If you follow the freebsd-hackers list you probably saw a message from Jordy some days ago talking about NFS stability. This leaded to a thread with Matt Dillon, who has fixed 3 serious bugs, one of them in the softupdates code. For me, this is quite a serious contribution to the FreeBSD code, not that he has forgotten about it. Also, guess which OS does freebsd.apple.com run?
It was posted in The Register, too lazy to search for the article tho.
Acording to uptime.netcraft.com:
The site www.playboy.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris.
Renderman is an open API. Photorealistic Renderman is Pixar's implementation. Anyone can make a Renderman compliant render engine. E.g. BMRT is an alternative implementation, free as in beer. It would make little sense for Pixar to GPL it since is what they make money from, it's their main product.
ILM is credited for all the CGI, and also has been mentioned serveral times as the first movie which successfully integrated computer generated graphics with live footage.
Care to elaborate on that? What problems are those? Unless you've been living under a rock FreeBSD is released with the new BSDL, not the old one with the advertising clause, and it's perfectly compatible with the GPL and matches RMS's criteria (something 99% of BSDers couldn't care less about). If you've ever used old Linux kernels perhaps you noticed in the 2.0.x series that the NCR53C8xx driver was available both as the imported BSD driver and as one created by the Linux kernel hackers.
That quote was on the OpenBSD site, but is hardly surprising since OpenBSD won't enable any service at all unless you tell him to. This, of course, is The Right Way to Do It (tm) instead of the "let's enable every service by default" approach that W2K (Advamced) Server takes. In my experience, the average *ix sysadmin is much more knowledgeable than the average Windows admin about what services is he running.
I've got a friend living in Germany, he got a 768Kb down for less money I pay for my 256Kb one in Spain. I think the reason DSL is profitable in my country is that the same company that owns the phone lines (Telefonica) is the owner of the one that provides DSL access (Telefonica DATA), but there are independent companies who provide this service as well, Jazztel and BT itselft, wonder how long will they last if they have to pay for bandwidth, although, AFAIK, BT has it's own ATM lines between COs.
Here in Europe ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service. I pay about 35 USD/month for a 256/128Kb connection. Is it much cheaper over there un US so those companies are losing money? What's the exact reason why all of them are going down the drain?
Thanks for the info, I'll have a deeper look at gentoo when I have the time. Might be a nice option if I want to install a linux box, sound pretty customizable, just if it would be possible to install it with XFS it would be perfect for me.
In the ports directory you will find applications such as StarOffice (5.1 and 5.2), Netscape (linux version), linux version of Flash Plug-in and some more that work perfectly with Linux compat mode. What FreeBSD does is install a package (currently based on Redhat 6.1) and user a kernel module to provide binary compatibility, so it's no emulation. I've successfully ran Quake3 with h/w accel and all IPlanet products. Some other linux stuff you might run is e.g. acrored4 and the linux jvm. I'm posting this on a FreeBSD box using no other than Opera for linux.
Yeah, the e-cache bug. When I worked for Sun we had lots of complains about it. Lot's of cpus had to be changed with the Sony made ones. All Sun did was tell the customers to keep the patch level up to date (kernel patch 23 for Solaris 2.6 users) but they never found a real solution. Bad thing is when your shinny new E10K goes down because of a faulty cpu.
Thanks for writing it Phillipe. I had never had a look inside KDE component system but you little introduction has brought some ideas for future projects.
The story I heard is the other way. Back when C= still existed and David Haynie was working on the new Zorro bus (Zorro 4) he realised that what he was doing was nothing but a PCI-esque architecture. There are stories telling about an A3000+ with AGA gfx and DSP that Haynie built, a prototype. AAA (codenamed Hombre) never saw the light, same as Zorro 4, which would have been replaced by PCI if a new machine had ever seen the light of the day.
Q: Internet Explorer is 100x better than Netscape. So why should I run Linux when it doesn't have a decent web browser??
Nobody tells you to use Netscape, you can use the excellent Konqueror, Mozilla or even Opera instead.
Q: Windows is super easy to install. To install Linux I have to do an fdisk, whatever that is. What's the deal here?
Try one of those easy distros, Red Hat, Mandrake that come with a graphical disk editor, couldn't be easier.
Q: There aren't any WYSIWYG word processors for Linux. How should I do my school work??
StarOffice? Lyx? KWord?
I agree with you in most of the points, except Mono not being a potential threat to open-source. Not a threat for the average home user, but for open-source use in the enterprise. Imagine a shop where some services have already been moved to Linux or BSD boxes, usually web serving, but it could also be Samba and some other stuff. Now when the.NET boom starts some of the open-source advocates working there say: "We have this Mono thing, why don't we deploy our.NET systems using it?" As there is a bunch of knowledgeable Linux admins working there, somehow the company says OK.
A year passes and Microsoft "updates" the Passport system and releases a.NET update as well, but Mono doesn't get that update, so some stuff breaks. The boss gets angry and says : "Ok, remove that Mono crap and let's put some XP boxes to do the job" If in this particular case Mono was a test of wether to use open-source systems in the future, this company will probably not use any more open-source software again.
OTOH I think Mono and Gnome are different and sepparated products, you should be able to choose either or both of them, maybe you want to run.NET staff on your KDE desktop.
You forgot people like Centropolis (of Godzilla fame) and Digital Domain?
OTOH I agree with you that to a certain point it would be nice if those tools were released, many smaller shops would greatly benefit from them.
With todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.
I used Amiga computers for almost 7 years, back when I was part of the 'demo scene'. Yes, AmigaOS was fast, the message passing system was fast because all it had to do was pass a pointer, as there was no memory protection. I can't remember the amount of times Voyager and IBrowse crashed my A1200. I remember when Netscape released their source, some people suggested porting it to AmigaOS; this, of course, was nothing but a very bad joke, imagine Netscape crashing and taking down the whole system with him. These days I run BSD boxes with WindowMaker, if you ask me I don't miss Amiga at all, the thing was dog slow for most serious work (i.e. using gcc). Sometimes I feel a bit of nostalgia and miss some of the really cool demos that were produced for it.
Slashdot Mirror
If you follow the freebsd-hackers list you probably saw a message from Jordy some days ago talking about NFS stability. This leaded to a thread with Matt Dillon, who has fixed 3 serious bugs, one of them in the softupdates code. For me, this is quite a serious contribution to the FreeBSD code, not that he has forgotten about it. Also, guess which OS does freebsd.apple.com run?
as it has already been cracked
Nice review Russ, although I see you use the same spellchecker as /. editors :-)
"but the Zaurus is also soon run Familiar as well."
It was posted in The Register, too lazy to search for the article tho.
Acording to uptime.netcraft.com:
The site www.playboy.com is running Netscape-Enterprise/3.6 SP3 on Solaris.
I won't touch anything Microsoft makes or sells with a 10 foot pole, but you must admit that this game looks gorgeus.
Renderman is an open API. Photorealistic Renderman is Pixar's implementation. Anyone can make a Renderman compliant render engine. E.g. BMRT is an alternative implementation, free as in beer. It would make little sense for Pixar to GPL it since is what they make money from, it's their main product.
ILM is credited for all the CGI, and also has been mentioned serveral times as the first movie which successfully integrated computer generated graphics with live footage.
Here you have all the info you need to learn about FreeBSD.
Care to elaborate on that? What problems are those? Unless you've been living under a rock FreeBSD is released with the new BSDL, not the old one with the advertising clause, and it's perfectly compatible with the GPL and matches RMS's criteria (something 99% of BSDers couldn't care less about). If you've ever used old Linux kernels perhaps you noticed in the 2.0.x series that the NCR53C8xx driver was available both as the imported BSD driver and as one created by the Linux kernel hackers.
That quote was on the OpenBSD site, but is hardly surprising since OpenBSD won't enable any service at all unless you tell him to. This, of course, is The Right Way to Do It (tm) instead of the "let's enable every service by default" approach that W2K (Advamced) Server takes. In my experience, the average *ix sysadmin is much more knowledgeable than the average Windows admin about what services is he running.
I've got a friend living in Germany, he got a 768Kb down for less money I pay for my 256Kb one in Spain. I think the reason DSL is profitable in my country is that the same company that owns the phone lines (Telefonica) is the owner of the one that provides DSL access (Telefonica DATA), but there are independent companies who provide this service as well, Jazztel and BT itselft, wonder how long will they last if they have to pay for bandwidth, although, AFAIK, BT has it's own ATM lines between COs.
Here in Europe ADSL seems to be profitable for all companies providing the service. I pay about 35 USD /month for a 256/128Kb connection. Is it much cheaper over there un US so those companies are losing money? What's the exact reason why all of them are going down the drain?
Heh, OSF is the Open Software Foundation, not Source. It had nothing to do with FSF and the rest of the OSS bang.
Thanks for the info, I'll have a deeper look at gentoo when I have the time. Might be a nice option if I want to install a linux box, sound pretty customizable, just if it would be possible to install it with XFS it would be perfect for me.
"Its basically ports++ that forms the core of the distro (aka its not just for "third party packages")."
:)
/usr/src && make -j8 buildworld
:)
Please, read the FreeBSD handbook
cd
I installed FreeBSD 4.3 on my box when it was released, I CVSuped the latest source code last week and now my box reads:
ainhoa# uname -srn
FreeBSD ainhoa.energyhq.org 4.4-STABLE
Yep, FreeBSD is cool
I prefer to compile with these options in my /etc/make.conf
:)
CPUTYPE=i686
This way you automagically have a cc -O -pipe -march=pentiumpro setup so you don't compile for 10 years old 386 cpus.
Sure, compiling KDE2 will take some time, but who cares, you can continue working while the package builds, thanks God for dual cpus and SCSI disks
In the ports directory you will find applications such as StarOffice (5.1 and 5.2), Netscape (linux version), linux version of Flash Plug-in and some more that work perfectly with Linux compat mode. What FreeBSD does is install a package (currently based on Redhat 6.1) and user a kernel module to provide binary compatibility, so it's no emulation. I've successfully ran Quake3 with h/w accel and all IPlanet products. Some other linux stuff you might run is e.g. acrored4 and the linux jvm. I'm posting this on a FreeBSD box using no other than Opera for linux.
Yeah, the e-cache bug. When I worked for Sun we had lots of complains about it. Lot's of cpus had to be changed with the Sony made ones. All Sun did was tell the customers to keep the patch level up to date (kernel patch 23 for Solaris 2.6 users) but they never found a real solution. Bad thing is when your shinny new E10K goes down because of a faulty cpu.
Thanks for writing it Phillipe. I had never had a look inside KDE component system but you little introduction has brought some ideas for future projects.
The story I heard is the other way. Back when C= still existed and David Haynie was working on the new Zorro bus (Zorro 4) he realised that what he was doing was nothing but a PCI-esque architecture. There are stories telling about an A3000+ with AGA gfx and DSP that Haynie built, a prototype. AAA (codenamed Hombre) never saw the light, same as Zorro 4, which would have been replaced by PCI if a new machine had ever seen the light of the day.
OK, I'll byte...
:-)
Q: Internet Explorer is 100x better than Netscape. So why should I run Linux when it doesn't have a decent web browser??
Nobody tells you to use Netscape, you can use the excellent Konqueror, Mozilla or even Opera instead.
Q: Windows is super easy to install. To install Linux I have to do an fdisk, whatever that is. What's the deal here?
Try one of those easy distros, Red Hat, Mandrake that come with a graphical disk editor, couldn't be easier.
Q: There aren't any WYSIWYG word processors for Linux. How should I do my school work??
StarOffice? Lyx? KWord?
Your last question is really lame
I agree with you in most of the points, except Mono not being a potential threat to open-source. Not a threat for the average home user, but for open-source use in the enterprise. Imagine a shop where some services have already been moved to Linux or BSD boxes, usually web serving, but it could also be Samba and some other stuff. Now when the .NET boom starts some of the open-source advocates working there say: "We have this Mono thing, why don't we deploy our .NET systems using it?" As there is a bunch of knowledgeable Linux admins working there, somehow the company says OK.
.NET update as well, but Mono doesn't get that update, so some stuff breaks. The boss gets angry and says : "Ok, remove that Mono crap and let's put some XP boxes to do the job" If in this particular case Mono was a test of wether to use open-source systems in the future, this company will probably not use any more open-source software again.
.NET staff on your KDE desktop.
A year passes and Microsoft "updates" the Passport system and releases a
OTOH I think Mono and Gnome are different and sepparated products, you should be able to choose either or both of them, maybe you want to run
You forgot people like Centropolis (of Godzilla fame) and Digital Domain?
OTOH I agree with you that to a certain point it would be nice if those tools were released, many smaller shops would greatly benefit from them.
With todays processors linux based rendering farms are really hard to beat. The two industry standard rendering programs have already been ported to linux, Mental Ray and the famous Photorealistic Renderman. On the artists side Softimage|3D 3.9 is already running on Linux. Porting XSI will be more tricky since it was developed for Wintel (it will create a fake registry in the IRIX version, you get the idea). Side FX has some products running on Linux. Maya 4.0 is also ported to Linux.
Add to this that most of those shops have developed lots of in-house tools that run on, surprise, IRIX, so porting to Linux seems a better choice than trying some acrobatic effort to make them work on Redmond's.
You want composition software? No problem, you can use NothingReal's impressive Shake
IMHO you may call those pplications which are truly useful to artists. Sure, they're damn expensive, but this is a niche market so that's not surprising.
I used Amiga computers for almost 7 years, back when I was part of the 'demo scene'. Yes, AmigaOS was fast, the message passing system was fast because all it had to do was pass a pointer, as there was no memory protection. I can't remember the amount of times Voyager and IBrowse crashed my A1200. I remember when Netscape released their source, some people suggested porting it to AmigaOS; this, of course, was nothing but a very bad joke, imagine Netscape crashing and taking down the whole system with him. These days I run BSD boxes with WindowMaker, if you ask me I don't miss Amiga at all, the thing was dog slow for most serious work (i.e. using gcc). Sometimes I feel a bit of nostalgia and miss some of the really cool demos that were produced for it.