People have asked my opinion, and I'll just leave it by saying I don't prefix "Linux" with those 3 little letters and a slash even tho I've been asked.
I'm sorry CmdrTaco but during the infamous KDE/Gnome flamefests you added way too much oil to the fire to be considered even remotely moderate on the issue of Free Software and the GPL. Don't try to make yourself look so objective and balanced when all the long toothed/. readers know exactly what your views on anything non GPLed are.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on top of of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
That being said, unlike a lot of posters here, I don't see speed as being a permanent impediment to Java's growth. We're already at the point where some serious Java apps are fast enough for everyday use, and I expect that to be more true over time as a) hardware continues to get faster
This gets said over and over again by Java zealots. Speed is of no concern because the hardware keeps getting faster. If the hardware keeps getting faster imagine the kind of cool stuff people could do with an efficient language instead of the Java bloat. No matter how optimised the VM will always be a speed killer. M$ will keep releasing more powerful and snappier desktop apps while the java zealots will keep coding stuff that's slower and less featureful. That's how it's been for the last five years and that trend seems to remain unchanged. JBuilder and Forte suck ass compared to Visual Studio. Have a nice day.
Nope. I have to endure JBuilder in my daily work (yes I'm a suffering java developer who couldn't get a decent C++ gig). JBuilder is NOT acceptable by any stretch of imagination. Any application that takes 40 seconds to launch on a 800MHz PIII has serious performance issues. And it's full of bugs too lest we forget.
It would be really nice to have an open alternative to Java that is also compiled. Glancing through the spec there is lots to like there. For instance the idea of building unit tests into the language spec seems like a pretty good one to me and would help popularise unit testing among developers. Native support for unicode is nothing new but it's nice that unlike Java he still retians the ascii type for those who don't need i18n. I hope the guy pulls it off. I'd like to play with a new C++ like language. If he only reconsidered his views on templates though...
Before you start accusing me of incompetence I'm rushing to let you know that I work with EJB on a daily basis. And the tech has more idiocies that I can count. Entity beans are useless. Transactions can be handled with JTA just fine. Can you explain which part of the EJB eases handling transactions? Session beans can only be load balanced if they're stateless. So they're useless too. 3/4 of the services most EJB vendors provide(well, I'm mainly referncing my experiences with Weblogic) are not needed for EJB development, and thus are mainly useless wastes of memory.
I know that EJBs are used outside of web applications but how common is that given that every major EJB container vendor always bundles a servlet container in their application server?
Location transparency is non-existant. I've not seen a single app that benefits from not knowing whether a service it's using is local or remote. This is bunch of overhyped crap from CORBA. If you do distributed objects you're always forced to cater for network failures so you might just as well have it explicitly stated in the code. Before you jump here, note that I'm not dissing the idea of a naming service or some other directory lookup system I'm just saying that if you're accessing a remote service you might as well be explicit about it. EJB is big, bloated and it's almost never the right approach to take. It's java specific (yes I know about RMI/IIOP but it's more pain than it's worth) it's complicated for its own good and very slow. You've been reading too many press releases from SUNW
Allright. Maybe PHP won't be optimal for the most demanding web applications but surely servlets and JavaBeans (as opposed to EJBs) should nicely do the trick. What does EJB offer that you can't get with plain servlets and beans? Clustering of your application boxes can be accomplished with tomcat. No need for stupid EJBs.
I used to work almost exclusively with CORBA which is over-engineered but at least it made sense as we had to interface lots of legacy code. But EJBs tie you to Java exlusively so integration with the legacy stuff is no longer so simple. What good are EJBs then? Everything they offer can be accomplished through simpler and more efficient solutions.
Can you elaborate on what you have in mind when you say 'services'? I'm not contradicting myself I just don't understand how Web Services is different from a shopping cart and if it's no different then the whole hype is just that. A bunch of buzzwords to milk som PHBs for more money on $50,000/cpu app servers. I once (not long ago) interviewed at a Java shop where they told me they were building a new generaion of Web Services. I quickly found out that they were building a simple dotcom website. You know, the shopping cart, the catalogue, the lot. If you're telling me that that effort requires 60 coders and just as many architects then I'm telling you that PHP works better and costs far less money for the same result (at least from the customer's viewpoint).
Am I the only one failing to grasp the importance of Web Services? I'm really perplexed as to what the great benefit of those is supposed to be? Isn't all that web services crap just a hyped up way of designing a typical dotcom shopping cart?
Take EJB for instance. What a bloated overhyped piece of crap. There's so much bullshit from Sun about EJB when the bloody thing just plain doesn't work. Just about every project is better off with just using servlets and standard beans and their own persistence instead of relying on the slow and crappy CMP. EJB is bullshit and so is the dotNet crap and all that web services circus. It seems to me that good coders with PHP and apache knowledge seem to be able to pull a better magic than all the Javas and dotNets of this world. I'd say OpenSource is not missing the bandwagon at all unless you have a bandwagon of hype in mind.
But I still say that nothing is better then the almighty Google
then
adv.
At that time: I was still in school then. Come at noon; I'll be ready then.
Next in time, space, or order; immediately afterward: watched the late movie and then went to bed.
In addition; moreover; besides: It costs $20, and then there's the sales tax to pay.
Used after but to qualify or balance a preceding statement: The star was nervous, but then who isn't on the first night of a new play.
In that case; accordingly: If traffic is heavy, then allow extra time.
As a consequence; therefore: The case, then, is closed.
n.
That time or moment: The bus leaves at four; until then let's walk.
adj.
Being so at that time: the then chairman of the board.
than
conj.
Used after a comparative adjective or adverb to introduce the second element or clause of an unequal comparison: She is a better athlete than I.
Used to introduce the second element after certain words indicating difference: He draws quite differently than she does.
When. Used especially after hardly and scarcely: I had scarcely walked in the door than the commotion started.
WHICH PART OF THE DEFINITION DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? ONCE MORE I SEE THIS SPELLING ERROR ON SLASHDOT I'M GONNA GO FUCKING NUTS!!!!
Filing for bankruptcy protection is not the same as being "out of business," but it's uncomfortably close.
It's not over until the fat lady sings, of course, but I think I hear her sucking air into her lungs and clearing her throat. That fat lady is going to sing soon and when she does she's going to blow some eardrums. There are very few companies that survive the chapter 11 stage. Stop deluding yourselves guys.
These days even companies that actually produce something are going under. This is really sad. I hope these guys quickly land new jobs somwhere. I can't believe how abysmal the gaming industry has got. And with the grassroots support that Loki enjoyed it's quite frightening to see them go under.
Maybe one day someone else will try to do the same thing but I honestly can't see what Loki could've done to prevent their fate. They had a strong team and did the best they could with the very heterogenous platform that Linux is. Is there really no future for Linux gaming?
There is no inherent benefit to GPL when it comes to forking. If the TuxRacer had used a BSD style license it would still be possible to fork it now and carry on with a free version. No license gets revoked when a new release comes out under new terms. That would be law working retrospectively which I believe is not permitted.
I know the pain when a promising demo gets screwed by a couple of small(ish) bugs that just shouldn't have been there in the first place and usually would take only a few hours to fix in the absence of the stress factor. I remember working for a small company developing a certain geometrical algorithm. Everything work in the test lab but the bulk of work went into the guts of the thing and the UI contained a few ridiculous bugs like having directional vectors pointing in the opposite direction. The net result was that obviously nothing worked right (GIGO law kicked in) and our customers were all rolling on the floor laughing. I don't think the managers ever really forgave us that but hell, it's their fault for scheduling unattainable deadlines.
Demo disasters hurt a lot more when you know the stuff is really almost done as opposed to when you're just showing flashing lights that don't do anything.
Check out this link. It's a good scoop on what a day of a good sysadmin looks like. The second chapter actually has an interview scenario too. Hope this helps.
Will this render all voice recordings useless as a potential court evidence? I know that courts already try to not use voice recordings as evidence but this could make any voice recordings totally inadmissable as evidence. Don't you think?
Well, it's good that we're finally (after decades of research) we get realistic sounding Text to Speech. On the other hand I can't imagine Stephen Hawking speaking in non-metallic voice. Am I weird?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry CmdrTaco but during the infamous KDE/Gnome flamefests you added way too much oil to the fire to be considered even remotely moderate on the issue of Free Software and the GPL. Don't try to make yourself look so objective and balanced when all the long toothed /. readers know exactly what your views on anything non GPLed are.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Hang on, I think I've heard this one before... Seems like c.s.s. folk are infesting slashdot these days ;).
This gets said over and over again by Java zealots. Speed is of no concern because the hardware keeps getting faster. If the hardware keeps getting faster imagine the kind of cool stuff people could do with an efficient language instead of the Java bloat. No matter how optimised the VM will always be a speed killer. M$ will keep releasing more powerful and snappier desktop apps while the java zealots will keep coding stuff that's slower and less featureful. That's how it's been for the last five years and that trend seems to remain unchanged. JBuilder and Forte suck ass compared to Visual Studio. Have a nice day.
Exactly. And pigs will fly don't you forget that one.
Nope. I have to endure JBuilder in my daily work (yes I'm a suffering java developer who couldn't get a decent C++ gig). JBuilder is NOT acceptable by any stretch of imagination. Any application that takes 40 seconds to launch on a 800MHz PIII has serious performance issues. And it's full of bugs too lest we forget.
Failed.
It would be really nice to have an open alternative to Java that is also compiled. Glancing through the spec there is lots to like there. For instance the idea of building unit tests into the language spec seems like a pretty good one to me and would help popularise unit testing among developers. Native support for unicode is nothing new but it's nice that unlike Java he still retians the ascii type for those who don't need i18n. I hope the guy pulls it off. I'd like to play with a new C++ like language. If he only reconsidered his views on templates though...
Location transparency is non-existant. I've not seen a single app that benefits from not knowing whether a service it's using is local or remote. This is bunch of overhyped crap from CORBA. If you do distributed objects you're always forced to cater for network failures so you might just as well have it explicitly stated in the code. Before you jump here, note that I'm not dissing the idea of a naming service or some other directory lookup system I'm just saying that if you're accessing a remote service you might as well be explicit about it. EJB is big, bloated and it's almost never the right approach to take. It's java specific (yes I know about RMI/IIOP but it's more pain than it's worth) it's complicated for its own good and very slow. You've been reading too many press releases from SUNW
I used to work almost exclusively with CORBA which is over-engineered but at least it made sense as we had to interface lots of legacy code. But EJBs tie you to Java exlusively so integration with the legacy stuff is no longer so simple. What good are EJBs then? Everything they offer can be accomplished through simpler and more efficient solutions.
because they've already saturated their current revenue streams?
Can you elaborate on what you have in mind when you say 'services'? I'm not contradicting myself I just don't understand how Web Services is different from a shopping cart and if it's no different then the whole hype is just that. A bunch of buzzwords to milk som PHBs for more money on $50,000/cpu app servers. I once (not long ago) interviewed at a Java shop where they told me they were building a new generaion of Web Services. I quickly found out that they were building a simple dotcom website. You know, the shopping cart, the catalogue, the lot. If you're telling me that that effort requires 60 coders and just as many architects then I'm telling you that PHP works better and costs far less money for the same result (at least from the customer's viewpoint).
Take EJB for instance. What a bloated overhyped piece of crap. There's so much bullshit from Sun about EJB when the bloody thing just plain doesn't work. Just about every project is better off with just using servlets and standard beans and their own persistence instead of relying on the slow and crappy CMP. EJB is bullshit and so is the dotNet crap and all that web services circus. It seems to me that good coders with PHP and apache knowledge seem to be able to pull a better magic than all the Javas and dotNets of this world. I'd say OpenSource is not missing the bandwagon at all unless you have a bandwagon of hype in mind.
then
adv.
At that time: I was still in school then. Come at noon; I'll be ready then. Next in time, space, or order; immediately afterward: watched the late movie and then went to bed.
In addition; moreover; besides: It costs $20, and then there's the sales tax to pay.
Used after but to qualify or balance a preceding statement: The star was nervous, but then who isn't on the first night of a new play.
In that case; accordingly: If traffic is heavy, then allow extra time.
As a consequence; therefore: The case, then, is closed.
n. That time or moment: The bus leaves at four; until then let's walk.
adj. Being so at that time: the then chairman of the board.
than
conj.
Used after a comparative adjective or adverb to introduce the second element or clause of an unequal comparison: She is a better athlete than I.
Used to introduce the second element after certain words indicating difference: He draws quite differently than she does.
When. Used especially after hardly and scarcely: I had scarcely walked in the door than the commotion started.
WHICH PART OF THE DEFINITION DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND? ONCE MORE I SEE THIS SPELLING ERROR ON SLASHDOT I'M GONNA GO FUCKING NUTS!!!!
It's not over until the fat lady sings, of course, but I think I hear her sucking air into her lungs and clearing her throat. That fat lady is going to sing soon and when she does she's going to blow some eardrums. There are very few companies that survive the chapter 11 stage. Stop deluding yourselves guys.
Loki didn't port QIII if I remember correctly. ID did it themselves.
Game Over
Maybe one day someone else will try to do the same thing but I honestly can't see what Loki could've done to prevent their fate. They had a strong team and did the best they could with the very heterogenous platform that Linux is. Is there really no future for Linux gaming?
There is no inherent benefit to GPL when it comes to forking. If the TuxRacer had used a BSD style license it would still be possible to fork it now and carry on with a free version. No license gets revoked when a new release comes out under new terms. That would be law working retrospectively which I believe is not permitted.
Demo disasters hurt a lot more when you know the stuff is really almost done as opposed to when you're just showing flashing lights that don't do anything.
Check out this link. It's a good scoop on what a day of a good sysadmin looks like. The second chapter actually has an interview scenario too. Hope this helps.
Will this render all voice recordings useless as a potential court evidence? I know that courts already try to not use voice recordings as evidence but this could make any voice recordings totally inadmissable as evidence. Don't you think?
Well, it's good that we're finally (after decades of research) we get realistic sounding Text to Speech. On the other hand I can't imagine Stephen Hawking speaking in non-metallic voice. Am I weird?
Stop surfing for pr0n and you won't see 3 or 4 popping up. It's as simple as that.
Mazda is partly owned by Ford and in direct competition with Honda. Hope this helps.