I didn't see a lot of actual quotes in this article, and most of them were from Big Names. Were a lot of these Slashdot quotes simply paraphrased? Also, does the Slashdot team have a list of the people Jane's claims were quoted, or is there indeed such a list?
Antibiotics are prescribed to patients who won't complete the cycle, breeding hardier germs. Anyone remember the TB upswing? And now, to push their products, dishsoap, "fresh" scent sprays, ever children's toys are being made antibacterial, which has the same effect, only moreso.
Antibiotics and antibacterials are two separate things. Antibiotics are drugs that specifically target bacteria inside an animal (usually human) body. They have limited strength, because really strong stuff would start killing off to many cells of the host animal. This simply makes more room for the resistant bacteria to flourish over their weaker cousins. Antibiotics are pretty much bacterium snipers: they worry more about avoiding friendly fire (killing host cells) than killing more targets.
Antibacterials (usually in soaps and cleaning products) don't have this "friendly fire" problem, so they act more like carpet bombing than sniping. Antibacterials are used in environments where everything is supposed to be dead. We can wash our hands in it only because the outer layer of skin is supposed to be dead; we can gargle it in mouthwash only because the limited exposure only kills some of the cells in there (ever notice it hurts after a while?). Antibacterials overkill because they can, and kill bacteria pretty much regardless of their "hardiness". Weak men and strong both fear the bomb; weak germs and strong both fear Lysol. are to antibiotics what carpetfission bombs are to buckshot. These are applied outside the body and overkill bacteria. There is no such thing as an antibacterial-resistant bacterium. The assumption behind using antibacterials is that it can and should kill every living thing it touches. Since the outer layer of our skin is dead cells, we can even wash our hands in this stuff.
The next and ultimate step would be- COMPUTING ACTIVATED THOUGHT (computer directly influencing our minds, bypassing such silly biological interfaces as eyes, ears..)
I don't know about you, but I still like knowing where my brain ends and other sources of thought begin. What you describe above sounds a bit like the ultimate two-way subliminal.
I saw two arguments in the page you sent. The first is information overload. I refute that by noting that you would put a throttle on the input line specifically for that purpose.
I know that the human brain needs an input throttle, and that our sensory organs are specifically built to provide that throttle. Indeed, I have a broken throttle: I lack the ability to separate signal from noise audibly, and as a result background noise makes people talking to me sound like Teen Spirit.
Indeed, part of the beauty of an implant would be to provide a technological throttle to input from a technological device. We humans aren't built to read a dozen analog gauges or read text in a half dozen "floating windows", or for that matter to transfer scratches of graphite on paper into Really Deep Thoughts.
Regarding the invasiveness of the procedure, I can say little. "Getting a neural implant" sounds cool; "invasive neurosurgery" sounds less so.
There is one other problem with neural implants people rarely think of. Right when you decide to plunk down the money and let a neurosurgeon drill into your skull, Microsoft Implant 2.0 will come out.
If you think upgrading your computer's OS is nasty, consider upgrading your head. And if you don't, you won't be compatible with all those new devices you got an implant to connect to...
IANAL, but I remember some copyright law. IIRC, parody is "fair use" of copyrighted materials so long as no more copyrighted material is used than is needed for recognition.
This rule of thumb is what allows someone to make Spaceballs (an obvious rip-off of Star Wars, but not to (say) re-do the soundtrack of Star Wars to change all the lines to make it raunchy. The latter would still be parody, but would be too much use of original material.
But putting Rick Moranis in a black suit with a big helmet that makes heavy breathing sounds is entirely, and legally, appropriate parody.
I've never thought much of most computer magazines - they have too much stake in promoting the products of their advertisers to be believable.
And what makes Slashdot any different? I have a banner ad for an SGI server right over this. And you get ads from VA Linux, Linux Care, O'Reilly, yada yada yada...
I once worked on a similar project: we were using Linux as an el-cheapo terminal on a turnkey, don't-give-the-customer-root-and-they-won't-hurt-t hemselves solution. We never completed the project (another set of stories), but we decided that we would ship the CD with every copy.
Why? Upgrades.
If you upgrade the Linux you ship, you have to have another copy of the source available. Everybody has to be able to access their source code. Doing this on a Web site can be annoying and expensive. By shipping the CD, you don't have to keep holding onto the code yourself. Most other solutions require you to keep a copy of today's Linux fifty years down the line.
If you really don't want to give everybody a disk, remember to version your Linux and other open code. Hand the customer a notice saying "This contains FredCo Open Source Distribution v1.0. Please contact FredCo at 800-555-5555 to purchase a source distribution of this software at a nominal fee, plus shipping and handling". Then, just have a couple of master disks (never just one) of FredCo OSD v1.0, and have a CD-burner around to copy these for customers. Upgrade your software? Cut a new set of master CDs, and rev the version number.
This may be cheaper in terms of materials, but you still have to have some business process in place for handling source requests.
Given the (again, IMHO bogus) premise that "children become what they play", a nation of aviators and people who can think quickly under stress sounds like a lot more fun place to live than a nation of people trained in house-clearing tactics:-)
If we're talking about military vehicle sims (tank sims, fighter sims, even mecha sims like Battletech), these neither teach the instincts nor the tactics of today's violent behavior.
The violence in an F-15 sim is inherently different than the violence in a first-person shooter. If you imagine yourself as the fighter pilot, you can imagine yourself killing other planes and pilots--but not with a rifle. The sorts of "power fantasies" such a sim may provide are impossible to carry out without millions of dollars of illegal-to-civilian equipment.
I can fantasize all day about sending an air-to-air missile up somebody's afterburner, but I can't actually do that unless I can actually get my hands on both an air-to-air missile and an aircraft with hardpoints, "painting" radar, etc... Believe it or not, I can't just pick one of these up at a gun show.
The situations that you enter in a military vehicle sim are not situations you can enter as a civilian. If you are a certified computer-trained tank-killer, you are still not going to ever get a chance to kill a tank unless you are either:
A:) In the military, or
B:) In a town that is getting invaded.
In either situation, the tank-killing instincts you have gotten are assets rather than liabilities.
By contrast, the typical FPS situation is shooting people in a building or wilderness. All you need are people, buildings or wilderness, and a firearm. The first two are run into every day; the third is easily acquired, compared to an M-1 Abrams. The fantasy of the FPS is much closer to the reality of a player.
People who play games on their computers are wasting time + resources (storage & cpu cycles) = money. If you aren't interested enough in computers to be doing something useful with them, then get outside, read a book, or earn a buck raking someone's lawn. Make it your point in life to use every ounce of your energy to help people out, and if after five years you hate yourself for it, I'll send you $100.
Egad!
I agree with the direction you are going. I disagree as to how far you are going in that direction.
Part of the Human Condition is the need to kick back once in a while in order to be able to do your best for the rest of the day. Computer games are a valid way to do that. This is not to say that playing them all day is a good idea; IMHO, that is indeed a waste of one's time. None of us are getting any younger. Believe it or not, part of the Human Condition is that you do need to kick back once in a while.
Load average is defined as the number of processes sitting on the run queue. This need not indicate a disk IO bottleneck.
Indeed, a high load average indicates that there is no I/O bottleneck, and a low load average may indicate an I/O bottleneck.
The run queue holds only those processes that the kernel thinks can constructively use CPU cycles. Once a process asks the kernel to access an I/O device, the kernel decides whether the device is currently available. If not, the process gets kicked off the run queue until the device becomes available again.
Thus, if you have a lot of processes hitting the same device, an I/O bottleneck would actually drop the load, as there are fewer processes able to use the processor.
I believe that the desktop development forking is causing pain today, but will improve Linux in the long run.
I would not even call the multiple desktop problem a true "forking" issue, since I don't think that the desktops started from a common source.
In the short term, you have a host of competing desktops, all trying to be The One True Desktop. However, since it is more professional pride/ego than dollars motivating development, the competition is more likely to be a footrace than a demolition derby. That is, I don't expect the GNOME and KDE guys to put any work into keeping the other from working well.
What will happen? Binary Darwinism. The poor interfaces will die out, and their good features and good developers will be at least partly absorbed by the better ones. Eventually, there will be either One True Desktop, or Several True Desktops that the user can choose from.
The Open Source community can afford to "burn" effort making multiple attempts to solve the same problem; indeed, I think that we can't affort not to. The diversified desktops of today will show us what a good desktop would be like, and the myriad will merge back to one or several.
IMHO, the biggest legal issue with the GPL is that the user does not necessarily agree with the licensing terms: that is, they didn't actually sign anything.
The irony is, if a commercial shop uses this to break out of the GPL, the same legal precedent can be used to break all shrinkwrap licenses.
What I would suggest is investigating SSL. Remember that the encryption algorithm is not the protocol, but a part of it. PGP, for instance, can use either RSA or Diffie-Hellman public keys and anything from IDEA to Bass-o-Matic (I kid you not!) for a symmetric key. Ad described above, the symmetric key is encrypted using the public key, and the message is encrypted with the symmetric key.
Currently, it seems that SSL and RSA are tied together--you can't talk SSL unless you talk RSA. I would take SSL, gut out the algorithms (gut out RSA, and see if the symmetric algorithm is copyrighted), and replace the algorithms.
You can get a pseudo-free implementation of SSL out of an Australian team (the RSA patent is void there). They are called SSLeay. If you can't find one, you can find the SSL spec and write to it.
Then, go to GnuPG, a GPL'd version of PGP that only uses Diffie-Hellman to avoid the RSA patent. Snag the crypto algorithms out of GnuPG, glue them into the SSL server/client, and you have your own free variant SSL. You won't be able to talk to regular SSL (expecting RSA), but you can make your own free standard.
The scary part is, I now live in a world where I use CTRL-ALT-DELETE on my Windows machine to log in, and CTRL-ALT-DELETE on my Linux machine to reboot it.
The second thing is that Microsoft is quite a large company. If it wants to outperform Linux then all it needs to do is install Linux, tune it to its limits and then analyze its performance and find out weak points. Then it makes the same thing with NT. After that it just puts hundred well paint workers to make NT faster than Linux. This is made easier by the fact that if Linux works faster than NT they can just look at sources and figure out what Linux is doing better than NT. Also, it is possible that Microsoft would look at the weak points in Linux and would publish only those benchmarks where Linux performs significantly worser than NT. Anybody who does those same benchmarks would get similar results and the original benchmarks would be considered objective.
And thus, Linux uses Microsoft's own strengths against it. Re-read the above: Microsoft is the largest, most useful QA department that Linux has.
What is the purpose of a QA department if it isn't to shake your system until it fractures and tell you where the fault lines lie? Microsoft will likely do this better to Linux than they will to NT itself. And we need pay them nothing but attention.
Sure, they will publish these results in the worst possible light. But for Linux, competence trumps hype. Linux cannot be FUDded out of existence unless each and every Linux developer can be FUDded into dropping the platform--no ivory-tower business types can decide that Linux is a money loser and kill it.
Every time Microsoft finds a test scenario that Linux is poor at, or breaks Linux, we see another fault line. If we decide that Linux should be fixed (the answer will often be 'no'--see below), we know exactly what part of the OS needs to be riveted together stronger.
Now, why would we not want to fix something? There are a pair of traps that Linux could fall into. The first is to fall into the trap of letting Microsoft dictate our development. If we react to Microsoft every time on useless side issues, we keep developers away from what is most useful. If we consistantly fix Microsoft's latest find as a top priority, MS can run us ragged--bad idea.
The second trap is to worry about exclusive flaws, or trade-offs. Face it, Linux will not be all things to all people, unless Linux itself fragments a bit. Here is an example: You can make a filesystem much more reliable versus power failure if you remove kernel-level buffering. The kernel-level buffering is a big speed boost however: you can save files at solid-state speed, rather than waiting for platters to spin. In most cases, we accept the trade-off of speed over reilability.
We could get hit with complaints about how badly the filesystem gets hit after someone flicks the Big Red Switch, and "fix" the filesystem to be unbuffered. Then Microsoft could complain about how slow the filesystem was. We'd keep making U-turns. Sometimes, you have to stand your ground and note that you don't do so well here so that you can do better over there. And you have to be willing to say, "If you want , you know where to find it.
1. Given $5K, $10K or $20K to spend on a _single_ general purpose server machine, inclusive of OS and any serving technology, what's the best of class? Linux should win here by definition: cheap OS = big box, expensive OS = littler box.
Heck, for the sake of fairness, spot them the OS, so that both teams have the same hardware budget.
One of the problems with the original Mindcraft test was that the hardware was specifically NT-friendly and Linux-hostile. IIRC, they found a RAID controller that had a sucky Linux driver on it. Face it, a good NT box is not always a good Linux box, and vice-versa.
BTW, the above would still not put Linux on top. If this test is like the original, here are some reasons that NT beat Linux:
1: Linux hit the disk slower because it had a lame driver.
2: Linux has some SMP issues.
3: Linux has a singlethreaded TCP stack, while NT seems to have a multithreaded TCP stack. This gives NT a natural advantage, as it could split its writes across all four ethernet cards.
4: Besides pitting NT against Linux, the test pits IIS against Apache. IIS simply outperforms Apache on serving static web pages: I bet you could test both servers on equivalent NT boxen and find that out.
Microsoft found some places where NT outperforms Linux, and exploited them. No, not Mindcraft; they were specifically hired by Microsoft to do this test.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that Linux developers will make Linux so good that Microsoft will not be able to do this again. You can always find some way, some pathological case, that one machine outperforms another, and can thus make a benchmark that shows that platform A outperforms platform B. A properly rigged Commodore 64 can outperform Solaris, NT, and/or Linux on a benchmark, assuming that the C-64 advocate can choose the benchmark. I know that, were I in that position, the benchmark would start from the power off condition (Commodore wipes the floor with all of the above when it comes to boot time).
In this case, the pathological test case was a set of systems serving static pages very quickly. Let me define "very quickly"--on their slowest case, Linux on one CPU--the machine was pumping enough bytes to clog multiple T-1 lines. Who serves that much static traffic over a LAN? Who serves that much static traffic over a T-3?
Microsoft and Mindcraft pointed out some technical deficiencies with Linux and Apache, and I thank them for it. They chose to do so with a pathological test case, and thus put the truth to "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
That is, once you step into the realm of 4 processor machines, testing NT vs. Linux is just silly, because who in their right mind would use either one for such hardware? It's like saying that my Cessna is a better stealth fighter than your Piper Cub, and ignoring the F-111 because "we're not competing in that market."
Exqueeze me?
What would your preferred OS for quad-Intel hardware be? Or, more to the point, if you need quad-Intel performance, what would your preferred OS/hardware platform be (other options include Alpha, SPARC, etc.).
IMHO, a quad-processor Intel box running Linux is a serious alternative to SPARC for a lot of purposes. My company just bought some dual-CPU Intel/Linux machines (expandable to 4 CPU) as Oracle servers, where we would normally buy a Sun server for the job.
Go to VA Linux, where we bought these machines. They are turning a profit (what a concept!) selling multiprocessor Linux/Intel boxes, going head to head with Solaris/SPARC.
Whether Linux qualifies as a "heavy duty OS" depends on what your definition of a "heavy duty OS" is. Remember, to some people, all Unix is light duty, and mainframes are heavy duty. If, however, Unix is considered heavy duty, Linux competes well in that workstation/server range. There are some places where a commercial Unix does better (posts better numbers, has better features, etc.), and other places with Linux can beat a commercial Unix on the same grounds.
If you are looking at quad Intel machines, you are talking about the five-digit price range--somewhere from $10,000 to $100,000. There are a lot of serious contenders in this space--and most of them are running Unix. There may be some heavier duty contenders, but I don't see anything that is far and away better than Intel/Linux for general purpose computing. Neither is Intel/Linux far and away better than everybody else: Linux is running in that pack with the big Unix dogs.
Linux is not a Piper cub. If you want to use the warplane analogy, I would think of it more as an F-18. It isn't a heavily specialized craft (like the Stealth Fighter), it isn't very heavy duty (like those IBM B-52s out there); it is a small, tight unit that flies with the best of them, and has advantages and disadvantages compared to its class (top-caliber fighter craft).
And NT? The F-4 Phantom. The gun used to ship separately, and it is living proof that, with a big enough engine, even a rock can fly.
Actually HAL was somewhat able to function correctly. The ability to have AI in an operating system would be a very significant advance.
I disagree. The last thing you want in an OS is an AI. You may want one running on an OS as an application--or even as a sysadmin.
The OS is a layer (or set of layers) that sits below your applications, where your applications are the things that actually do your work for you.
An AI, especially of HAL's caliber, is the highest level of computing we can imagine. Computers perform mental activities, and because we are humans, we cannot conceive of any higher-level mental activity than human thought. We can postulate that such higher levels exist, but we couldn't adequately describe them.
So if the AI is part of the OS, what the hell is it running? Gods?
I think who it's -not- ready for is non-geeks who want to do a lot of advanced stuff.
Nothing is ready for non-experts who want to do a lot of advanced stuff. This is pretty much the definition of "experts": "Those who can do advanced stuff". And what is a geek, other than an expert computer user?
Unless you are an expert driver, can you do a bootlegger reverse? No. Unless you are an expert pianist, can you rip through "The flight of the Bumblebees"? No. Unless you are an expert accountant, can you do your company's taxes? No.
Unless you are a geek, can you do advanced stuff with a computer? No.
Linux is not ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. No OS is ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. No OS will ever be ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. As systems get easier to use, the definition of "advanced stuff" will change to match.
Of course, neither does Unix. IIRC, the Jargon File describes the etymology was "a bad joke on Multix", so it is fitting that Linux is a bad joke on Unix.
Remember that computers can have multiple names! Thus, you can use multiple schemes. One scheme which seems to work is:
1: Every functional machine type (firewall, app server, DB server, communication server, personal) gets a theme. If you are feeling cute enough, the themes are related (like mammals/fish/insects/birds). In most places, machines don't change functional groups often: once a machine is installed as a database server, it will never serve as anything but a database server.
2: Every machine gets a name based on its group theme. This is the canonical name of the box.
3: If those in power want to use machine-understandable names, make them the canonical names. Then take theme names and bind them to the machine-understandable names, so that HP102x is always, say, Everest, no matter what else happens to the machine. The theme name will likely become the canonical name in everyday speech.
4: Machines get functional names based on their current function. The second mail server gets the name mail_2 or somesuch. This is a secondary name. If the box gets reassigned as a Web server, it gets renamed www_2 or somesuch.
4a: Personal machines (desktops, laptops, Palm Pilots, Dreamcasts...) get a functional name based on their primary user (usually username). If people get multiple computers, they get prefixes or suffixes. Thus, I could have a Linux machine named l_remande, and an NT machine called n_remande. Resist the temptation to make the username name the canonical name; the machine has to get renamed when its primary user leaves your operation, and that often happens more often than computers obsolescing.
The username name is more important than it sounds. People will forget the canonical names of each others' machines (because you never use them), but need to know them to fix them. If I am told that Mary's machine has a problem, I don't have to guess whether I have to log into "mako" or "bluefin", I just log into "mary".
5: When setting up a resource farm (where people can access one of many machines), make sure that all the names are easy to remember and easy to type. At WPI, there was a lab full of DECStations that all answered to things from Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. Most of the load was on "yaya"; little of it went onto boxes like "planet_10" or "bigboote". The problem was that lazy users saved keystrokes with "telnet yaya", and you don't risk misspelling "bigboote". Elsewhere on campus, it was worse: a math lab had machines named after mathemeticians. Everybody logged onto "godel" and "newton"; I don't even remember the names of the other boxen.
6: Side note: in-jokes work. In the aforementioned Banzai lab, one of the DECStations was still down as the students arrived. By the time it was repaired and booted, it got the name "realsoon". One user at another site had three computers, and the theme was artificial intelligence: he had "huey", "dewey", and "louie" (from Silent Running, not Disney).
7:Good themes share some common attributes. They should have a large, if not infinite, range of names (name them after states, and you can only run fifty machines). The theme should either be extremely obvious (like many nature themes), or be easy to gain context on. Buckaroo Banzai isn't too bad, as you can rent the video: cult movie characters are worse, as you would have to rent a lot of movies to get the joke. People's names are bad: names strange enough not to conflict with the user base are often too strange to remember or type.
These are all internal naming conventions. External names should be different.
At a former job, we set up an SCO Xenix build server. In the true spirit of short names for lazy typing, we named the machine xb, for Xenix Build. Everything promptly broke.
We couldn't figure out what happened for a while, until someone typed the command:
telnet xb
And got back something to the effect of:
telnet: cannot connect to 0.0.0.11
Telnet had read xb, not as a machine name, but as a hexidecimal IP address!
It quickly became xblb (Xenix Build Lab), solving the problem.
If B&N wanted to post such a "bogus software patent" defense, they could well put up a defense fund for this and ask for assistance.
Since there are a lot of companies out there with a vested interest in the death of BSPs, some of them might want to express that interest financially, to save themselves lawsuits in the long run.
It's the ultimate perversion: Open Source Legalism.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't see a lot of actual quotes in this article, and most of them were from Big Names. Were a lot of these Slashdot quotes simply paraphrased? Also, does the Slashdot team have a list of the people Jane's claims were quoted, or is there indeed such a list?
Antibiotics and antibacterials are two separate things. Antibiotics are drugs that specifically target bacteria inside an animal (usually human) body. They have limited strength, because really strong stuff would start killing off to many cells of the host animal. This simply makes more room for the resistant bacteria to flourish over their weaker cousins. Antibiotics are pretty much bacterium snipers: they worry more about avoiding friendly fire (killing host cells) than killing more targets.
Antibacterials (usually in soaps and cleaning products) don't have this "friendly fire" problem, so they act more like carpet bombing than sniping. Antibacterials are used in environments where everything is supposed to be dead. We can wash our hands in it only because the outer layer of skin is supposed to be dead; we can gargle it in mouthwash only because the limited exposure only kills some of the cells in there (ever notice it hurts after a while?). Antibacterials overkill because they can, and kill bacteria pretty much regardless of their "hardiness". Weak men and strong both fear the bomb; weak germs and strong both fear Lysol. are to antibiotics what carpetfission bombs are to buckshot. These are applied outside the body and overkill bacteria. There is no such thing as an antibacterial-resistant bacterium. The assumption behind using antibacterials is that it can and should kill every living thing it touches. Since the outer layer of our skin is dead cells, we can even wash our hands in this stuff.
I don't know about you, but I still like knowing where my brain ends and other sources of thought begin. What you describe above sounds a bit like the ultimate two-way subliminal.
I know that the human brain needs an input throttle, and that our sensory organs are specifically built to provide that throttle. Indeed, I have a broken throttle: I lack the ability to separate signal from noise audibly, and as a result background noise makes people talking to me sound like Teen Spirit.
Indeed, part of the beauty of an implant would be to provide a technological throttle to input from a technological device. We humans aren't built to read a dozen analog gauges or read text in a half dozen "floating windows", or for that matter to transfer scratches of graphite on paper into Really Deep Thoughts.
Regarding the invasiveness of the procedure, I can say little. "Getting a neural implant" sounds cool; "invasive neurosurgery" sounds less so.
There is one other problem with neural implants people rarely think of. Right when you decide to plunk down the money and let a neurosurgeon drill into your skull, Microsoft Implant 2.0 will come out.
If you think upgrading your computer's OS is nasty, consider upgrading your head. And if you don't, you won't be compatible with all those new devices you got an implant to connect to...
"Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust. Don't pull it out, or it will rust"
--Highlander 2: The Sickening (There should have been only one)
This rule of thumb is what allows someone to make Spaceballs (an obvious rip-off of Star Wars, but not to (say) re-do the soundtrack of Star Wars to change all the lines to make it raunchy. The latter would still be parody, but would be too much use of original material.
But putting Rick Moranis in a black suit with a big helmet that makes heavy breathing sounds is entirely, and legally, appropriate parody.
And what makes Slashdot any different? I have a banner ad for an SGI server right over this. And you get ads from VA Linux, Linux Care, O'Reilly, yada yada yada...
Why? Upgrades.
If you upgrade the Linux you ship, you have to have another copy of the source available. Everybody has to be able to access their source code. Doing this on a Web site can be annoying and expensive. By shipping the CD, you don't have to keep holding onto the code yourself. Most other solutions require you to keep a copy of today's Linux fifty years down the line.
If you really don't want to give everybody a disk, remember to version your Linux and other open code. Hand the customer a notice saying "This contains FredCo Open Source Distribution v1.0. Please contact FredCo at 800-555-5555 to purchase a source distribution of this software at a nominal fee, plus shipping and handling". Then, just have a couple of master disks (never just one) of FredCo OSD v1.0, and have a CD-burner around to copy these for customers. Upgrade your software? Cut a new set of master CDs, and rev the version number.
This may be cheaper in terms of materials, but you still have to have some business process in place for handling source requests.
If we're talking about military vehicle sims (tank sims, fighter sims, even mecha sims like Battletech), these neither teach the instincts nor the tactics of today's violent behavior.
The violence in an F-15 sim is inherently different than the violence in a first-person shooter. If you imagine yourself as the fighter pilot, you can imagine yourself killing other planes and pilots--but not with a rifle. The sorts of "power fantasies" such a sim may provide are impossible to carry out without millions of dollars of illegal-to-civilian equipment.
I can fantasize all day about sending an air-to-air missile up somebody's afterburner, but I can't actually do that unless I can actually get my hands on both an air-to-air missile and an aircraft with hardpoints, "painting" radar, etc... Believe it or not, I can't just pick one of these up at a gun show.
The situations that you enter in a military vehicle sim are not situations you can enter as a civilian. If you are a certified computer-trained tank-killer, you are still not going to ever get a chance to kill a tank unless you are either:
A:) In the military, or
B:) In a town that is getting invaded.
In either situation, the tank-killing instincts you have gotten are assets rather than liabilities.
By contrast, the typical FPS situation is shooting people in a building or wilderness. All you need are people, buildings or wilderness, and a firearm. The first two are run into every day; the third is easily acquired, compared to an M-1 Abrams. The fantasy of the FPS is much closer to the reality of a player.
Egad!
I agree with the direction you are going. I disagree as to how far you are going in that direction.
Part of the Human Condition is the need to kick back once in a while in order to be able to do your best for the rest of the day. Computer games are a valid way to do that. This is not to say that playing them all day is a good idea; IMHO, that is indeed a waste of one's time. None of us are getting any younger. Believe it or not, part of the Human Condition is that you do need to kick back once in a while.
Indeed, a high load average indicates that there is no I/O bottleneck, and a low load average may indicate an I/O bottleneck.
The run queue holds only those processes that the kernel thinks can constructively use CPU cycles. Once a process asks the kernel to access an I/O device, the kernel decides whether the device is currently available. If not, the process gets kicked off the run queue until the device becomes available again.
Thus, if you have a lot of processes hitting the same device, an I/O bottleneck would actually drop the load, as there are fewer processes able to use the processor.
I would not even call the multiple desktop problem a true "forking" issue, since I don't think that the desktops started from a common source.
In the short term, you have a host of competing desktops, all trying to be The One True Desktop. However, since it is more professional pride/ego than dollars motivating development, the competition is more likely to be a footrace than a demolition derby. That is, I don't expect the GNOME and KDE guys to put any work into keeping the other from working well.
What will happen? Binary Darwinism. The poor interfaces will die out, and their good features and good developers will be at least partly absorbed by the better ones. Eventually, there will be either One True Desktop, or Several True Desktops that the user can choose from.
The Open Source community can afford to "burn" effort making multiple attempts to solve the same problem; indeed, I think that we can't affort not to. The diversified desktops of today will show us what a good desktop would be like, and the myriad will merge back to one or several.
The irony is, if a commercial shop uses this to break out of the GPL, the same legal precedent can be used to break all shrinkwrap licenses.
Currently, it seems that SSL and RSA are tied together--you can't talk SSL unless you talk RSA. I would take SSL, gut out the algorithms (gut out RSA, and see if the symmetric algorithm is copyrighted), and replace the algorithms.
You can get a pseudo-free implementation of SSL out of an Australian team (the RSA patent is void there). They are called SSLeay. If you can't find one, you can find the SSL spec and write to it.
Then, go to GnuPG, a GPL'd version of PGP that only uses Diffie-Hellman to avoid the RSA patent. Snag the crypto algorithms out of GnuPG, glue them into the SSL server/client, and you have your own free variant SSL. You won't be able to talk to regular SSL (expecting RSA), but you can make your own free standard.
The scary part is, I now live in a world where I use CTRL-ALT-DELETE on my Windows machine to log in, and CTRL-ALT-DELETE on my Linux machine to reboot it.
And thus, Linux uses Microsoft's own strengths against it. Re-read the above: Microsoft is the largest, most useful QA department that Linux has.
What is the purpose of a QA department if it isn't to shake your system until it fractures and tell you where the fault lines lie? Microsoft will likely do this better to Linux than they will to NT itself. And we need pay them nothing but attention.
Sure, they will publish these results in the worst possible light. But for Linux, competence trumps hype. Linux cannot be FUDded out of existence unless each and every Linux developer can be FUDded into dropping the platform--no ivory-tower business types can decide that Linux is a money loser and kill it.
Every time Microsoft finds a test scenario that Linux is poor at, or breaks Linux, we see another fault line. If we decide that Linux should be fixed (the answer will often be 'no'--see below), we know exactly what part of the OS needs to be riveted together stronger.
Now, why would we not want to fix something? There are a pair of traps that Linux could fall into. The first is to fall into the trap of letting Microsoft dictate our development. If we react to Microsoft every time on useless side issues, we keep developers away from what is most useful. If we consistantly fix Microsoft's latest find as a top priority, MS can run us ragged--bad idea.
The second trap is to worry about exclusive flaws, or trade-offs. Face it, Linux will not be all things to all people, unless Linux itself fragments a bit. Here is an example: You can make a filesystem much more reliable versus power failure if you remove kernel-level buffering. The kernel-level buffering is a big speed boost however: you can save files at solid-state speed, rather than waiting for platters to spin. In most cases, we accept the trade-off of speed over reilability.
We could get hit with complaints about how badly the filesystem gets hit after someone flicks the Big Red Switch, and "fix" the filesystem to be unbuffered. Then Microsoft could complain about how slow the filesystem was. We'd keep making U-turns. Sometimes, you have to stand your ground and note that you don't do so well here so that you can do better over there. And you have to be willing to say, "If you want , you know where to find it.
Heck, for the sake of fairness, spot them the OS, so that both teams have the same hardware budget.
One of the problems with the original Mindcraft test was that the hardware was specifically NT-friendly and Linux-hostile. IIRC, they found a RAID controller that had a sucky Linux driver on it. Face it, a good NT box is not always a good Linux box, and vice-versa.
BTW, the above would still not put Linux on top. If this test is like the original, here are some reasons that NT beat Linux:
1: Linux hit the disk slower because it had a lame driver.
2: Linux has some SMP issues.
3: Linux has a singlethreaded TCP stack, while NT seems to have a multithreaded TCP stack. This gives NT a natural advantage, as it could split its writes across all four ethernet cards.
4: Besides pitting NT against Linux, the test pits IIS against Apache. IIS simply outperforms Apache on serving static web pages: I bet you could test both servers on equivalent NT boxen and find that out.
Microsoft found some places where NT outperforms Linux, and exploited them. No, not Mindcraft; they were specifically hired by Microsoft to do this test.
Do not fool yourself into thinking that Linux developers will make Linux so good that Microsoft will not be able to do this again. You can always find some way, some pathological case, that one machine outperforms another, and can thus make a benchmark that shows that platform A outperforms platform B. A properly rigged Commodore 64 can outperform Solaris, NT, and/or Linux on a benchmark, assuming that the C-64 advocate can choose the benchmark. I know that, were I in that position, the benchmark would start from the power off condition (Commodore wipes the floor with all of the above when it comes to boot time).
In this case, the pathological test case was a set of systems serving static pages very quickly. Let me define "very quickly"--on their slowest case, Linux on one CPU--the machine was pumping enough bytes to clog multiple T-1 lines. Who serves that much static traffic over a LAN? Who serves that much static traffic over a T-3?
Microsoft and Mindcraft pointed out some technical deficiencies with Linux and Apache, and I thank them for it. They chose to do so with a pathological test case, and thus put the truth to "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Exqueeze me?
What would your preferred OS for quad-Intel hardware be? Or, more to the point, if you need quad-Intel performance, what would your preferred OS/hardware platform be (other options include Alpha, SPARC, etc.).
IMHO, a quad-processor Intel box running Linux is a serious alternative to SPARC for a lot of purposes. My company just bought some dual-CPU Intel/Linux machines (expandable to 4 CPU) as Oracle servers, where we would normally buy a Sun server for the job.
Go to VA Linux, where we bought these machines. They are turning a profit (what a concept!) selling multiprocessor Linux/Intel boxes, going head to head with Solaris/SPARC.
Whether Linux qualifies as a "heavy duty OS" depends on what your definition of a "heavy duty OS" is. Remember, to some people, all Unix is light duty, and mainframes are heavy duty. If, however, Unix is considered heavy duty, Linux competes well in that workstation/server range. There are some places where a commercial Unix does better (posts better numbers, has better features, etc.), and other places with Linux can beat a commercial Unix on the same grounds.
If you are looking at quad Intel machines, you are talking about the five-digit price range--somewhere from $10,000 to $100,000. There are a lot of serious contenders in this space--and most of them are running Unix. There may be some heavier duty contenders, but I don't see anything that is far and away better than Intel/Linux for general purpose computing. Neither is Intel/Linux far and away better than everybody else: Linux is running in that pack with the big Unix dogs.
Linux is not a Piper cub. If you want to use the warplane analogy, I would think of it more as an F-18. It isn't a heavily specialized craft (like the Stealth Fighter), it isn't very heavy duty (like those IBM B-52s out there); it is a small, tight unit that flies with the best of them, and has advantages and disadvantages compared to its class (top-caliber fighter craft).
And NT? The F-4 Phantom. The gun used to ship separately, and it is living proof that, with a big enough engine, even a rock can fly.
I disagree. The last thing you want in an OS is an AI. You may want one running on an OS as an application--or even as a sysadmin.
The OS is a layer (or set of layers) that sits below your applications, where your applications are the things that actually do your work for you.
An AI, especially of HAL's caliber, is the highest level of computing we can imagine. Computers perform mental activities, and because we are humans, we cannot conceive of any higher-level mental activity than human thought. We can postulate that such higher levels exist, but we couldn't adequately describe them.
So if the AI is part of the OS, what the hell is it running? Gods?
Nothing is ready for non-experts who want to do a lot of advanced stuff. This is pretty much the definition of "experts": "Those who can do advanced stuff". And what is a geek, other than an expert computer user?
Unless you are an expert driver, can you do a bootlegger reverse? No. Unless you are an expert pianist, can you rip through "The flight of the Bumblebees"? No. Unless you are an expert accountant, can you do your company's taxes? No.
Unless you are a geek, can you do advanced stuff with a computer? No.
Linux is not ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. No OS is ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. No OS will ever be ready for non-geeks who want to do advanced stuff. As systems get easier to use, the definition of "advanced stuff" will change to match.
Methinks we need a twelve-step program...
Who says it has to make sense?
1: Every functional machine type (firewall, app server, DB server, communication server, personal) gets a theme. If you are feeling cute enough, the themes are related (like mammals/fish/insects/birds). In most places, machines don't change functional groups often: once a machine is installed as a database server, it will never serve as anything but a database server.
2: Every machine gets a name based on its group theme. This is the canonical name of the box.
3: If those in power want to use machine-understandable names, make them the canonical names. Then take theme names and bind them to the machine-understandable names, so that HP102x is always, say, Everest, no matter what else happens to the machine. The theme name will likely become the canonical name in everyday speech.
4: Machines get functional names based on their current function. The second mail server gets the name mail_2 or somesuch. This is a secondary name. If the box gets reassigned as a Web server, it gets renamed www_2 or somesuch.
4a: Personal machines (desktops, laptops, Palm Pilots, Dreamcasts...) get a functional name based on their primary user (usually username). If people get multiple computers, they get prefixes or suffixes. Thus, I could have a Linux machine named l_remande, and an NT machine called n_remande. Resist the temptation to make the username name the canonical name; the machine has to get renamed when its primary user leaves your operation, and that often happens more often than computers obsolescing.
The username name is more important than it sounds. People will forget the canonical names of each others' machines (because you never use them), but need to know them to fix them. If I am told that Mary's machine has a problem, I don't have to guess whether I have to log into "mako" or "bluefin", I just log into "mary".
5: When setting up a resource farm (where people can access one of many machines), make sure that all the names are easy to remember and easy to type. At WPI, there was a lab full of DECStations that all answered to things from Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. Most of the load was on "yaya"; little of it went onto boxes like "planet_10" or "bigboote". The problem was that lazy users saved keystrokes with "telnet yaya", and you don't risk misspelling "bigboote". Elsewhere on campus, it was worse: a math lab had machines named after mathemeticians. Everybody logged onto "godel" and "newton"; I don't even remember the names of the other boxen.
6: Side note: in-jokes work. In the aforementioned Banzai lab, one of the DECStations was still down as the students arrived. By the time it was repaired and booted, it got the name "realsoon". One user at another site had three computers, and the theme was artificial intelligence: he had "huey", "dewey", and "louie" (from Silent Running, not Disney).
7:Good themes share some common attributes. They should have a large, if not infinite, range of names (name them after states, and you can only run fifty machines). The theme should either be extremely obvious (like many nature themes), or be easy to gain context on. Buckaroo Banzai isn't too bad, as you can rent the video: cult movie characters are worse, as you would have to rent a lot of movies to get the joke. People's names are bad: names strange enough not to conflict with the user base are often too strange to remember or type.
These are all internal naming conventions. External names should be different.
We couldn't figure out what happened for a while, until someone typed the command:
telnet xb
And got back something to the effect of:
telnet: cannot connect to 0.0.0.11
Telnet had read xb, not as a machine name, but as a hexidecimal IP address!
It quickly became xblb (Xenix Build Lab), solving the problem.
Since there are a lot of companies out there with a vested interest in the death of BSPs, some of them might want to express that interest financially, to save themselves lawsuits in the long run.
It's the ultimate perversion: Open Source Legalism.