This little snippet of shell has saved me from disaster a couple times. Let's say you just deleted "foo.c", and you need it back! Right away! If you know that the code will contain the text "while (mungeCount < superMungeCount) {", then you can try:
This does have its problems. If the file spanned multiple blocks it may not get all of it, but you'd be surprised how often it does get all of it. You might get multiple versions of the file concatenated together, and you'll have to text edit to pull out the one you want. Also, of course, it only works on text files. But the two times that I needed this, it worked, so it might help you out too. Note that you should run it immediately after deleting the file - ever disk access means that much more chance that the block will be recycled.:-(
Unicode-reinterpreted-as-a-string-of-ASCII-bytes (taken literally) can only mean UTF-7, which never really got much traction, but had no NULs or control characters in it - all pure, readable ASCII. It's problem in DNS would be that it treats upper and lower case as distinct, which is not true for current DNS queries. If you meant "UTF-8" when you said "unicode-reinterpreted-as-a-string-of-ASCII-bytes" , that also has no NUL or control codes in it, and unlike UTF-7 it lets you treat upper/lower case any way you want. It's drawback is that it will insert bytes in the 128..255 (ie, non-ASCII) range into the data stream, which will probably cause trouble for current DNS servers.
So, to sum it up, you are right that current Unicode encodings will not meet current DNS RFCs, but the reason you gave wasn't quite right. Punycode does solve the problem, but ugh, punycode is an awful hack of a character encoding system. I'd hate to see it live on forever, but it might be useful getting us started on i18n-ified DNS.
Ummm...actually, did you notice that my post only said that MySQL has row-level locking and transactions?
OK, I know you were just trolling for an answer, but sheesh. Unlike the original poster, I do know what features MySQL has. I didn't say it had all features, just that two of the ones the poster had criticized it for lacking were not, in fact, lacking at all.
And unlike you, I can actually read a posting and understand what it says.
If you think PostgresSQL is now faster than MySQL, fine, post a real benchmark, with both databases being properly tuned.
But MySQL has had transactions and row-level locking for quite some time now, so the fact that you claim that it doesn't indicates that you don't know what you are talking about.
Futhermore, why must you bring up your dislike for MySQL in a message about Postgres' great new features? If Postgres really is improving, great! Talk about that! Why must you at the same time talk about how sucky MySQL is? (Especially since what you say about MySQL is clearly untrue).
"The rest is pretty much just a standard action/adventure story - it's the end that makes it special."
You say then, then act surprised that the scouring is left out? Let's face it, what works in a book isn't always exactly what works in a movie. As Jackson commented, there are pacing issues that are different for each medium. The scouring of the shire is semi-comic, where the brave hobbits come back to the shire and make mincemeant of all those nastly little half-orcs and their big boss Sharky. In the book, this worked well and as you point out shows what would have happened to the Shire if Saruman and Sauron had won. But in the movie, this would happen after the main battle and the defeat of Sauron. There it would have been an awkward change of pace between the final victory and the departure for the Grey Havens (I'm assuming they'll keep that, it will make a nice bittersweet farewell segment). Having action/victory/semicomic adventure/sad farewell as the end of the movie will lessen the impact of the action and victory. In a book, which is slower and where the action has less impact, it works, but I say leaving it out of the movie sounds like a good idea.
I signed up for their mailing list. Downloaded their perl test. Used it on their "welocome to the SPF mailing list message". The result:
$ perl -MMail::SPF::Query -le 'print for Mail::SPF::Query->new(ipv4=>shift, sender=>shift)->result' 207.8.214.4 umbrella.listbox.com ...
fail
client umbrella.listbox.com[207.8.214.4] is not a designated mailer for domain of sender umbrella.listbox.com
So apparently these guys don't have their own mailing list system set up to use their protocol properly? Or am I using their tool wrong? (I'm pretty much just typing in what the README gives).
I've been using courier for about 4 years now. Works great, very easy to set up, supports maildir so I've used it with both qmail and postfix, works well with both.
The only problem I had is mentioned by another person in this thread - it treats "}" as a needs-to-be-quoted char, which is incorrect. That means that if you have a "}" in your password (as I did at one time), and your mail client only quotes when needed (as the newer evolutions do), you won't be able to log in. I submitted a 1-line patch for this to the Courier mailing list, which the courier author reads. A couple months later, still it wasn't applied.
So I guess, I'm happy with its performance, and very happy with its ease of use. As another person in the thread says, it does have compliance issues with the IMAP standard, and the author doesn't seem to care, so if I had the time to set up something more complex like Cyrus I probable wouldn't use it.
As long as the software licence says it does this, and it doesn't "phone home" with anything but what is necessary to identify the computer hosting the cracked copy, I think this could actually be pretty cool.
In my experience, most companies don't want to steal software, but it does sometimes get accidentally installed without an extra licence purchase. If the software maker did it right, they could just call up the owner of the infringing computer, and say, "Hey, it looks like you need a few more copies of our software! Have your purchasing department get in touch with us. We'll let the unpaid-for software keep working for a month but make sure you buy your licences before then. Then get back in touch and we'll tell you how to reconfigure your installations to use these new licences."
Honestly, this method sure beats the BSA, doesn't it? In fact, if I were a busy IT person, I'd appreciate knowing that I can run around installing this software whenever I want, and the company will just get back to me if I forget to pay for it!
Of course, if they didn't warn you in their licence that they'd be doing this, or if they were transmitting confidential information back to home...that's a whole other story.
If you are a desk clerk at a hospital, then the hospital would have every right to fire you.
Hospital records are supposed to be kept as private as possible. Employees who satisfy their own curiousity without caring whose privacy they compromise should never have be allowed to have jobs where "poking around" in private data is possible.
RMS' fixation on calling it "GNU/Linux" really seems to me to be so extreme that it's bordering on mental illness. Want to talk about programming? He talks about calling your desktop system GNU/Linux. Want to talk about the SCO lawsuit? Well, it wouldn't be a problem if only people would call it GNU/Linux. I remember an article from a KDE guy who met RMS at a conference, to show him KDE; what did RMS do? Browse through the guy's menus, looking for tabs called "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux".
Is there a name for people who become so totally obsessed with one thing that they can't see how irritating they are? And I don't mean "geeks" either, RMS seems to be going way beyond geekiness in this!
You know, I think any C/C++ programmer who actually looks at how their time is spent eventually decides that they have wasted enough hours chasing down one-past-the array bugs, free-then-access bugs, and just plain wild pointer bugs. Java may run more slowly than C/C++, but these bugs pretty much just can't even occur in that language. I envy the people who are scared of pointers to begin with, stick with java, and never have to waste their time on these bugs. Sure, most programmers are smart enough to learn how pointers work - but I have yet to meet a programmer who can code in pointers and explicit memory deallocation without creating some very very nasty bugs once in a while. Sure, in C++ you can use smart pointers of various flavors to ease the pain, but they only get you so far and without true garbage collection and runtime reachability systems you can't always avoid these problems.
That being said, my current job is doing C++ work for a few reasons, and "java might not be fast enough" was one of the things that came up when the language was being decided for this project. Oh well.
Emacs is not cool with UTF-8, they are just beginning the first steps for it. Yes, Emacs can read and write UTF-8 files, and it knows how to decode a UTF-8 stream into individual characters and Unicode charactor codes. But it cannot display most of these charcters, so they end up being just boxes on the screen. Sure, being able to load and save UTF-8 files is part of working with UTF-8, but one of the key requirements of an editor is being able to actually display the text in the file.
It's very frustrating. I have a Java program that includes strings of japanese characters, but I must use one of the Japanese-specific encodings under Emacs to edit it, which locks me out of adding (for example) Cyrillic characters. When I convert to UTF-8 with another tool and load in emacs, all the japanese characters are boxes and entering japanese characters isn't allowed.
You say you'd like to see serious benchmarks comparing MySQL with PostgresSQL? I wish I could help you, but I realized that Postgres sucked before I got far enough. I needed a DB, I got recommendations for Postgres because it was a "real" database and had a fuller feature set than MySQL. So I set up Postgres. Just populating my database (and yes, I used all optimizations recommended, like turning off indexes and transactions while populating) took 10 minutes, twice in the week of work the database was corrupted inexplicably, plus the misery of vacuuming (took 6 minutes!) meant my database would have regular downtimes. I tried MySQL, suddenly populating the database took only 30 seconds and in the 3 years I've been using it, not a single database corruption.
And the best part? MySQL had been adding the missing features as fast as I've been needing them. So be quiet with your anti-MySQL comments, it's a great database that just plain works. I can never understand why some people flame it so badly...sure, it's not perfect, but from my view it's a great pieces of software. Something Postgres most definitely is not.
You say you want your condo building to be its own ISP. This sounds like an awful idea. A good ISP spends a huge amount of time answering questions from users who can't connect/can't read their email/want you to get the email they accidentally deleted/etc. Do you really want to spend your whole day doing this? If you don't, then you're going to be a bad ISP - one that ignores its customers and fixes broken stuff when it is convienient for the ISP, not when the customers want it.
So, either you are signing up to spend most of your day dealing with your neighbor's computer problems, or you are offering to give them a crappy ISP. Either way, I don't see much benefit. I'd say give it up, let the tenants choose their own ISP, and leave that work to somebody who is willing to do it as their full time job.
Can anyone tell me what he means by "baroque instruction encoding"?
"Baroque" in this case means "overly complicated, usually in a bizarre way." If you ever wrote an x86 assembler or disassembler, you would know exactly what Linus was talking about.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Command line MPlayer is not easy to use out of the box. When I run mplayer foo.mpg, as installed out of a Red Hat 8.0 distribution, I get 40 lines of garbage. Towards the end is this error:
It seems there is no Xvideo support for your video card available.
Run 'xvinfo' to verify its Xv support, and read Xv section of DOCS/video.html !
See 'mplayer -vo help' for other (non-xv) video out drivers. Try -vo x11
Error opening/initializing the selected video_out (-vo) device!
Running mplayer -vo help gives a list of about a dozen different output drivers, with no hint as to which one is right for me. In fact, it's downright misleading; my graphics card is listed as one of the options, but that option doesn't work because I have the wrong X server!!! I defy you to find a non-techie who would be able to figure out that mplayer -vo x11 foo.mpg is the right option to give to make it work - yes, that is given as advice in the error message, but that is not an easy to read error message, and other (misleading and/or ridiculously hard to follow) advice is given as well. I bet that even most techie people would do what I did at first - give up and assume that the app is just plain broken. Which, I guess, it is...it's just broken in a way that can be fixed by knowing the proper magical command line switch.
In a perfect world, product and businesses live or die based on their own merits. The anti-monopoly laws are an attempt to (among other things) bring reality closer to this hypothetical perfect system. Microsoft has been found to hold a monopoly, and the judge has decided that Microsoft is using its OS monopoly to help.net against java, so instead of.net or java competing on equal footing,.net will have a huge advantage just because it is backed by a company that happens to also have an OS monopoly. The judge's ruling is an attempt to correct for this. It seems pretty fair to me.
PS - I wasn't quite right when I said that "The judge has decided..."; the trail has barely even started, the judge has officially decided nothing. This ruling is because the judge thinks that Sun will probably win, but Microsoft could use delaying tactics to put off an official ruling until irreparable damage to Sun/Java has been done, so until a ruling comes this will make such delaying tactics less successful.
Reading a 233MB file that happened to be on my disk: 233MB in 7.7s (about 30MB/s). I hadn't accessed this file in days, so it was not in buffer cache before doing this test.
Copying the file: (Reading it all, and writing it): 233MB in 26.0s (about 9MB/s). This time it might have been in buffer cache, I ran this test right after the previous.
Seems you have a batch of lousy disks. This is an IDE disk, "cat/proc/ide/hda/model" gives me "WDC WD400BB-32CLB0". The CPU is a 1.6GHz pentium 4.
There was a model of seagate drives that would sometimes leak oil. Not "all over the place", but onto the platters, which is probably the worst place to get the oil anyway! I was working at a server manufacturer at the time, we got a recall on all of them. Can't remember the exact model, but yes, they really did leak, and it really did cause problems.
One point Miguel made really made me sit up and take notice. He pointed out that all of Gnu started out as Richard Stallman's attempt to make a free copy of a proprietary system, and Mono is just another attempt to do that same. I'd never thought of it that way, but he's right; it is very hard to remember in this day and age that 20 years ago, AT&T and company were really a lot like Microsoft as far as their treatment of end users, so why was it good for Stallman to propogate the then-evil-and-proprietary Unix interface and bad for De Icaza to propogate the.NET interface?
What is the best case outcome for the lawsuit that you and the EFF have started. Is it possible that the DMCA (or parts of it) can be found unconstitutional? Or would a "best case" just be a weaking of the DMCA, where for certain purposes people would be allowed to discuss their findings regardless of the DMCA.
Also, how likely (in the opinion of you or your lawyers) are the different possible outcomes of this case?
Yes, the kernel uses enormous numbers of GCC extensions. It gets significant performance improvements this way. Perhaps you are willing to give up kernel performance for a portability, but from my experience as an instructor in a Linux device drivers class, you are in the vast minority. A kernel really needs assembly inlines (for example the sti and cli instructions are get inserted pretty frequently in critical code paths), and to do them well you have to use extensions to C.
There are even some places where GCC extensions make the code easier to maintain. For example, the way that device driver entry points are defined is much cleaner (using the "structure member:value" structure initialization syntax) and less error prone than using standard C.
Yes, it might have been helpful a few times to have been able to compile Linux on a non-GCC compiler, but not very often. And GCC runs almost everywhere, so limiting yourself to GCC doesn't limit the architectures you can port to. It really does seem that in this case the benefits outweigh the losses.
I can't believe the number of people implying that this guy is an idiot for needing 64GB RAM. People, not everybody uses their computer for browsing the web and playing Quake. There are some scientific applications out there, that are extremely important to people with lots of money, where having 64GB worth of fast-access matrices/hash table/etc. will let you do experiments that are simply not possible if you are limited to 1GB or if your data is on disk or across a network where access will be orders of magnitude slower than RAM. Give the guy a break, if he's seriously considering buying 64GB quad-itaniums, then I think you can assume that he has done the homework and figured out that it will be worth the money.
What surprised me is the "please, no alphas" comment. A bunch of alphas will have much higher performance than 4 itaniums. Yes, it is end of life'd, but when you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your computer, worrying about the cost of porting to a new architecture when you replace this computer seems penny wise and pound foolish. Besides, as long as you are using the same OS and compiler on both old and new platforms, the "porting" should be mostly just a matter of recompiling.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that would be an "ask slashdot" that would be guaranteed to make some serious flames.
tr </dev/hda '\n' '~' | tr '\0-\37\200-\377' '\n' | grep "while (mungeCount < superMungeCount) {" | tr '~' '\n' >foo-recovered.c
This does have its problems. If the file spanned multiple blocks it may not get all of it, but you'd be surprised how often it does get all of it. You might get multiple versions of the file concatenated together, and you'll have to text edit to pull out the one you want. Also, of course, it only works on text files. But the two times that I needed this, it worked, so it might help you out too. Note that you should run it immediately after deleting the file - ever disk access means that much more chance that the block will be recycled. :-(
Unicode-reinterpreted-as-a-string-of-ASCII-bytes (taken literally) can only mean UTF-7, which never really got much traction, but had no NULs or control characters in it - all pure, readable ASCII. It's problem in DNS would be that it treats upper and lower case as distinct, which is not true for current DNS queries. If you meant "UTF-8" when you said "unicode-reinterpreted-as-a-string-of-ASCII-bytes" , that also has no NUL or control codes in it, and unlike UTF-7 it lets you treat upper/lower case any way you want. It's drawback is that it will insert bytes in the 128..255 (ie, non-ASCII) range into the data stream, which will probably cause trouble for current DNS servers.
So, to sum it up, you are right that current Unicode encodings will not meet current DNS RFCs, but the reason you gave wasn't quite right. Punycode does solve the problem, but ugh, punycode is an awful hack of a character encoding system. I'd hate to see it live on forever, but it might be useful getting us started on i18n-ified DNS.
Ummm...actually, did you notice that my post only said that MySQL has row-level locking and transactions?
OK, I know you were just trolling for an answer, but sheesh. Unlike the original poster, I do know what features MySQL has. I didn't say it had all features, just that two of the ones the poster had criticized it for lacking were not, in fact, lacking at all.
And unlike you, I can actually read a posting and understand what it says.
If you think PostgresSQL is now faster than MySQL, fine, post a real benchmark, with both databases being properly tuned.
But MySQL has had transactions and row-level locking for quite some time now, so the fact that you claim that it doesn't indicates that you don't know what you are talking about.
Futhermore, why must you bring up your dislike for MySQL in a message about Postgres' great new features? If Postgres really is improving, great! Talk about that! Why must you at the same time talk about how sucky MySQL is? (Especially since what you say about MySQL is clearly untrue).
"The rest is pretty much just a standard action/adventure story - it's the end that makes it special."
You say then, then act surprised that the scouring is left out? Let's face it, what works in a book isn't always exactly what works in a movie. As Jackson commented, there are pacing issues that are different for each medium. The scouring of the shire is semi-comic, where the brave hobbits come back to the shire and make mincemeant of all those nastly little half-orcs and their big boss Sharky. In the book, this worked well and as you point out shows what would have happened to the Shire if Saruman and Sauron had won. But in the movie, this would happen after the main battle and the defeat of Sauron. There it would have been an awkward change of pace between the final victory and the departure for the Grey Havens (I'm assuming they'll keep that, it will make a nice bittersweet farewell segment). Having action/victory/semicomic adventure/sad farewell as the end of the movie will lessen the impact of the action and victory. In a book, which is slower and where the action has less impact, it works, but I say leaving it out of the movie sounds like a good idea.
When somebody calls you after you ask them not to, especially if it wakes you up all hours of the night, that is harassment.
He should use caller ID to find out who is doing it (sounds like he already has). Contact them. If it happens again, file in small claims court.
$ perl -MMail::SPF::Query -le 'print for Mail::SPF::Query->new(ipv4=>shift, sender=>shift)->result' 207.8.214.4 umbrella.listbox.com
...
fail
client umbrella.listbox.com[207.8.214.4] is not a designated mailer for domain of sender umbrella.listbox.com
So apparently these guys don't have their own mailing list system set up to use their protocol properly? Or am I using their tool wrong? (I'm pretty much just typing in what the README gives).
I've been using courier for about 4 years now. Works great, very easy to set up, supports maildir so I've used it with both qmail and postfix, works well with both.
The only problem I had is mentioned by another person in this thread - it treats "}" as a needs-to-be-quoted char, which is incorrect. That means that if you have a "}" in your password (as I did at one time), and your mail client only quotes when needed (as the newer evolutions do), you won't be able to log in. I submitted a 1-line patch for this to the Courier mailing list, which the courier author reads. A couple months later, still it wasn't applied.
So I guess, I'm happy with its performance, and very happy with its ease of use. As another person in the thread says, it does have compliance issues with the IMAP standard, and the author doesn't seem to care, so if I had the time to set up something more complex like Cyrus I probable wouldn't use it.
As long as the software licence says it does this, and it doesn't "phone home" with anything but what is necessary to identify the computer hosting the cracked copy, I think this could actually be pretty cool.
In my experience, most companies don't want to steal software, but it does sometimes get accidentally installed without an extra licence purchase. If the software maker did it right, they could just call up the owner of the infringing computer, and say, "Hey, it looks like you need a few more copies of our software! Have your purchasing department get in touch with us. We'll let the unpaid-for software keep working for a month but make sure you buy your licences before then. Then get back in touch and we'll tell you how to reconfigure your installations to use these new licences."
Honestly, this method sure beats the BSA, doesn't it? In fact, if I were a busy IT person, I'd appreciate knowing that I can run around installing this software whenever I want, and the company will just get back to me if I forget to pay for it!
Of course, if they didn't warn you in their licence that they'd be doing this, or if they were transmitting confidential information back to home...that's a whole other story.
If you are a desk clerk at a hospital, then the hospital would have every right to fire you.
Hospital records are supposed to be kept as private as possible. Employees who satisfy their own curiousity without caring whose privacy they compromise should never have be allowed to have jobs where "poking around" in private data is possible.
RMS' fixation on calling it "GNU/Linux" really seems to me to be so extreme that it's bordering on mental illness. Want to talk about programming? He talks about calling your desktop system GNU/Linux. Want to talk about the SCO lawsuit? Well, it wouldn't be a problem if only people would call it GNU/Linux. I remember an article from a KDE guy who met RMS at a conference, to show him KDE; what did RMS do? Browse through the guy's menus, looking for tabs called "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux".
Is there a name for people who become so totally obsessed with one thing that they can't see how irritating they are? And I don't mean "geeks" either, RMS seems to be going way beyond geekiness in this!
You know, I think any C/C++ programmer who actually looks at how their time is spent eventually decides that they have wasted enough hours chasing down one-past-the array bugs, free-then-access bugs, and just plain wild pointer bugs. Java may run more slowly than C/C++, but these bugs pretty much just can't even occur in that language. I envy the people who are scared of pointers to begin with, stick with java, and never have to waste their time on these bugs. Sure, most programmers are smart enough to learn how pointers work - but I have yet to meet a programmer who can code in pointers and explicit memory deallocation without creating some very very nasty bugs once in a while. Sure, in C++ you can use smart pointers of various flavors to ease the pain, but they only get you so far and without true garbage collection and runtime reachability systems you can't always avoid these problems.
That being said, my current job is doing C++ work for a few reasons, and "java might not be fast enough" was one of the things that came up when the language was being decided for this project. Oh well.
Emacs is not cool with UTF-8, they are just beginning the first steps for it. Yes, Emacs can read and write UTF-8 files, and it knows how to decode a UTF-8 stream into individual characters and Unicode charactor codes. But it cannot display most of these charcters, so they end up being just boxes on the screen. Sure, being able to load and save UTF-8 files is part of working with UTF-8, but one of the key requirements of an editor is being able to actually display the text in the file.
It's very frustrating. I have a Java program that includes strings of japanese characters, but I must use one of the Japanese-specific encodings under Emacs to edit it, which locks me out of adding (for example) Cyrillic characters. When I convert to UTF-8 with another tool and load in emacs, all the japanese characters are boxes and entering japanese characters isn't allowed.
You say you'd like to see serious benchmarks comparing MySQL with PostgresSQL? I wish I could help you, but I realized that Postgres sucked before I got far enough. I needed a DB, I got recommendations for Postgres because it was a "real" database and had a fuller feature set than MySQL. So I set up Postgres. Just populating my database (and yes, I used all optimizations recommended, like turning off indexes and transactions while populating) took 10 minutes, twice in the week of work the database was corrupted inexplicably, plus the misery of vacuuming (took 6 minutes!) meant my database would have regular downtimes. I tried MySQL, suddenly populating the database took only 30 seconds and in the 3 years I've been using it, not a single database corruption.
And the best part? MySQL had been adding the missing features as fast as I've been needing them. So be quiet with your anti-MySQL comments, it's a great database that just plain works. I can never understand why some people flame it so badly...sure, it's not perfect, but from my view it's a great pieces of software. Something Postgres most definitely is not.
You say you want your condo building to be its own ISP. This sounds like an awful idea. A good ISP spends a huge amount of time answering questions from users who can't connect/can't read their email/want you to get the email they accidentally deleted/etc. Do you really want to spend your whole day doing this? If you don't, then you're going to be a bad ISP - one that ignores its customers and fixes broken stuff when it is convienient for the ISP, not when the customers want it.
So, either you are signing up to spend most of your day dealing with your neighbor's computer problems, or you are offering to give them a crappy ISP. Either way, I don't see much benefit. I'd say give it up, let the tenants choose their own ISP, and leave that work to somebody who is willing to do it as their full time job.
"Baroque" in this case means "overly complicated, usually in a bizarre way." If you ever wrote an x86 assembler or disassembler, you would know exactly what Linus was talking about.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Command line MPlayer is not easy to use out of the box. When I run mplayer foo.mpg, as installed out of a Red Hat 8.0 distribution, I get 40 lines of garbage. Towards the end is this error:
Running mplayer -vo help gives a list of about a dozen different output drivers, with no hint as to which one is right for me. In fact, it's downright misleading; my graphics card is listed as one of the options, but that option doesn't work because I have the wrong X server!!! I defy you to find a non-techie who would be able to figure out that mplayer -vo x11 foo.mpg is the right option to give to make it work - yes, that is given as advice in the error message, but that is not an easy to read error message, and other (misleading and/or ridiculously hard to follow) advice is given as well. I bet that even most techie people would do what I did at first - give up and assume that the app is just plain broken. Which, I guess, it is...it's just broken in a way that can be fixed by knowing the proper magical command line switch.In a perfect world, product and businesses live or die based on their own merits. The anti-monopoly laws are an attempt to (among other things) bring reality closer to this hypothetical perfect system. Microsoft has been found to hold a monopoly, and the judge has decided that Microsoft is using its OS monopoly to help .net against java, so instead of .net or java competing on equal footing, .net will have a huge advantage just because it is backed by a company that happens to also have an OS monopoly. The judge's ruling is an attempt to correct for this. It seems pretty fair to me.
PS - I wasn't quite right when I said that "The judge has decided..."; the trail has barely even started, the judge has officially decided nothing. This ruling is because the judge thinks that Sun will probably win, but Microsoft could use delaying tactics to put off an official ruling until irreparable damage to Sun/Java has been done, so until a ruling comes this will make such delaying tactics less successful.
Reading a 233MB file that happened to be on my disk: 233MB in 7.7s (about 30MB/s). I hadn't accessed this file in days, so it was not in buffer cache before doing this test.
/proc/ide/hda/model" gives me "WDC WD400BB-32CLB0". The CPU is a 1.6GHz pentium 4.
Copying the file: (Reading it all, and writing it): 233MB in 26.0s (about 9MB/s). This time it might have been in buffer cache, I ran this test right after the previous.
Seems you have a batch of lousy disks. This is an IDE disk, "cat
There was a model of seagate drives that would sometimes leak oil. Not "all over the place", but onto the platters, which is probably the worst place to get the oil anyway! I was working at a server manufacturer at the time, we got a recall on all of them. Can't remember the exact model, but yes, they really did leak, and it really did cause problems.
One point Miguel made really made me sit up and take notice. He pointed out that all of Gnu started out as Richard Stallman's attempt to make a free copy of a proprietary system, and Mono is just another attempt to do that same. I'd never thought of it that way, but he's right; it is very hard to remember in this day and age that 20 years ago, AT&T and company were really a lot like Microsoft as far as their treatment of end users, so why was it good for Stallman to propogate the then-evil-and-proprietary Unix interface and bad for De Icaza to propogate the .NET interface?
What is the best case outcome for the lawsuit that you and the EFF have started. Is it possible that the DMCA (or parts of it) can be found unconstitutional? Or would a "best case" just be a weaking of the DMCA, where for certain purposes people would be allowed to discuss their findings regardless of the DMCA.
Also, how likely (in the opinion of you or your lawyers) are the different possible outcomes of this case?
There are even some places where GCC extensions make the code easier to maintain. For example, the way that device driver entry points are defined is much cleaner (using the "structure member : value" structure initialization syntax) and less error prone than using standard C.
Yes, it might have been helpful a few times to have been able to compile Linux on a non-GCC compiler, but not very often. And GCC runs almost everywhere, so limiting yourself to GCC doesn't limit the architectures you can port to. It really does seem that in this case the benefits outweigh the losses.
What surprised me is the "please, no alphas" comment. A bunch of alphas will have much higher performance than 4 itaniums. Yes, it is end of life'd, but when you are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on your computer, worrying about the cost of porting to a new architecture when you replace this computer seems penny wise and pound foolish. Besides, as long as you are using the same OS and compiler on both old and new platforms, the "porting" should be mostly just a matter of recompiling.