"However, OS X's design choice makes for more secure communication between user-space threads and the kernel, which gives an advantage in the workstation-space, since you can keep a user process from running amok in the kernel. "
Um... what? Linux migrated away from userthreads because it sucks. OS X has also migrated away from userthreads and now uses kernelthreads. Both use pthreads.
"The author made a fundamental mistake in assuming that server stress tests were the be-all and end-all of performance computing"
No, the previous article benchmarked both and found that OS X performed better as a workstation. The entire point of this article was to try to determine if it was OS X or the CPU that was responsible for poor server performance.
No, McNealy has universally condemned Open Source as a bad idea. It's one thing to explain why Open Source isn't right for Java, but it is right for OpenOffice, and it's quite another thing to pretend you don't open source anything and say bad things about the whole OSS community.
The truth is that Microsoft propoganda isn't going to stop anytime soon, so it's good for Linux to have some propoganda of its own. Luckily, this report isn't filled with nearly as much nonsense as many of the MS reports are.
It will look favorably on Linux when corporate managers are comparing it with Windows.
That's just plain idiotic and counter to what is needed.
First and foremost is that these documents must not be lost when their format is abandoned. Open specs ensure that won't happen.
Second, many computers don't come with MS Office, such as all Macs and most cheaper brand PCs, including many Dells and HPs.
Third, Acrobat Reader is not the only nor the best PDF reader on the market. xPDF is another free one and it's very fast.
Fourth, a PDF can be created from nearly any program through a PDF printer (many free ones available). Just because docs may be common doesn't mean that all documents are going to be word processor documents. What about maps? Blueprints? Flyers? Magazines? Spreadsheets? Presentations? I see at least three non-doc formats there that can easily be exported to PDFs.
"Of course, this didn't really happen, because we all know Sun are evil and out to destroy all open source software."
I know you're being sarcastic, but Sun deserves the flak it gets from the OSS community. Scott McNealy has spoken out against OSS on numerous occasions, which is weird for a company that supports OSS in several different ways.
"Anyone with IE on Windows can view.doc files without any additional software."
Well, that's the definition of vendor lock-in now, isn't it? Even MS fanboys can usually see that this is a bad thing. MS can abandon its old formats... and they will, eventually.
I think xPDF is available for Windows for free. It opens in about one second on Linux.
"I'd rather fire up AbiWord to open an MS Word document than have to endure yet another PDF"
PDFs started being tolerable for me when I began using KPDF and xPDF instead of Adobe's horrible Acrobat Reader. Since KPDF loads quicker than any word processor, I prefer documents in PDF format. The only real problem with PDFs are that there is no decent way to edit them or convert them into a word processor format. That is the fatal flaw with PDFs.
Medium and format are different things. Now that the medium is not a physical object like a tape or disk, most of that problem has been removed.
OOo and PDF formats are well-documented and at any time in the future it will be possible to write a program to read them. OOo is just zipped XML that can be read with a text editor and PDF is just a subset of postscript.
Yeah, but you know what? It makes wonderful security and economic sense to build a diverse infrastructure. It's when large companies realize this that we will see the biggest Linux deployments yet.
Wouldn't it be great if you could deploy an enterprise app on both Windows and Linux platforms? Any given virus, worm or hacker would be highly unlikely to take out both. Add OS X and BSD to the mix while you're at it and you have a rock-solid deployment.
Doing that wouldn't necessarily be all that difficult. Use a cross-platform database like Oracle or DB2 so you can run it on both platforms and use a portable language like Java or pay to maintain a C or C++ app for both platforms (hey, if hundreds of Open Source apps can do it, so can a large company).
My solution has been to go to the drive-in instead of the theatre. It's $10 per person (vs. $12.50 at the theatre) and I get two, or often three, movies. I bring my own food and drink. Nobody's talking bothers me and if I feel I need to, I can talk as well. I can bring the kid to many of the movies since the early movie is often relatively kid friendly and he's in bed by the second movie.
If you're in the Toronto area, check out the Docks drive-in or the 5 drive in (5drivein.com) in Oakville.
The worst part is while the movie doesn't start until 9:00 you have to get there by 7:30 to get a good spot. At the 5 Drive In there's a playground for kids and you can always bring a newspaper, listen to the radio or a CD, even bring a picnic for dinner.
can you please post the repository? I googled some deb 'http://ubuntu.nooms.de/ hoary/' but the files are not located in/hoary instead of/dists/hoary and I can't figure out how to make apt-get use it that way.
Actually, classified ads are huge business. Any online newspaper will tell you that classifieds are their number one destination and they're all scrambling to compete with craigslist.
Searching classifieds will be massive, but I think that market is in local searches, not a huge google-like index of classified ads.
"The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was"
Same thing with Windows ME. I might have the numbers wrong, but build 2490 was incredible and I was convinced that MS finally made a great OS. Then came build 2525 (one of the final ones before release) with memory leaks, tons of stupid additional bloat and horrible stability.
Becoming a plumber or electrician has way more potential these days. Work for someone for a while, then go out on your own. You can easily make $60,000 and I know some electricians who pull in over $100,000.
Those jobs (especially an electrician) are great because they're interesting, challenging and offer lots of diversity. You are also free to go out on your own without nearly the risk a techy would take trying to establish a tech company (or any other company).
As a bonus, trades will never be outsourced because their location is of primary importance.
"Burning CD's on Linux is easier than Right Click-->Send to CD in Windows? Not even close."
Ok, so it's the same.
"Plus, the first time she has to install something new, like a program or a printer the Linux experience for her will become infinitely more complicated."
No, she'll go into Synaptic, find the program from a categorized list of over 16,000 apps, and select to install it. For a printer she'll go into kcontrol and use the 'add printer' wizard.
"Also, you have got to be kidding about the shoddy digital camera support under Windows. Are you talking about Windows 98? Under Windows XP, there hasn't been a single piece of USB or FireWire hardware that hasn't 'Just Worked' the instant I plug it in."
Doesn't work with my mom's Kodak or my dad's HP unless you install Kodak and HP's software. Which, incidentally, conflicts with each other so neither one works very well. These cameras are about three years old.
"With my Mom's digital camera, she simply plugged it into the USB port and Windows Explorer came up with all of her pictures in a folder, ready to go. Linux is nowhere near that easy to use."
Linux puts a folder on the desktop that you need to click rather than just opening that folder. That's not more difficult. And Linux works with my parents' cameras.
As well, Windows does not detect my dad's HP Photosmart P1000 printer and HP doesn't have an XP driver (three year old printer). The Windows 2000 driver installation on XP is way harder than any Linux driver install I've ever tried. I had to manually extract cabs, put files into the system folder and run an alternative setup file to get it to work. Linux just detected it during install.
Actually, configuration aside, learning Linux tends to be easier than learning Windows. Email, Internet and office are virtually identical. Users don't have to learn the hard way about email viruses. They don't have to learn the hard way that the Control Panel can be dangerous. All they need to learn is to click on the three or four icons at the bottom of the screen.
I put my mom on Linux and she has never used a computer in her life. Yes, she had a learning curve, but that was mostly with how to use the mouse. Now she's burning CDs (easier with Gnome than Windows) and emailing digital pictures (again, easier with Gnome than Windows' shoddy digital camera support).
Michael Geist has a column in the Toronto Star, the biggest circulation paper in the country. You can bet he will be on this. Last week he was all up in arms about some privacy thing, too.
Unless this guy was asked by Linus or OSI to license the trademark (which he wasn't), then the FAQ is all lies.
While the FAQ attempts to explain what he's doing to make it sound fair, if he truly were being fair the license fee would be free or 1 cent (if free wouldn't count as protecting the trademark). I understand that unprotected trademarks are lost, so sending out a free 'you have the right to use this trademark' letters to peopl who ask should be fine. I also understand if Linus or OSI want to reserve the right to take the license back if somebody misuses the name (say, MS releases Windows Linux, but it's just Windows being marketed to clueless managers).
Not really. We just have a lot of management people who don't care. If your boss said he didn't care if the sql app worked or not, you would not have spent a lot of time getting it to work, would you?
Where I work I had to fight just to have the right to have Firefox installed (I'm a web app programmer who does some design work). Our main designer does not have Firefox installed because she doesn't want to get yelled at by IT staff.
Don't blame the designers *all* the time, because if part of their job was to get it working cross browser they would already do it that way.
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"However, OS X's design choice makes for more secure communication between user-space threads and the kernel, which gives an advantage in the workstation-space, since you can keep a user process from running amok in the kernel. "
Um... what? Linux migrated away from userthreads because it sucks. OS X has also migrated away from userthreads and now uses kernelthreads. Both use pthreads.
"The author made a fundamental mistake in assuming that server stress tests were the be-all and end-all of performance computing"
No, the previous article benchmarked both and found that OS X performed better as a workstation. The entire point of this article was to try to determine if it was OS X or the CPU that was responsible for poor server performance.
No, McNealy has universally condemned Open Source as a bad idea. It's one thing to explain why Open Source isn't right for Java, but it is right for OpenOffice, and it's quite another thing to pretend you don't open source anything and say bad things about the whole OSS community.
The truth is that Microsoft propoganda isn't going to stop anytime soon, so it's good for Linux to have some propoganda of its own. Luckily, this report isn't filled with nearly as much nonsense as many of the MS reports are.
It will look favorably on Linux when corporate managers are comparing it with Windows.
Many people have fatal heart conditions that are tolerable with a pacemaker :)
That's just plain idiotic and counter to what is needed.
First and foremost is that these documents must not be lost when their format is abandoned. Open specs ensure that won't happen.
Second, many computers don't come with MS Office, such as all Macs and most cheaper brand PCs, including many Dells and HPs.
Third, Acrobat Reader is not the only nor the best PDF reader on the market. xPDF is another free one and it's very fast.
Fourth, a PDF can be created from nearly any program through a PDF printer (many free ones available). Just because docs may be common doesn't mean that all documents are going to be word processor documents. What about maps? Blueprints? Flyers? Magazines? Spreadsheets? Presentations? I see at least three non-doc formats there that can easily be exported to PDFs.
"Of course, this didn't really happen, because we all know Sun are evil and out to destroy all open source software."
I know you're being sarcastic, but Sun deserves the flak it gets from the OSS community. Scott McNealy has spoken out against OSS on numerous occasions, which is weird for a company that supports OSS in several different ways.
"Anyone with IE on Windows can view .doc files without any additional software."
Well, that's the definition of vendor lock-in now, isn't it? Even MS fanboys can usually see that this is a bad thing. MS can abandon its old formats... and they will, eventually.
I think xPDF is available for Windows for free. It opens in about one second on Linux.
"I'd rather fire up AbiWord to open an MS Word document than have to endure yet another PDF"
PDFs started being tolerable for me when I began using KPDF and xPDF instead of Adobe's horrible Acrobat Reader. Since KPDF loads quicker than any word processor, I prefer documents in PDF format. The only real problem with PDFs are that there is no decent way to edit them or convert them into a word processor format. That is the fatal flaw with PDFs.
Medium and format are different things. Now that the medium is not a physical object like a tape or disk, most of that problem has been removed.
OOo and PDF formats are well-documented and at any time in the future it will be possible to write a program to read them. OOo is just zipped XML that can be read with a text editor and PDF is just a subset of postscript.
Yeah, but you know what? It makes wonderful security and economic sense to build a diverse infrastructure. It's when large companies realize this that we will see the biggest Linux deployments yet.
Wouldn't it be great if you could deploy an enterprise app on both Windows and Linux platforms? Any given virus, worm or hacker would be highly unlikely to take out both. Add OS X and BSD to the mix while you're at it and you have a rock-solid deployment.
Doing that wouldn't necessarily be all that difficult. Use a cross-platform database like Oracle or DB2 so you can run it on both platforms and use a portable language like Java or pay to maintain a C or C++ app for both platforms (hey, if hundreds of Open Source apps can do it, so can a large company).
They should be going after the pirate groups and material providers.
They could have chrooted the city to Colorado for a few weeks or taken hurricane off the ACL.
Way to preach radical religion. I suspect you are a Baptist.
Exactly. In any civilized justice system, you go after the people who actually break the law and not the conduit by which they do it.
They can sue the Internet next.
My solution has been to go to the drive-in instead of the theatre. It's $10 per person (vs. $12.50 at the theatre) and I get two, or often three, movies. I bring my own food and drink. Nobody's talking bothers me and if I feel I need to, I can talk as well. I can bring the kid to many of the movies since the early movie is often relatively kid friendly and he's in bed by the second movie.
If you're in the Toronto area, check out the Docks drive-in or the 5 drive in (5drivein.com) in Oakville.
The worst part is while the movie doesn't start until 9:00 you have to get there by 7:30 to get a good spot. At the 5 Drive In there's a playground for kids and you can always bring a newspaper, listen to the radio or a CD, even bring a picnic for dinner.
can you please post the repository? I googled some deb 'http://ubuntu.nooms.de/ hoary/' but the files are not located in /hoary instead of /dists/hoary and I can't figure out how to make apt-get use it that way.
ubuntuforums seem to be down.
Actually, classified ads are huge business. Any online newspaper will tell you that classifieds are their number one destination and they're all scrambling to compete with craigslist.
Searching classifieds will be massive, but I think that market is in local searches, not a huge google-like index of classified ads.
"The sad part was the last RC I got was SUBSTANTIALLY more stable than the Initial release was"
Same thing with Windows ME. I might have the numbers wrong, but build 2490 was incredible and I was convinced that MS finally made a great OS. Then came build 2525 (one of the final ones before release) with memory leaks, tons of stupid additional bloat and horrible stability.
Becoming a plumber or electrician has way more potential these days. Work for someone for a while, then go out on your own. You can easily make $60,000 and I know some electricians who pull in over $100,000.
Those jobs (especially an electrician) are great because they're interesting, challenging and offer lots of diversity. You are also free to go out on your own without nearly the risk a techy would take trying to establish a tech company (or any other company).
As a bonus, trades will never be outsourced because their location is of primary importance.
"Burning CD's on Linux is easier than Right Click-->Send to CD in Windows? Not even close."
Ok, so it's the same.
"Plus, the first time she has to install something new, like a program or a printer the Linux experience for her will become infinitely more complicated."
No, she'll go into Synaptic, find the program from a categorized list of over 16,000 apps, and select to install it. For a printer she'll go into kcontrol and use the 'add printer' wizard.
"Also, you have got to be kidding about the shoddy digital camera support under Windows. Are you talking about Windows 98? Under Windows XP, there hasn't been a single piece of USB or FireWire hardware that hasn't 'Just Worked' the instant I plug it in."
Doesn't work with my mom's Kodak or my dad's HP unless you install Kodak and HP's software. Which, incidentally, conflicts with each other so neither one works very well. These cameras are about three years old.
"With my Mom's digital camera, she simply plugged it into the USB port and Windows Explorer came up with all of her pictures in a folder, ready to go. Linux is nowhere near that easy to use."
Linux puts a folder on the desktop that you need to click rather than just opening that folder. That's not more difficult. And Linux works with my parents' cameras.
As well, Windows does not detect my dad's HP Photosmart P1000 printer and HP doesn't have an XP driver (three year old printer). The Windows 2000 driver installation on XP is way harder than any Linux driver install I've ever tried. I had to manually extract cabs, put files into the system folder and run an alternative setup file to get it to work. Linux just detected it during install.
Actually, configuration aside, learning Linux tends to be easier than learning Windows. Email, Internet and office are virtually identical. Users don't have to learn the hard way about email viruses. They don't have to learn the hard way that the Control Panel can be dangerous. All they need to learn is to click on the three or four icons at the bottom of the screen.
I put my mom on Linux and she has never used a computer in her life. Yes, she had a learning curve, but that was mostly with how to use the mouse. Now she's burning CDs (easier with Gnome than Windows) and emailing digital pictures (again, easier with Gnome than Windows' shoddy digital camera support).
Michael Geist has a column in the Toronto Star, the biggest circulation paper in the country. You can bet he will be on this. Last week he was all up in arms about some privacy thing, too.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- Carl Sagan
Unless this guy was asked by Linus or OSI to license the trademark (which he wasn't), then the FAQ is all lies.
While the FAQ attempts to explain what he's doing to make it sound fair, if he truly were being fair the license fee would be free or 1 cent (if free wouldn't count as protecting the trademark). I understand that unprotected trademarks are lost, so sending out a free 'you have the right to use this trademark' letters to peopl who ask should be fine. I also understand if Linus or OSI want to reserve the right to take the license back if somebody misuses the name (say, MS releases Windows Linux, but it's just Windows being marketed to clueless managers).
Not really. We just have a lot of management people who don't care. If your boss said he didn't care if the sql app worked or not, you would not have spent a lot of time getting it to work, would you?
Where I work I had to fight just to have the right to have Firefox installed (I'm a web app programmer who does some design work). Our main designer does not have Firefox installed because she doesn't want to get yelled at by IT staff.
Don't blame the designers *all* the time, because if part of their job was to get it working cross browser they would already do it that way.