You suppose what hasn't been implemented? XFS does not need a fsck program which runs the way traditional fsck's run, i.e. after an unclean unmount.
Both reiserfs ans XFS are journalling filesystems. And initially reiserfs didn't have a fsck program, but now it does. It seemed logical that XFS would also move the same direction.
It -does- have tools to check consistency of an XFS filesystem and repair corrupt or inconsistent filesystems. There's just no reason to always run them after an unclean shutdown, because log replay takes care of this.
When you call fsck on an ext2 partition, it calls ext2.fsck. It would be better to integrate everything in the existing infrastructure.
Please mod parent up and support consumer choice for activation free software by switching to OS X.
Wonderful. And how do you know that they won't require product activation there too? In fact, they say in their web page that they are considering activation for the Mac.
Let me put in my rant here. I purchased a copy of Waterloo Maple 6, student edition.
May I suggest Maxima, which is the code on which Maple was originally based. It is GPL and cross-platform.
The authorization interfaces with this stupid licensing server called "flexlm."
If you have been using UNIX for any length of time you would have run into this. Most of the commercial software on UNIX uses it. The Intel compiler which they released as freeware also requires this software.
It's called a free market economy, folks, and it's the best thing we (humans) ever invented.
It is the best only if it maximizes something we define as useful. Free market works very well when there is competiton, i.e., low barriers to entry. If that is not the case then you (customer) are screwed.
Vector processors (Cray) are off in their own little category because they're only fast for SIMD instructions.
Intel wants developers to use the SSE2 instructions wherever possible and not rely on the FPU. And that is why Athlon beats them in so many benchmarks. So that is the direction we are moving now.
AOL has a list of email addresses you can't sign up for (and it is not offensive or already taken). You cannot, for instance, signup for aoluser@aol.com.
Until the print display on ebook readers is at least 600 DPI, forget it. The print you read on a cheap paperback is 1200 DPI. The text displayed on your ebook reader is about 96 dpi, or the quality of a poor dotmatrix printout.
I don't know what kind of books you read, but the text of most books is less than 400 dpi. This is the limitation of the press used to produce the books.
Why should a business care what MS's progit margin is
Profit margins reflect the competition in the market. No one will worry about price increases with computer hardware like hard drives because they know the manufacturers can't afford to charge too much. However, in MSs case, sky is the limit.
People who use.doc format are "screwed" only if MS kills it, which seems unlikely. If they foolishly price it out of the market, people will still use it, but without MS tools.
How will they use.doc without MS? It is not documented. Software costs have gone from less than 10% of the cost of a computer to more than 100% if you want the MS Office suite. People are still buying, but there is a lot of pain. And it will only get worse.
To break the MS stranglehold, proponents of open standards must demonstrate that the new standards will help businsses make money, will not require throwing away their investment in MS programs and infrastructure, and will allow them to continue to transparently (without conversion) read and use both their own legacy data and new incoming data from other sources that is still in the MS format.
Since cost is the major issue here, all that should be considered is the cost of using standards vs. using proprietary formats. And therein lies the rub--you don't know what MS is going to charge 5 years from now. If it is at the current level, then businesses may not lose money. However, there may be people who don't want this hanging over their head. Such businesses will move to open systems even if there are some short term issues.
But, if I ran a business, I'd opt for whatever was going to make me the most money, regardless of whether or not it was well-documented, open or closed.
Microsoft's current profit margin is more than 300%. How do you determine the cost of software--one answer is that it will be what the market will brear. If your software aquisition and maintainence costs are about 5% now, who is to say it shouldn't be 50% in the future? With standards, the cost would be hiring someone to write a filter according to spec.
People are not going to blind themselves to their own data just to support an open standard
People who have tied themselves to.doc format are screwed anyway. Moving to open formats in the future would be less painful.
But, the reality is different. The present-day cost of moving away from the.doc format outweighs the long-term possibility of getting screwed by Microsoft.
Are you sure about that? Because the next version of Windows will require a MS 2003 server to authenticate your documents. But you won't enable it you say? But when you receive a document from another person, and can't open it, you will have to fork out several thousand dollars for the hardware and software.
Committee-generated standards are useless unless people decide to adhere to them, regardless of technical reasonableness.
There are two separate issues here: standards and acceptance. I suppose you have read all about the W3C difficulties getting Microsoft to implement standards in IE. If you have two different implementations, one which follows a documented, well thought out standard, and another a non-documented closed implementation, which one would you choose?
So, of course, the.doc format is a standard.
Again, where is the documentation for the.doc format? There isn't any. The standard is subject to MS's whims.
I'm not advocating the widespread acceptance of proprietary standards.
But that is what your actions amount to. And years later when all your data is locked up in proprietary formats, and MS asks you to fork over several hundred dollars to read your data, your cries of "I just want to get work done" will not help you.
Complete opinion. I say inconsistencies in GUI suck more...
I was talking about how you cannot change it at all. I suppose after about 20 years of this they would've figured it out.
...and this is useful how? I can invision maybe one or two scenarios where this may be useful but not worth the trouble in my opinion. Maybe there are others that I haven't thought of.
There is no trouble: it is set up by default on all KDE installations.
Uncheck the box that says "Keep my system up to date".
Thanks. I'll check it out.
I want to play games today... probably in a few years as well... but "today" being the operative word.
And when they came for me there was no one left to speak...
It is easy to find fault with Microsoft and Windows. Most of it is deserved. But, Linux has faults, too. One big problem is part and parcel of its evelopment modeL: Because there's no single entity setting and enforcing standards, the highly touted benefits of "choice" often become a crapshoot of conflicting libraries, packaging schemes, and software compiled by God-Knows-Who in God-Know-Where.
When there is a single entity controlling everything, then there will be no standards, or rather, they will be broken at will to satisfy the business tactic of the moment. Do you think the.doc format is a standard? Why not? GNU/Linux follows standards like POSIX, TCP/IP, and the RFCs. You will find that file formats are open, and can be still used years down the line. Is this what you consider a flaw?
If you want to believe that Linux is technically better than Windows, fine. I happen to agree on that point. If you think that Microsoft is the evil empire, that's OK; you can form your own opinions. If you can't seperate the two ideas in your mind, then there's a problem, and you probably ought to reexamine your conclusions (or at least your mode of evangelism.)
But what you fail to realize is that the technical decisions in Windows are infact taken due to business reasons, and thus they are very closely related. For instance, MS's decision to shove DRM down your throat is the business decision, and the technical outcome is the reduced freedom you have when using the software (crippled output, "secure" computing etc.)
Yeesh, no kidding. I haven't heard someone kick and scream so loudly about ctrl-c and ctrl-v before. At least Windows has this support consistent across programs -
So what if it is consistent? It still sucks.
I've had more than a few weird idiosyncracies between differing Linux programs and cutting/pasting to and from them, though it's much improved with today's distributions than before.
I suppose you are talking about text. If you use KDE, a clipboard program runs by default, which makes things much easier. You can even bind specific actions to data using regexps.
He complains about forced downloading of patches, which is something you can disable.
How can you do this? There is a nagscreen that comes up and stays in the taskbar for a about 5 minutes everytime I boot up. This is one of the "features" in the latest service pack.
But for the gamer like me, it's hard to switch away from Windows since most games are written for Windows.
Wait a couple of years when the full force of DRMd closed systems hit you.
That brings up the intriguing possibility of a "fractional maximise" button in the titlebar. That could well be useful even if you did not have a widescreen display. Say maximise your editor to 2/3 of the screen and your helpfile to 1/3 (kind-of like docking).
KDE has had such vertical and horizontal maximization for a few years now (use middle-click on the maximize button).
That's called buffered I/O and is a standard feature of modern operating systems. Where it gets dangerous is that Windows doesn't force you to manually unmount removable disks before pulling them out, which can easily result in data loss. But that's what the little light is for next to those drives. If the light is on, don't take the disk out or you will lose data.
Unfortunately, this doesn't help for network drives. And they put the lights of the networking cards on the back of the computer. Those bastards...
Forgetting some of the more awesome scripting languages supported in Windows since 1998
It is awesome according to Microsoft definitions like innovation.
(VBScript and JScript natively, but windows scripting host has python, ruby and perl plugins)
Of course, you will have to install the perl, python, and ruby packages yourself (did I mention that ActiveState installer needs the latest and greatest service packs installed?). In any case WSH is the only thing installed by default.
And it's because of this lack of savvy-ness that you'll need to download a tool. If you use Windows, chances are there has been something written to do this.
The big problem is that today any tool, while it is not shareware or nagware, will have some ads and spy stuff built into it. Since you don't have the source anyway, you can't even check that.
If you use Linux, somebody will probably tell you to write a script.
More likely they will post a code snippet (which has been my experience in these matters).
You may not know it, but Microsoft's procedural programming tools are very advanced and have been since 1989...even if there's no camel on the front of the instruction guide. WSH gives you everything you want...regular expressions, an interface to COM objects and the windows API, and some basic GUI tools. I have built entire applications out of WSH. Shit, there have been many critical VIRUSES written in WSH. With all this power available in the majority of windows installations, there is no need for an add-on command shell unless you are really well versed in said shell and couldn't live without it.
WSH isn't easy to use at all. And for the virus comment, when I was looking around on the net for tutorials and such for general system maintainence tasks, all I found was scripts which let you mail everyone in your addressbook.:-)
I do prefer bash scripting, but i think downloading a seperate environment just for a more comfortable scripting is like buying a new car because you like the color. Besides, diversity is what makes a programmer.
I am don't have a scripting fetish, I just want to get work done. With Cygwin, I get all the UNIX tools for a few MB, without knowing much of any programming. sed G myfile.txt | fold -s -w 60 |less gives me my document reader, and I have been trying forever to do that in WSH.
Care to put a number on that? Last time I checked Apple's website, their educational discount was less than 5% (about $50 on a $1,200 purchase). BTW, SUN gives a 40% educational discount.
Uhh, no. Not for a home user. Home users want to USE software, not write it, not compile it.
Fair enough.
Pretty much anything you'd want to do as a home user is better done using the standard Windows GUI, or (god forbid), DOS. Shit, I'm a developer and I still prefer the old Dos commands to Cygwin...it just seems so kludgy.
How would you do something like--find all the zip files in a directory which have errors and move them some place else? You will be forced to download some "utility" everytime something like that happens.
Windows isn't UN*X like in most of the ways that are important (different threading, different hardware interface, different file systems, different security model), so I see no reason to have a seperate, non-Windows system for performing file operations, etc.
Why should it bother you if you are not a developer?
Since the machine has Mandrake installed for the dual boot, it makes sense that users savvy enough to want the extensibility and control of a UN*X like system are going to reboot anyway.
I had the honor of listening to James Gosling's Keynote at Borcon 2001.
I don't think that is such an honor. This is what RMS has to say about Gosling.
In the summer of that year, about two years ago now, a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history.
Slashdot Mirror
Both reiserfs ans XFS are journalling filesystems. And initially reiserfs didn't have a fsck program, but now it does. It seemed logical that XFS would also move the same direction.
When you call fsck on an ext2 partition, it calls ext2.fsck. It would be better to integrate everything in the existing infrastructure.
Wonderful. And how do you know that they won't require product activation there too? In fact, they say in their web page that they are considering activation for the Mac.
May I suggest Maxima, which is the code on which Maple was originally based. It is GPL and cross-platform.
If you have been using UNIX for any length of time you would have run into this. Most of the commercial software on UNIX uses it. The Intel compiler which they released as freeware also requires this software.
It is the best only if it maximizes something we define as useful. Free market works very well when there is competiton, i.e., low barriers to entry. If that is not the case then you (customer) are screwed.
The reiserfsck program used to be /bin/true, but it was changed to an actual executable later. I suppose it hasn't been implemented for XFS either.
Intel wants developers to use the SSE2 instructions wherever possible and not rely on the FPU. And that is why Athlon beats them in so many benchmarks. So that is the direction we are moving now.
AOL has a list of email addresses you can't sign up for (and it is not offensive or already taken). You cannot, for instance, signup for aoluser@aol.com.
Sure it was. Why did he do the rm thing if wanted to remove Linux. Did he have another OS that would use the ext2 partition?
I don't know what kind of books you read, but the text of most books is less than 400 dpi. This is the limitation of the press used to produce the books.
Profit margins reflect the competition in the market. No one will worry about price increases with computer hardware like hard drives because they know the manufacturers can't afford to charge too much. However, in MSs case, sky is the limit.
How will they use .doc without MS? It is not documented. Software costs have gone from less than 10% of the cost of a computer to more than 100% if you want the MS Office suite. People are still buying, but there is a lot of pain. And it will only get worse.
Since cost is the major issue here, all that should be considered is the cost of using standards vs. using proprietary formats. And therein lies the rub--you don't know what MS is going to charge 5 years from now. If it is at the current level, then businesses may not lose money. However, there may be people who don't want this hanging over their head. Such businesses will move to open systems even if there are some short term issues.
Microsoft's current profit margin is more than 300%. How do you determine the cost of software--one answer is that it will be what the market will brear. If your software aquisition and maintainence costs are about 5% now, who is to say it shouldn't be 50% in the future? With standards, the cost would be hiring someone to write a filter according to spec.
People who have tied themselves to .doc format are screwed anyway. Moving to open formats in the future would be less painful.
Are you sure about that? Because the next version of Windows will require a MS 2003 server to authenticate your documents. But you won't enable it you say? But when you receive a document from another person, and can't open it, you will have to fork out several thousand dollars for the hardware and software.
There are two separate issues here: standards and acceptance. I suppose you have read all about the W3C difficulties getting Microsoft to implement standards in IE. If you have two different implementations, one which follows a documented, well thought out standard, and another a non-documented closed implementation, which one would you choose?
Again, where is the documentation for the .doc format? There isn't any. The standard is subject to MS's whims.
But that is what your actions amount to. And years later when all your data is locked up in proprietary formats, and MS asks you to fork over several hundred dollars to read your data, your cries of "I just want to get work done" will not help you.
I was talking about how you cannot change it at all. I suppose after about 20 years of this they would've figured it out.
There is no trouble: it is set up by default on all KDE installations.
Thanks. I'll check it out.
And when they came for me there was no one left to speak...
When there is a single entity controlling everything, then there will be no standards, or rather, they will be broken at will to satisfy the business tactic of the moment. Do you think the .doc format is a standard? Why not? GNU/Linux follows standards like POSIX, TCP/IP, and the RFCs. You will find that file formats are open, and can be still used years down the line. Is this what you consider a flaw?
But what you fail to realize is that the technical decisions in Windows are infact taken due to business reasons, and thus they are very closely related. For instance, MS's decision to shove DRM down your throat is the business decision, and the technical outcome is the reduced freedom you have when using the software (crippled output, "secure" computing etc.)
So what if it is consistent? It still sucks.
I suppose you are talking about text. If you use KDE, a clipboard program runs by default, which makes things much easier. You can even bind specific actions to data using regexps.
How can you do this? There is a nagscreen that comes up and stays in the taskbar for a about 5 minutes everytime I boot up. This is one of the "features" in the latest service pack.
Wait a couple of years when the full force of DRMd closed systems hit you.
KDE has had such vertical and horizontal maximization for a few years now (use middle-click on the maximize button).
Unfortunately, this doesn't help for network drives. And they put the lights of the networking cards on the back of the computer. Those bastards ...
It is awesome according to Microsoft definitions like innovation.
Of course, you will have to install the perl, python, and ruby packages yourself (did I mention that ActiveState installer needs the latest and greatest service packs installed?). In any case WSH is the only thing installed by default.
The big problem is that today any tool, while it is not shareware or nagware, will have some ads and spy stuff built into it. Since you don't have the source anyway, you can't even check that.
More likely they will post a code snippet (which has been my experience in these matters).
WSH isn't easy to use at all. And for the virus comment, when I was looking around on the net for tutorials and such for general system maintainence tasks, all I found was scripts which let you mail everyone in your addressbook. :-)
I am don't have a scripting fetish, I just want to get work done. With Cygwin, I get all the UNIX tools for a few MB, without knowing much of any programming. sed G myfile.txt | fold -s -w 60 |less gives me my document reader, and I have been trying forever to do that in WSH.
Care to put a number on that? Last time I checked Apple's website, their educational discount was less than 5% (about $50 on a $1,200 purchase). BTW, SUN gives a 40% educational discount.
Fair enough.
How would you do something like--find all the zip files in a directory which have errors and move them some place else? You will be forced to download some "utility" everytime something like that happens.
Why should it bother you if you are not a developer?
Why torture them when they use Windows?
Cygwin comes with hundreds of small utilities. No need to download their Windows equivalents one by one (and much safer too).
Most new PCs do have one.
I don't think that is such an honor. This is what RMS has to say about Gosling.