Then they took 2 years thinking up a new name for it...
I can see it now.
Developer A: Windows 5? Ballmer: [ thows chair at him ] Developer B: [ sheepishly ] Windows 6? Ballmer: [ throws chair at him ] Developer C: [ sheepishly ] Windows 7? Ballmer: Thats the greatest thing I've heard all day!!!
Of course they're trying to rush the release of Windows 7, Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" is right around the corner.
Huh? According to wikipedia, XP came out in Oct 2001, Mac OS X 10.1 came out in Sept 01. We are currently at 10.5, which comes a development kit, X11, and works on 2 different CPU architectures. The second architecture was added very recently.
I guess this is flamebait, but isn't MS pretty much a software company? Around here, people say that Apple is a hardware company, overpriced, etc. And I've heard that one of MS's new marketing strategies is to say that its cheaper than the "alternatives".
To me, it really seems as though there is a market for a new GUI based OS for commodity PCs. No, its not Linux. It could be, but I really think it would take a commercial entity to tie up all the loose ends. The commandline/server applications are fine to develop independently, but for a GUI, I think that a commercial entity is required to make something that people will want to use.
People who OS bash are like runners in the special olympics. Even if you win, you're still a retard
Nice.
I think Windows is a fine gaming environment, but I have seen and heard of people's problems with the stuff, and most slashdot type people would say, "Well, they (the users) are retarded". I installed Windows XP on a VM on my Mac just in case there was some reason to use it, and to get used to VMware and maybe there is a Windows app that I might want to use, and I could use it. So far, Google Chrome is the only thing I've used it for.
Back to the user experience with Windows, the little tray icons kept yelling at me. I was like "Huh?, WTF?". It was saying something like my machine was insecure because I didn't have something or another. It took me a while, and possibly a registry hack to get rid of the message (I don't remember the details, don't want to). It would tell me I had too many icons on my desktop. I've seen other little tray icons yelling at the user for other reasons or another (Java VM updates comes to mind). Like any normal human being even knows what java is, where its used, and why they need it. It seems like I've got 50 different options of what to do when I log off (unfortunately, many Linux GUIs do the same thing). You get these bozo boxes all the time that come with a "bong" sound, that you have to read 10 times to understand what they are asking for, or you can just do the easy thing (like most people do), and just hit OK.
Have you ever seen a novice computer user use Windows? When these message boxes come up, they scroll over them with their mouse. They read and reread them, and after a while they get numb to them, and just hit OK.
I've seen these popup/popunder things when using IE, that confuse the hell out of me, and I work with computers for a living, and have for over 10 years. I even used to be a windows developer for a few years. Another thing, is that Windows is noisy. Its annoying in a public place.
I'm not bashing Windows here, I'm simply relaying my personal experiences and those that I have witnessed looking over the shoulders and from the words of novices that use Windows. This kind of software is not what I would give to an older person, or recommend to anybody that I liked.
I would go with OS X personally. I've used 10.3,4, and 5, and they all have been fine with the exception of a bug in the wireless driver in 10.3 that caused the machine to kernel panic. That was annoying, but it was only triggered when going from a wireless connection to a wired one when you changed your location. The fix was to leave the ethernet wire unplugged and then change locations, and a new patch came out shortly. Aside from that, I've never had any issues with my past 3 macs.
I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu to have any opinions. I use RedHat EL, Fedora, and OpenSUSE at work, and they are OK, but I wouldn't recommend any of them to a novice. They make great servers, and development platforms, but they are still a little rough around the edges.
I literally could not buy hardware fast enough to overcome the stupidity of these programmers, and it would be far better to pay a lot more money for the people instead.
Hardware doesn't fix bugs, nor provides new features, nor does it automagically port the new software to the new hardware.
Hardware w/o developers just sits there.
YACA (Yet another car analogy), the fastest car does not win all of the races. The best drivers seem to win the most races. A fast car with a sucky driver ends up wrecked more quickly too.
"Manufacturers generally make 15% to 20% in profit on an SUV, compared with only 3% or less on a car, according to Michael Flynn, director of the University of Michigan Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation." from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004283-6,00.html
SUVs were the rage for over a decade. They were incredibly profitable for the companies. And the profits went where?
I've read other places how the car companies were almost laughing at its customers who were paying so much for these station wagons with extra ground clearance for those rough suburban commutes. They took the joke so far, that GM came out with the Escalade and Ford with the Excursion and Lincoln Navigator. And people bought them!
So, we have companies selling stuff at joke profits for over a decade, and they need what from who?
And all this time they were still making cars, so I don't think they forgot how to do it. I seriously doubt that all their employees got 5x+ increase in wages.
So, why can't these companies go back to making cars? Isn't that what they do for a living?
As for taxes, tax cuts seem, for lack of a better term, "silly", in a time of recession. Shouldn't we focus on getting the national debt down before we cut anyone's taxes?
So, if you were to lose your job, you would focus on paying down your mortgage?
Tax cuts at the expense of possibly increasing the national debt is the right thing to do.
Tax cuts puts more money into the economy which will limit the depth and length of a recession.
Nasa has actually given results for it's money. What kind of return on the investment do other agencies produce?
NASA is a very popular, and its something that the common person understands (to a point). But as far as results go, things like NSF, DOE, and military have more of a positive impact on people's everyday lives than NASA.
NASA is pretty much closing up many of its aeronautical R&D, which has been replaced by the private sector. Also, the private sector is going into space.
I guess its cool to have a robot limp around on Mars and stuff. But there are tons of things here on earth to study. Global warming and alternate energy come to mind.
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. " -- Donald Rumsfeld
I guess we are defending against the unknown unknowns. Because as the parent post says, we have no known enemies that could come near to touching us.
On Windows, tabbed completion grabs the FIRST entry that matches.
And its the first on the hardisk, no human pattern to the match, but hey they added some functionality after all these years.
On Linux, tabbed completion lists ALL the entries that match.
Depends on the shell, and its options. zsh has had for years, and bash has it recently where there is programmable completion. Its so nice to do cd TAB and it list directories and symlinks to directories that you can actually, err, cd into, instead of completing with files and whatnot.
I've never been a fan of the #!/usr/bin/env thing. So many people combined with retarded shells that can't reliably set things like the PATH correctly makes using env unreliable. I've found it to cause more problems, than solve them.
I've seen different UNIX systems where the PATH is set both before and after sourcing the user's.files. I've read the INVOCATION section of bash so many times, I almost understand it.
The most sane shell I've ever come across is zsh. In all invocations, it sources.zshenv if it exists. The most insane shell I've come across is [t]csh. bash is tolerable.
handy to do vi and toggle between ^K and ^J to see past invocations of vi (or other commands).
I never use the history command.
Oh, and if rm -rf/foo/bar gives you trouble, just do sudo !!
Another trick I use is grep . * or similar. For smaller files, this will output the contents of the files prepended with the name of the file. Comes in handy from time to time.
Its weird, after you've been doing UNIX commands for over 10 years, they just come out of your fingers, and you don't really think much about them. I'm sure there are tons more tricks that I know, but they are in muscle memory, not my brain.
Doesn't sound like a latin word, and at least one dictionary says that its European based from around 1500 which is well after latin was still a spoken language.
Then why are we allowed to say copulation and feces on TV?
Because those words are latin derived, and they have specific meanings.
"Vulgar" words in English are typically old english derived, where vulgar means from the mob, or common people.
Basically, this all boils down to a social status thing.
A judge does not say "Fuck you, I'm going to send you to the ass slamming prison, and that will teach you!", he says, "I sentence you to a sentence of no less than X years and no more than Y years in prison, blah blah".
Its the guy who gets sentenced, that says, "Fuck you", and then the judge slaps him with a contempt of court charge.
In a nutshell, it all comes down to a power trip. I mean, its now at the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land as to whether you can say fuck or not. The court wants to defend themselves and their authority by saying "NO, you can't say fuck", but then they are also bound to that silly Constitution thing.
So, we end up with controversy, which makes great discussion and news.
The thing is we already have selective socialized medicine.
My medical "insurance" is taken out of my paycheck just like taxes before I even see the money. Those people that work in jobs that don't provide insurance are obviously in a different boat.
Then when one considers that 44% of all medical care is paid for by the government, and the fact that the government sets the prices that the "insurance" companies will pay.
I dunno, I say cut the middle man. Something like 20-30% of our health care costs go to these insurance companies.
The 99.9% guarantee is great, if there's someone to talk to who'll actually look at the problem when those three 9s aren't met. Otherwise it's marketing propaganda.
Keep in mind that most software comes with no warrantee whatsoever that it will be worth what the marketing propaganda says it will be.
Also, I don't think that Google would put out a product like this without adequate support. And if your only problem you have with the software is only getting 99.9% availability, then a simple status webpage would be suffice that says something like, "We are experiencing troubles, we anticipate having the system back up in 10 minutes".
In my eye, I see this as setting the bar a little higher in terms of system architecture and software engineering than anything Joe sixpack, Joe Executive, or Joe the plumber or myself have seen to date.
Did your C64 have virtual memory? Could it cache your binaries and files off of your nonexistant hardisk? Would you or anybody besides a tinkerer use it today for anything besides tinkering?
There's Damn Small Linux. Runs with a GUI interface w/ 16 MB of RAM, runs w/o a harddisk in 128 MB of RAM.
My laptop has 4GB of RAM, it can run Windows, Linux, and OS X at the same time. I haven't tested it, but I could run multiple versions of say Linux.
Also consider that 20k of RAM in the late 70s, early 80s, probably cost more than 1 GB of RAM today w/o any adjustment for inflation.
Linux runs on quite modest hardware requirements, but will use what is there as well. I would say outside of a dedicated realtime embedded OS, Linux is about as lean as it gets.
What about the different code bases for each architecture that are only used on that architecture?
Linux runs on LOTS of architectures, and variants of architectures, and each one of those takes code to make it run, but not all of it is compiled into the target architecture. Here's an incomplete list: http://home.hccnet.nl/p.van.deurzen/linuxweb/docs/architectures.htm
Maybe its complete, but it doesn't include things like the (maybe now defunct) 16bit port that existed a few years ago, and I didn't see the coreboot Linux smashed into a bios chip.
Linus' masters thesis was titled "Linux, a portable Operating System". If he didn't then, I surely would give him an A today.
I tend to use log4j and asynchronous logging that passes log messages to a syslog server that can handle the file io - and it ends up being network overhead that is the killer.
People have said disk io, CPUs, and they say they are both cheap. NICs are VERY cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they took 2 years thinking up a new name for it...
I can see it now.
Developer A: Windows 5?
Ballmer: [ thows chair at him ]
Developer B: [ sheepishly ] Windows 6?
Ballmer: [ throws chair at him ]
Developer C: [ sheepishly ] Windows 7?
Ballmer: Thats the greatest thing I've heard all day!!!
Of course they're trying to rush the release of Windows 7, Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" is right around the corner.
Huh? According to wikipedia, XP came out in Oct 2001, Mac OS X 10.1 came out in Sept 01. We are currently at 10.5, which comes a development kit, X11, and works on 2 different CPU architectures. The second architecture was added very recently.
I guess this is flamebait, but isn't MS pretty much a software company? Around here, people say that Apple is a hardware company, overpriced, etc. And I've heard that one of MS's new marketing strategies is to say that its cheaper than the "alternatives".
To me, it really seems as though there is a market for a new GUI based OS for commodity PCs. No, its not Linux. It could be, but I really think it would take a commercial entity to tie up all the loose ends. The commandline/server applications are fine to develop independently, but for a GUI, I think that a commercial entity is required to make something that people will want to use.
People who OS bash are like runners in the special olympics. Even if you win, you're still a retard
Nice.
I think Windows is a fine gaming environment, but I have seen and heard of people's problems with the stuff, and most slashdot type people would say, "Well, they (the users) are retarded". I installed Windows XP on a VM on my Mac just in case there was some reason to use it, and to get used to VMware and maybe there is a Windows app that I might want to use, and I could use it. So far, Google Chrome is the only thing I've used it for.
Back to the user experience with Windows, the little tray icons kept yelling at me. I was like "Huh?, WTF?". It was saying something like my machine was insecure because I didn't have something or another. It took me a while, and possibly a registry hack to get rid of the message (I don't remember the details, don't want to). It would tell me I had too many icons on my desktop. I've seen other little tray icons yelling at the user for other reasons or another (Java VM updates comes to mind). Like any normal human being even knows what java is, where its used, and why they need it. It seems like I've got 50 different options of what to do when I log off (unfortunately, many Linux GUIs do the same thing). You get these bozo boxes all the time that come with a "bong" sound, that you have to read 10 times to understand what they are asking for, or you can just do the easy thing (like most people do), and just hit OK.
Have you ever seen a novice computer user use Windows? When these message boxes come up, they scroll over them with their mouse. They read and reread them, and after a while they get numb to them, and just hit OK.
I've seen these popup/popunder things when using IE, that confuse the hell out of me, and I work with computers for a living, and have for over 10 years. I even used to be a windows developer for a few years. Another thing, is that Windows is noisy. Its annoying in a public place.
I'm not bashing Windows here, I'm simply relaying my personal experiences and those that I have witnessed looking over the shoulders and from the words of novices that use Windows. This kind of software is not what I would give to an older person, or recommend to anybody that I liked.
I would go with OS X personally. I've used 10.3,4, and 5, and they all have been fine with the exception of a bug in the wireless driver in 10.3 that caused the machine to kernel panic. That was annoying, but it was only triggered when going from a wireless connection to a wired one when you changed your location. The fix was to leave the ethernet wire unplugged and then change locations, and a new patch came out shortly. Aside from that, I've never had any issues with my past 3 macs.
I'm not familiar enough with Ubuntu to have any opinions. I use RedHat EL, Fedora, and OpenSUSE at work, and they are OK, but I wouldn't recommend any of them to a novice. They make great servers, and development platforms, but they are still a little rough around the edges.
I literally could not buy hardware fast enough to overcome the stupidity of these programmers, and it would be far better to pay a lot more money for the people instead.
Hardware doesn't fix bugs, nor provides new features, nor does it automagically port the new software to the new hardware.
Hardware w/o developers just sits there.
YACA (Yet another car analogy), the fastest car does not win all of the races. The best drivers seem to win the most races. A fast car with a sucky driver ends up wrecked more quickly too.
Like it or not, RPM has been declared as the standard.
http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3.2.0/LSB-Core-generic/LSB-Core-generic/book1.html
Should taxpayers back car makers first of all?
No.
"Manufacturers generally make 15% to 20% in profit on an SUV, compared with only 3% or less on a car, according to Michael Flynn, director of the University of Michigan Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation." from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1004283-6,00.html
SUVs were the rage for over a decade. They were incredibly profitable for the companies. And the profits went where?
I've read other places how the car companies were almost laughing at its customers who were paying so much for these station wagons with extra ground clearance for those rough suburban commutes. They took the joke so far, that GM came out with the Escalade and Ford with the Excursion and Lincoln Navigator. And people bought them!
So, we have companies selling stuff at joke profits for over a decade, and they need what from who?
And all this time they were still making cars, so I don't think they forgot how to do it. I seriously doubt that all their employees got 5x+ increase in wages.
So, why can't these companies go back to making cars? Isn't that what they do for a living?
As for taxes, tax cuts seem, for lack of a better term, "silly", in a time of recession. Shouldn't we focus on getting the national debt down before we cut anyone's taxes?
So, if you were to lose your job, you would focus on paying down your mortgage?
Tax cuts at the expense of possibly increasing the national debt is the right thing to do.
Tax cuts puts more money into the economy which will limit the depth and length of a recession.
Nasa has actually given results for it's money. What kind of return on the investment do other agencies produce?
NASA is a very popular, and its something that the common person understands (to a point). But as far as results go, things like NSF, DOE, and military have more of a positive impact on people's everyday lives than NASA.
NASA is pretty much closing up many of its aeronautical R&D, which has been replaced by the private sector. Also, the private sector is going into space.
I guess its cool to have a robot limp around on Mars and stuff. But there are tons of things here on earth to study. Global warming and alternate energy come to mind.
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. " -- Donald Rumsfeld
I guess we are defending against the unknown unknowns. Because as the parent post says, we have no known enemies that could come near to touching us.
also:
tar cf - . | ssh somehost tar -C /some/place -xf -
also nice with things like mysql dumps from one box, and loading the data onto another w/o touching the disk.
fuser is handy as well.
Another OS X goodie is open.
Similar in windows with start (but its been so long that I used windows, don't remember the details).
open .
Opens a finder window in your current directory.
open -a vlc movie.mpg
open the movie.mpg with the application vlc.
etc.
Nice mix between the command line and the GUI.
Also, you can drag and drop things from the finder into the terminal window, and they will even escape things like spaces for you.
OS X is such a nice UNIX implementation. Who would of thunk that?
12. unalias cp and mv and whatever else your vendor is trying to protect you from.
13. same for not allowing > to an existing file
14. ^L is your friend, especially in vi (maybe other editors as well).
15. for and while loops on the command line
16. Convince Solaris to get into the 21st century.
I love it when people leave CPU and/or disk intensive processes in the background and logout.
Especially if they are not niced. I either renice or kill them, depending on my mood.
Track down where your space is going:
du -h
Its better to do:
du | sort -n
The big directories are at the bottom, and that is where you should start cleaning up first.
On Windows, tabbed completion grabs the FIRST entry that matches.
And its the first on the hardisk, no human pattern to the match, but hey they added some functionality after all these years.
On Linux, tabbed completion lists ALL the entries that match.
Depends on the shell, and its options. zsh has had for years, and bash has it recently where there is programmable completion. Its so nice to do cd TAB and it list directories and symlinks to directories that you can actually, err, cd into, instead of completing with files and whatnot.
OS X, (BSD derived) puts env in /usr/bin.
I've never been a fan of the #!/usr/bin/env thing. So many people combined with retarded shells that can't reliably set things like the PATH correctly makes using env unreliable. I've found it to cause more problems, than solve them.
I've seen different UNIX systems where the PATH is set both before and after sourcing the user's .files. I've read the INVOCATION section of bash so many times, I almost understand it.
The most sane shell I've ever come across is zsh. In all invocations, it sources .zshenv if it exists. The most insane shell I've come across is [t]csh. bash is tolerable.
I have in my .zshrc file the following:
bindkey "^K" history-search-backward
bindkey "'J" up-line-or-historyward
handy to do vi and toggle between ^K and ^J to see past invocations of vi (or other commands).
I never use the history command.
Oh, and if rm -rf /foo/bar gives you trouble, just do sudo !!
Another trick I use is grep . * or similar. For smaller files, this will output the contents of the files prepended with the name of the file. Comes in handy from time to time.
Its weird, after you've been doing UNIX commands for over 10 years, they just come out of your fingers, and you don't really think much about them. I'm sure there are tons more tricks that I know, but they are in muscle memory, not my brain.
Doesn't sound like a latin word, and at least one dictionary says that its European based from around 1500 which is well after latin was still a spoken language.
But WTF do I know?
Then why are we allowed to say copulation and feces on TV?
Because those words are latin derived, and they have specific meanings.
"Vulgar" words in English are typically old english derived, where vulgar means from the mob, or common people.
Basically, this all boils down to a social status thing.
A judge does not say "Fuck you, I'm going to send you to the ass slamming prison, and that will teach you!", he says, "I sentence you to a sentence of no less than X years and no more than Y years in prison, blah blah".
Its the guy who gets sentenced, that says, "Fuck you", and then the judge slaps him with a contempt of court charge.
In a nutshell, it all comes down to a power trip. I mean, its now at the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land as to whether you can say fuck or not. The court wants to defend themselves and their authority by saying "NO, you can't say fuck", but then they are also bound to that silly Constitution thing.
So, we end up with controversy, which makes great discussion and news.
The thing is we already have selective socialized medicine.
My medical "insurance" is taken out of my paycheck just like taxes before I even see the money. Those people that work in jobs that don't provide insurance are obviously in a different boat.
Then when one considers that 44% of all medical care is paid for by the government, and the fact that the government sets the prices that the "insurance" companies will pay.
I dunno, I say cut the middle man. Something like 20-30% of our health care costs go to these insurance companies.
The 99.9% guarantee is great, if there's someone to talk to who'll actually look at the problem when those three 9s aren't met. Otherwise it's marketing propaganda.
Keep in mind that most software comes with no warrantee whatsoever that it will be worth what the marketing propaganda says it will be.
Also, I don't think that Google would put out a product like this without adequate support. And if your only problem you have with the software is only getting 99.9% availability, then a simple status webpage would be suffice that says something like, "We are experiencing troubles, we anticipate having the system back up in 10 minutes".
In my eye, I see this as setting the bar a little higher in terms of system architecture and software engineering than anything Joe sixpack, Joe Executive, or Joe the plumber or myself have seen to date.
"Regression testing"? What's that? If it compiles, it is good, if it boots up it is perfect.
Torvalds, Linus (1998-04-08)
There is a thing called the space-time tradeoff.
Did your C64 have virtual memory? Could it cache your binaries and files off of your nonexistant hardisk? Would you or anybody besides a tinkerer use it today for anything besides tinkering?
There's Damn Small Linux. Runs with a GUI interface w/ 16 MB of RAM, runs w/o a harddisk in 128 MB of RAM.
My laptop has 4GB of RAM, it can run Windows, Linux, and OS X at the same time. I haven't tested it, but I could run multiple versions of say Linux.
Also consider that 20k of RAM in the late 70s, early 80s, probably cost more than 1 GB of RAM today w/o any adjustment for inflation.
Linux runs on quite modest hardware requirements, but will use what is there as well. I would say outside of a dedicated realtime embedded OS, Linux is about as lean as it gets.
What about the different code bases for each architecture that are only used on that architecture?
Linux runs on LOTS of architectures, and variants of architectures, and each one of those takes code to make it run, but not all of it is compiled into the target architecture. Here's an incomplete list: http://home.hccnet.nl/p.van.deurzen/linuxweb/docs/architectures.htm
Maybe its complete, but it doesn't include things like the (maybe now defunct) 16bit port that existed a few years ago, and I didn't see the coreboot Linux smashed into a bios chip.
Linus' masters thesis was titled "Linux, a portable Operating System". If he didn't then, I surely would give him an A today.
I tend to use log4j and asynchronous logging that passes log messages to a syslog server that can handle the file io - and it ends up being network overhead that is the killer.
People have said disk io, CPUs, and they say they are both cheap. NICs are VERY cheap.