can only get better.
Postgres has 90% of what's needed to make a true object database. Unfortunately that missing 10% is pretty critical as far as making postgresql be able to do what Versant or ObjectStore or Objectivity does. One day I'll have to put together a list of changes that would need to be made. I doubt it would be much work, but it would be needed.
The main problem with software projects is not bad coders (although they are plentiful too), but bad management.
Managers have very little understanding of both how hard software development really is and the need for maintenance. Managers think in terms of "when will this software be finished". In reality, even a modest project will need probably years of maintenance to bring it to a bug free, reasonably complete state.
That's one area where free software does tend to win out - the author will often maintain it for many many years slowly ironing out the glitches. A lot of proprietry software get's slapped together. When it looks sort of like it works the coder gets shunted onto the next project. (Then he gets fed up and moves onto the next job). Meanwhile the code undergoes severe bit-rot.
I'm in the market for a sound card right now. If SBLive had source drivers I would be getting it because it's a great card. But no source, no purchase, so I'll be getting something else.
The glove sounds interesting, but moving your thumb to the base of your fingers sounds unnatural. Handykey sounds better right now (I ordered one a while back and should be getting it soon). The twiddlers look awesome to me and I can't wait to get mine.
I'm pretty sure Linus's box is now a Quad-Xeon. Certainly it is Quad-x86 Intel something.
In the slash0.2 source there is a slashd daemon which creates static pages from the database content.
Does slashdot not do that anymore due to all the configuration options?
Don't forget that Linus Torvalds computer is something like a Quad-Xeon. I've got confidence that Linux on 4 processors would be pretty competitive. Better or worse than NT I don't know, but it wouldn't have to hide.
If RedHat can be got for free and is a fraud, then just what is SCO which costs $thousands and sucks.
SCO is and always has been the worst UNIX on the market. Being UNIX it wasn't too bad (not stinking like NT), but pretty buggy nevertheless. NOTHING ported particularly easy to SCO.
I've never quite understood the grumbling about the divisions between different UNIXes. While the differences between HPUX and SunOS were never desirable, they are nothing compared to what has existed in the PC world. I mean look at it. You had DOS, then OS/2, then Windows and Win32 (of various flavours) and then NT. And if you were serious you would want to support Mac too. Even the differences between different Win32 flavours were at least as bad as what UNIX ever had.
By contrast, UNIX code from 1972 would run unchanged in 1998. 10 year old code just keeps on running. 25 year old code too.
I forget how old X is, but it's pretty old and still backwards compatible from way way back. An old OpenWindows program will still run with no problems.
Having said that, yes standards are important. Personally I think the Gnome vs KDE divide is a massive problem. Joe User doesn't care about diversity. He wants to be able to take a shrink wrapped package (or rpmed package) and have it fit in with his desktop. He's not going to be happy if he's using Gnome and the program he wants to use only works half right because it was designed for KDE (or vice versa).
I also don't see a problem with one distribution dominating provided they do a good job. I don't see the need for so many. I mean it's just putting a whole lot of free code together and making sure it all works together. It has to be done, but it's not really productive for 10 different groups to all be doing it. They'd be better off building something new and useful.
KDE or Gnome will die. Some of the distributions will die. It's a shame to see the code go to waste, but it's better than the alternative - bad interoperability.
I thought "slashdot" refered to the http:///..org, not the /. in Unix commands, as the above article asserts.
What innovations has MS given us anyway?
1) A reasonably easy to use GUI (although not ground breaking in usability and pretty boring)
2) Some quite sophisticated office apps.
BIG DEAL!
Gnome is not just copying MS, they have got some true innovations there. Themes are something MS doesn't have. Virtual desktops and remote GUI built in.
Guile, and TCL - extension languages, something MS has never done.
scwm - Extensible window manager.
Apache - Beat MS before they even had a server.
Emacs - Extensible editor, something MS has never caught up with.
24x7 OS - all the MS OSes require rebooting for certain re-configurations. Linux et al never absolutely requires a reboot.
I could probably go on and on, but hey
If they had to change their name, something like Silicon Gear Inc would much cooler than a stupid acronym.
And the new logo is just as lame as they come. The lower case letters combined with the non-classy typewriter font makes the statement "I have no class whatsoever". The IBM logo may be boring but the font and style has a "power" look. This sgi logo has a corner store unprofessional look. If you're trying to sell jeans or something - maybe.
Ummm. I thought the reason they want to get rid of #5 is to stop it being so Linux specific. If that's the case why consider a Logo which is a stylised DL - Debian Linux.
I don't have to imagine. I use emacs and vi with dvorak every day and it is absolutely no problem.
Wow, these economist people are real scientists aren't they? It takes about 2 weeks to learn dvorak. The benefit will be received for the rest of your life. If they pulled their little economic formulas out they might learn something at this point.
The Dvorak keyboard also tends to alternate between left and right because the vowels are on one side and the consonants on the other. If anything Dvorak does a better job here.
The typing records are held on dvorak, and anybody who has given dvorak a go can testify that your hands don't move anywhere near as far leading to less hand strain.
But I'd like to see how the TWIDDLER keyboard does. It might not be faster, but it sure would be relaxing and easy on the hands. I can't wait to try one out.
Remember way back when the first pentium came out? It was pretty slow, but the word was it would speed up heaps when applications were re-built for the pentium and optimised with re-order of instructions and stuff.
Of course no-one ever did this. In the early days it was probably mostly because everyone needed it to run on the old processors too. These days it is partly because nobody probably remembers this anymore, or not many people have bothered to do _that_ good a job of optimising for exactly how the pentium works anyway.
This time around, the same thing will happen, EXCEPT that probably Intel will come out with a proper VLIW gcc based compiler for Linux/UNIX. They have to do this for the chip to survive.
Now sure, MS and Borland or whoever will make their own compilers but nobody will use the VLIW stuff for years because of backward compatibility. They will stick with whatever x86 compatibility box Merced has.
But any Linux vendor can just do a re-build of everything (use the source Luke). This might be a big win for Linux to take a speed leap over Windows.
Well I struggled through the whole rambling article and I have NO idea what it was about. The author spends so much time commenting on his boring life and apologising for putting forward his point of view that I must have missed what his point of view actually was.
With your "Open Source Thingy" book, I have some advice. Don't quit your day job just yet. Keep at it and practicing.
Don't tell us what you've been doing until you've made your point and want to back it up with experiences. Don't apologise for your point of view or try and say who you are targeting. Say what you've got to say.
What was that thing Mark Twain(?) said, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have time to write a short one?