UNIX userland is IMO mostly unimportant. It's quite standard, very stable, and there exist several versions of it. If OS X offered no source for ls, I could mess with the GNU version instead.
The display server, window manager, audio manager and other userland tools are closed-source. Not all of them (Safari/WebKit, for example) but most.
Right, precisely the stuff that makes OS X be OS X, and precisely the stuff I'd be interested in looking at.
The parts that are left open are mostly unimportant as they're generic and replaceable. And I can get them in Linux anyway, where I can have a fully open system without having to put up with Apple's hardware obsession and closed parts I can't debug.
Yes. I looked at the code of several libraries, messed with the code of several utilities, and made some attempts at debugging the Linux kernel, some successful. I made contributions to several open source applications.
It's not that difficult really, even if you don't know the specifics. I figured out why there was a crash when using the GRsecurity kernel patch some years back, by looking at the kernel oops, and figuring out how the assembler dump correlated to that part of the source code, without having ever looked at the kernel before or knowing assembler. Took some thinking though. In C it's easy to make errors when dealing with data structures, and that code looks pretty much the same in the kernel and userspace. A linked list is still a linked list in the kernel.
I used git bisect to find the particular commit that made an USB device stop working.
Some days ago I figured out a deadlock in an experimental version of the Second Life viewer, but it turned out somebody got there first.
Compiling Mono from source, and reading the source for some parts of the framework helped me figure out why some things were crashing. I looked at the Npgsql source to gain a better understanding of what would happen if the server closed the connection at a specific point.
I've ocassionally looked inside the glibc source to see how some functions were implemented.
- would you know how to debug the application?
I'm proficient with C and GDB, can do C++ and C# competently too.
Worst case I can get a stack trace, get a rough idea of what may be going wrong, and send that to a mailing list.
- do you believe that you'd be able to just debug the kernel or some complicated framework, understand the coding, write a fix and be sure that it won't break all other applications because your fix breaks some other expected functionality?
To a point, yes.
Some things are complicated. I don't think I could figure out laptop suspend issues for instance, because issues there probably involve some deep understanding of ACPI and various hardware internals. But if I manage to make the kernel oops with a NULL pointer dereference, I'll probably be able to figure it out, and actually have once.
There are many problems in software that aren't caused by deep magic going wrong, but by such common things as incorrectly handling an exceptional situation that never happened to the developer writing the code, but that I happened to run into.
I agree that with colsed source, you just can't do it. But let's be honest, for most of us, we still wouldn't do it if we (technically) could because we lack the skills and the knowledge about the underlying layers of software.
But I'm not "most people", and actually can do this stuff. It happens to drive me bonkers to know that some issue that bothers me particularly could be fixed in a couple hours but remains in the vendor's bug list for months because they can't be bothered.
This comes from a software developer currently doing development support (that means fixing bugs in our applications). If something goes wrong in someone else's coding - hand the issue to them, don't touch it; chances are you'd break something you didn't understand.
But sometimes they're not working on it anymore, or consider it low priority, or don't agree that the program should do what you want at all. In such cases it's good to be able to do it yourself.
You do realize that OS X comes bundled with 100's of 'free' open source utilities/apps, right?
Do you realize that getting the apps themselves isn't the point?
I can get things like GCC and bash on Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X and so on.
The difference is in that when something goes wrong, on Linux and OpenSolaris I can debug all the way up to the kernel, while on Windows and OS X I'm stuck if the problem happens to be somewhere in the closed components of the system, and the core system is very unfriendly towards any kind of interesting customization.
The first is if the C&D gets out fast enough that people are not unable to mirror the information, especially if it is stored in a dynamic database that can't just be grabbed completely with a wget. One example of this: Say someone makes a keygen app that runs on their webserver, and people submit forms to get bogus serial numbers. A C&D would completely smash this, preventing the information from getting released. Similar if people ran other services that could be nailed by an ACTA or DMCA takedown notice.
That's until it reappears on some site hosted in China or random servers that were broken into.
The second is that the information that does escape the C&Ds gets pushed from mainstream sites to the seedy corners of the Internet. These are the same areas that have the dubious filesharing programs, the warez "search engines" and "DDL" sites [1], the "bump all Abloy locks in 2 secs, lulz" [2] text files, and other dodgy sites which tend to be more of a test of browser security than a place to find anything useful. So, unless someone is willing to spend time looking for that exact information on a hardened computer, it effectively has vanished.
So great job, you managed to keep the information from the sysadmins and other upstanding people, but it's still available in the dark corners of the net, where people with questionable motivations can still get at it.
Now for the company it's all good, but from the global point of view, things are worse than before.
Don't underestimate the power of lawyers. They have the guys with guns on their side.
I have never seen a study where they took a non-climate-changing atmosphere exactly like ours (which we don't even understand yet, since people don't seem to get that climate change occurs naturally, too) and put a few SUVs in it to test whether or not human CO2 emissions were able to affect the atmosphere...
Not everything has to be tested on the largest possible scale.
You don't need to poison a whole river to conclude that mercury is bad for fish. You can poison a small aquarium in an experimental setting, calculate the LD50, and from there calculate how much mercury will it take to kill half the fish in a given river.
Of course, the results in a real river won't be as neat as in an aquarium. It'll turn out that currents result in an uneven concentration, maybe it'll accumulate unevenly with depth and perhaps some things in the river will absorb large amounts of it lowering the overall concentration. But that still doesn't mean mercury doesn't have an effect on fish.
Same way, the effect of CO2 is known and well tested, the volume and composition of the atmosphere is also known, the main energy input into the system (the Sun) is also known, and where that energy goes after that is also known. Figuring out that with the same input, making it harder for energy to leave the planet will make things hotter isn't rocket science.
Now of course the atmosphere is big and complicated, there exist sinks and sources in various places, so changes don't necessarily have immediate or linear results. But still, in the end, there's an input and an output. If you reduce the output, stuff HAS to accumulate somewhere.
Ask?!? Actually asking a question is verboten in IT! First, you have spend meaningless hours researching the question and finding your own answers and then, after exhausting all of your options, then, and only then, can you go and ask a question.
Well, guess what the IT guy did to find out the answer to your question. He probably googled the answer, before or after you asked him. Since googling isn't exactly complicated, it's not such a terrible requirement to expect you try to figure out on your own first.
Also, there's a large set of questions that are hard to answer from memory. For instance, I don't remember how to mail merge in MS Word, yet I could still do it easily, by looking around in the menus and checking in which of them is it.
People seem to assume the IT guy just remembers the exact steps for everything, when most of the time what they know is where should they look to find an answer.
If you don't follow those steps in that order, you will get a snarky condescending answer of "What? You couldn't google it?!" or some other asinine statement. Or the fact that admitting ignorance in IT is equated with stupidity.
Well, and why couldn't you? Google and the help file exist for a reason.
The modern interpretation of "Thou shalt not kill" is "You shall not murder", where "murder" means "unlawful killing"
So if the scripture says you should kill the heathens, or stone somebody for some offense, assuming the scripture equals law, such a thing is lawful, and therefore not murder.
Taking "Thou shalt not kill" literally would imply that for instance Christianity should be an extremely pacifistic religion, when the Bible is full of killing, including animals for sacrifices and children.
I don't remember there being a Braille version. I figure the notice is for the benefit of the people who can see, so that they know they shouldn't touch things, even if there's a group people touching everything.
I imagine blind people get an organized tour with a guide.
Well the artist/parasite, is just trying to get paid from the only place that people actually pay for services.
You have no right to such a thing.
It's not about squelching the user, it's just about fairness
No, it's about UNfairness. You're talking of guaranteeing your own income through legal means, even if the entire planet decides they don't want to pay you anything.
That's what makes you a parasite -- you're talking about making it impossible for society to decide that they don't find your services worth paying for.
I mean you should just admit to yourself that you really don't want to pay for any music again, and eventually no one will make music right?
I already explained -- the only way I'm willing to pay is on a one to one payment basis: you make it, and I buy it.
Apparently in your world, if there's a group of people making swords, and people for whatever reason decide they don't want to buy them, the government should institute some sort of tax to ensure they get paid anyway, as to preserve the fine swordmaking tradition, even if nobody has an use for them anymore.
In my world, the government does no such thing, and the swordmakers go out of business or figure out something else to do, such as switching to making kitchen knives.
And come on, "admit to myself"? There's nothing to admit, I outright stated several times here that I think that if people won't pay voluntarily for your work, then you should consequently get no money. And if that makes you stop making music, then yes, you should stop making music.
You don't have to avoid the music industry like the plague or anything. You'll always have your connection, just know that any minor tariffs or taxes when it comes to media are going towards the culture of your country. It's just an effort to combat the loss of revenue from people that never pay for music. What they do pay for is the internet connectivity. You can live without paying for music- but you really can't live without the internet.
Yes, then it'll be a minor tax for the movies, and another minor tax for news, and another... no, NO WAY. I will do everything in my power to prevent such a thing from happening.
Fortunately most people can see where such things are going, and such proposals have been shot down so far. Any politician proposing such a system won't get my vote. Any ISP proposing it will see me switch to a competing one that doesn't. Any artist supporting such a measure will never, ever see a single cent from me in any shape or form.
I would argue that whatever the monthly fee of the internet, that people will pay for it. That they HAVE to pay for it. Just like Gas. So it just makes sense to get money from it.
I would argue that such a thing makes you a parasite, living on other people's money whether they want it or not. And sooner or later they'll see you as such, and decide they'll be better off without you. You're not doing yourself any favours by pretty much declaring yourself as one.
I know what you mean when you say that you don't like when money goes to an artist you don't like. However it's not about artist VS. artist, it's about the music industry as a whole. And yes, you did say you don't care about the music industry- that's fine and all, but you can't have it both ways.
Yes it is?
I don't support industries. I support products I like. Eg, I don't buy books for the sake of the "books on computer stuff" industry, I buy books from authors that write well on things I'm interested in.
The fact still remains that CD's, ipods, and internet connections are popular for music piracy, and therefore some revenue should be generated from them to make up for the lost sales. Now, CD's are used for legitimate purposes, of course. But the illegitimate uses of CDs, iPods and Internet- far far outweigh the legitimate ones.
No. If you can't manage to sell enough, that's your problem and nobody else's. Not the CD manufacturer's, not my ISP's, and certainly not mine.
If you attempt to force a compensation, I will attempt to force a compensation in the opposite direction. I don't *need* to buy music, so you can't really force me to pay, though you can annoy me enough that I refuse to pay anybody in the music industry a cent. There's plenty free (legal) music online I find perfectly acceptable. Also, I believe compensation to be inherently wrong, and whether you make money or not has nothing to do with it.
And it's only fair to provide SOME compensation to people trying to make a living out of content creation.
No. It isn't. You don't deserve any compensation. You're certainly welcome to try to sell your stuff, but you're not owed a profit, nor any compensations if people don't want to buy it. If it doesn't work you should consider earning money in some other way.
I'm completely serious when I say I value my internet access, unrestricted access to my computer and freedom in general far above music. I'll gladly do without the entire music industry if I must to avoid restrictions on my connection, and this tax nonsense.
It's not like these SOCAN cheques are huge or anything. We're talking fractions of a cent multiplied by radio station demographics. It's quite possible that radio stations that do play local music routinely can be spotted more money then huge artists- in that area. And if a starting musician gets a check for $250 a year then it might not seem like much- but the idea with royalties is they get bigger over time.
I don't see what that has to do with anything I said. I'll restate my argument in a more condensed version:
If you're a music fan, then you should not like the levy, because it forces you to spend part of your money on paying people who aren't the ones you wanted to give money to. For instance, if you're a big fan of celtic music and buy exclusively celtic music CDs, why in the world would you want to have your blank CDs support gangsta rap? It doesn't make sense. Any of your money that has to go to Eminem is money you can't give to your favourite artist.
If you don't care about music, then you shouldn't like it either, because why would you want to support it with the media you bought for your weekly backups? If you wanted to give money to a musician you'd have bought their music.
If you're an artist, you probably shouldn't like it either, unless you're on the top, because every dollar your fans pay as a tax is a dollar that gets arbitrarily distributed among popular artists, when you could be getting most of that instead. The thing is, people have a limited amount of money to spend on music. Adding a tax doesn't make people pay more, it distributes money differently. And if you're a starving artist with dedicated fans, that distribution isn't in your favor. Additionally, some people like myself get annoyed at this state of things, think "screw those assholes", and decide to spend that money on something else instead. So you end up worse off.
Now a days labels do whats called a 360 deal- which means they get a chunk of live profits and merchandise sales as well. So that live money really isn't a lot either. A two month tour in Europe could easily cost 50,000, and most artists work at a loss.
Then you signed a stupid contract, and I don't see why is that anybody's problem but yours.
What most people don't get is that these levies, the entire point is that it's a cultural thing. check out http://www.factor.ca/ to see all the bands currently getting money from the government. Most acts you've probably heard of, and they wouldn't be able to go on tour without such things as these levies.
Again, you seem not to understand my point of view. I do NOT care about those bands. I don't care about the music industry itself. I care about very specific artists I like, and couldn't care less about what happens to the rest of them. I actually do think that if a band can't make enough money it shouldn't get anything from the govenment -- it should simply go bankrupt, like any other business that can't attract enough interest.
check out http://www.factor.ca/ to see all the bands currently getting money from the government. Most acts you've probably heard of, and they wouldn't be able to go on tour without such things as these levies.
That's not a good thing. That's horrible. Why is my money paying for bands I don't care for? The government shouldn't give them any, and if that makes them unable to go on tour, they should be unable to go on tour. Period.
I repeat, there's only one thing I approve of here: You make a song, I buy it, and you get my money. That's it. You shouldn't be getting paid because I buy CDs, or ipods, or have an internet connection. You should be getting paid only when I pay for your music.
Anything else just pisses me off, and your attempts to present it as a good thing only annoy me more and turn me off buying any more music.
Why not let Ryan spend his time on it? After all he was willing to take care of it himself... he wasn't asking for other developers to maintain it. I am not arguing that people should like the feature, or support it... just that if it comes at no cost, and it adds more options and more freedom, we should let it at least move forward.
I don't think anybody was stopping him from spending time on it. He can spend all the time he wants, even if nobody else in the universe is interested.
What good is a "free" OS if features are rejected just because?
Just like Ryan is free to code whatever he likes, other developers are free to care or not about what he codes.
To me, something being good enough doesn't mean it can't improve. For example you may not want to provide a third party package server, or may not want to maintain it.
That's not really a statement of user friendliness. I made installers for Windows. I didn't really *want* to because it's boring as heck, but it has to be done, because that's how software is distributed on Windows.
In the same way I don't really enjoy packaging on Linux, but I have to, because that's how it's done there.
Being unwilling to comply with the platform's normal way of doing things isn't doing it in a friendlier manner, it's generally just being lazy or having too much of an ego. For instance, you could shoehorn a Mac style menu bar into a Windows application, but I doubt it'd get a good reception, or be able to obtain the "Designed for Windows" certification.
Or maybe you want to make the most user friendly software available in Linux (a la Apple)... some game to deliver in a CD for Kids to play by just double clicking it. Who knows? The thing is there are reasons why this might be a good option to have, even if most developers could not need it at all.
I don't get why people keep bringing this up, when the whole FatELF thing has nothing to do with this style of application deployment. Doing a Mac style install system on Linux would be a different project entirely. Mac could lose fat binaries and still have applications installed in the same way, or switch to using a package manager and keep fat binaries. Both things are really separate.
Really you can do Mac style deployment on Linux if you really want to. You just have to package the binary, data, every library it uses, and add a script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Then you can really drop a folder in a random location, click the script, and have it work.
I just feel this feature is being rejected because it's unnecessary for most tech-savy people. If we, as developers, forget to have our users in mind... we will fail in our job to deliver solutions.
On Linux, non-tech-savy people use the package manager. They don't go download tar files to random websites, because on Linux, that's the unfriendly way of doing things.
You're back to assuming yum/dpkg package installation is the end-all and be-all of linux installation.
I'm not assuming. It *is* the end-all of linux installation. You have a very specific and unusual setup, which doesn't apply to 99% of the userbase.
Using tar files with binaries under Linux is roughly equivalent to deploying software in Windows by copying files to directories by hand and running regsvr32 instead of providing an.msi. It's an ad-hoc, user unfriendly way of getting software on the system, generally reserved to advanced users and sysadmins.
At our university for example, we have the AFS network file system. I can put stuff in my network home directory and run it from a variety of lab and cluster workstations where I don't have time or permission to install a bunch of dependancies. But it's a huge pain in the butt when I sit down at a 32 bit machine and I had previously compiled some tool or library as 64 bit or whatever.
It still won't help you, because the architecture problem is not even half the issue. A binary compiled in Ubuntu will link against Ubuntu versions of libraries and may fail to work under a Red Hat that ships older version libraries.
And on OS X I just download Blender directly from the website... very easy because it contains everything I need.
As much as I appreciate the linux package system handling dependencies and installation of shared resources, whenever you're doing something *outside* of the packaging system it's a pain in the butt. *This* is where FatELF is handy.
But it won't do that. All you'll get is a binary that works on both i386 and amd64 Ubuntu Karmic. And it'll still fail to work on an older release or another distro, because nothing about FatELF involves packaging dependencies.
In any case most of the people arguing against this feature do so because they don't think it's needed. But I fail to see the disadvantages in implementing FatELF in Linux.
Thing is I fail to see any advantages either. Why spend time on something if it won't bring a benefit?
The way I see it, this is unnecessary because computing in general is getting divided in 3 rough groups:
1. Desktops. All modern hardware will run i386 code, macs included. All modern Linux distros will run 32 bit code. So if you feel a need to ship a tarred binary for some reson, ship 32 bit code, and no problem. No need to compile twice.
2. Special purpose devices. Those have special screens, small disk sizes, slow CPUs, and so on. It makes very little sense to provide a fat ELF for those, because even if OpenOffice came with a fat ELF with code that could technically work on my cell phone, it probably wouldn't work right anyway, if it managed to find enough memory to load. If the application does work fine, you're still wasting very limited resources.
3. Niche architectures like SPARC and Itanium. Nobody cares about these for "user friendliness" purposes.
Maybe you wouldn't... but FatELF would probably be targetted mostly at software for users that don't have a clue. Nothing would force software like "ls" or "man" to be compiled in a FatELF package. But I could easily see Open Office distributed like this, and it would be neat.
Why would it? Linux users install openoffice as a package. I don't really know anybody who downloads it from a website, it's just not the standard way to install things on Linux. If you're doing that, you're not a typical user, but have a special need of some sort. If you're a third party provider, you provide a third party package server.
I doubt you'll save much RAM on that. You'd be better off sticking to one architecture exclusively.
The moment you start a 32 bit app on a 64 bit system you've got to load the 32 bit version of glibc, as well as every other library the program uses. You'll probably lose more with that than you'll save with the smaller pointers.
Having two versions of everything will also take more disk space. On a 10GB limit, an extra 300MB can be quite significant.
that assumes the i386 libraries are in place, which as my original parent was just saying, isn't necessarily the case because often you can get everything purely 64-bit. (and as a side-effect of the earlier strawman, that CDs don't have room for both architectures, so only one is installed)
There's no need to assume, you make a package. If they're needed, it'll fetch them
Then no one wants to be that one 32-bit app which requires the user to install the whole set of 32-bit system libraries... especially as the whole point of a USB or net install is to avoid installing crap on every single machine you use.
This is a weak justification. It's what already happens for everything else. If you install KMail on a gnome system you're going to get lots of KDE packages pulled in. In fact pretty much any non-trivial application will have quite a few dependencies. For instance, for me to install blender right now would take downloading 7 other packages. I don't really see anything wrong with that.
And besides, who wants to have to maintain a shell script and two+ executables for every application? It doesn't scale well. FatELF would be a straightforward solution to some real issues, I'm disappointed people couldn't give constructive criticism instead of getting hung up on a single use case (native installation) where's it's not *really* needed. I'm sure FatELF won't make you coffee either, doesn't mean it isn't helpful in other areas. (non-"installed" software)
No, it won't be. Because you can't just check "build for all 8 architectures" and leave it at that. You need to make your code portable, which involves endianess and alignment issues for a start. That's what will take the real work, the shell script is a tiny thing in comparison.
Don't forget one of the problems I've complained about Linux for ages, only to get told "researching your ass off" is actually a better "feature"...Driver Cds. Maybe if you had fat binaries it would finally give Linux a stable ABI and we would finally see a "fat penguin" on the box of devices at the local Walmart/Best Buy/Staples and retailers like me could finally carry your product.
No, it wouldn't.
The userspace ABI is stable. But that's not where drivers are. Drivers are in kernel space, and the stability or lack of it would remain unchanged by this development.
As it is shopping for Linux devices at retail is a fricking nightmare, as by the time anything ends up on some approved list somewhere it usually isn't sold in stores anymore, or Deity help you if the approved device has firmware A and they have moved on to firmware G without changing the box (which of course they do all the time) as you can enjoy your new paperweight. It is just too damned hard to sell Linux when your customers are Joe Normals that shop at Walmrt. with Windows all I have to do is tell them to look for the logo and my after sale device support costs drop to zero.
I have right now: a nice color laser printer, a very decent scanner, and an old webscam by brother can no longer use but that I can, because he upgraded to XP64, which comes with no drivers for any of those. Meanwhile, Linux supports all that perfectly fine.
In fact my brother bought a new scanner that looks near identical to the old one. As far as I can tell any improvements if they exist at all are insignificant.
So, Windows has a stable driver ABI, why doesn't all that stuff work? Because it works so much better for the manufacturer to make you buy a new product instead.
For instance, suppose this patch goes in. But you won't get an i386/amd64/ARM binary from me, because I don't have an ARM system, so I won't compile for something I can't test. Some architectures have things like alignment requirements. Not all code will work everywhere even if a binary for the platform can be produced. Different byteorder will require writing code that will correctly read data files on all platforms.
And why would you want code for 8 different architectures on a low power device that has a much more limited amount of space than a desktop?
There are places this would be very useful to have. Anytime we're distributing binaries to users, hosting binaries on a network file share, or carrying portable media, it's a big pain in the butt to maintain completely separate architecture trees. In some cases it wastes a lot of space too if there's significant data files along with the executables, because we generally wind up replicating that in each arch install tree.
If your architectures are i386 and amd64 then you can just ship i386 and not bother with this at all.
If you're shipping something like Linux PPC or Sparc binaries, you're very, very unusual. You could also ship a shell script that runs the right binary, which may not be as cool, but should work just as well.
Except this seems to be the only place that doesn't acknowledge the usefulness of fat binaries.
Well, please explain what would the usefulness be.
Especially when the two architectures most people care about is i386 and amd64, and the former works perfectly fine on the later.
Windows has had them since DOS, although no one uses them.
That would seem to point to that the idea wasn't really useful in that case
OS X has them
But it went through a considerable architecture shift from one CPU to another that was incompatible. It isn't the case with amd64, you can ship an i386 binary and it'll work.
Then... once you have them and use them for a while you come back and say 'hey, thats a really good idea'.
Well, please explain, what benefit do you see coming out from this?
People who are anti-closed source need to just go hide in a cave somewhere and talk about when the revolution is going to come. There will be a place for closed source and open source, side by side for the foreseeable feature. Trying to deny that is only hurting yourself.
All distributions I know of ship 32 bit libraries. The developer can just ship an i386 binary, and it'll work. So what does this improve?
Things get rejected from the kernel all the time -- because not all things are good, useful, well coded, or solve a problem that needs solving. It's not new in any way.
This in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. Especially since on a 64 bit distro pretty much everything, with very few exceptions is 64 bit. In fact I don't think 64 bit distributions contain any 32 bit software except for closed source that can't be ported, and compatibility libraries for any applications the user would like to install manually. So to me there doesn't seem to be a point to try to solve a problem that exists less and less as the time passes and proprietary vendors make 64 bit versions of their programs.
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel, not as of 2006 or so
UNIX userland is IMO mostly unimportant. It's quite standard, very stable, and there exist several versions of it. If OS X offered no source for ls, I could mess with the GNU version instead.
Right, precisely the stuff that makes OS X be OS X, and precisely the stuff I'd be interested in looking at.
The parts that are left open are mostly unimportant as they're generic and replaceable. And I can get them in Linux anyway, where I can have a fully open system without having to put up with Apple's hardware obsession and closed parts I can't debug.
Different Vadim.
Ok
Yes. I looked at the code of several libraries, messed with the code of several utilities, and made some attempts at debugging the Linux kernel, some successful. I made contributions to several open source applications.
It's not that difficult really, even if you don't know the specifics. I figured out why there was a crash when using the GRsecurity kernel patch some years back, by looking at the kernel oops, and figuring out how the assembler dump correlated to that part of the source code, without having ever looked at the kernel before or knowing assembler. Took some thinking though. In C it's easy to make errors when dealing with data structures, and that code looks pretty much the same in the kernel and userspace. A linked list is still a linked list in the kernel.
I used git bisect to find the particular commit that made an USB device stop working.
Some days ago I figured out a deadlock in an experimental version of the Second Life viewer, but it turned out somebody got there first.
Compiling Mono from source, and reading the source for some parts of the framework helped me figure out why some things were crashing. I looked at the Npgsql source to gain a better understanding of what would happen if the server closed the connection at a specific point.
I've ocassionally looked inside the glibc source to see how some functions were implemented.
I'm proficient with C and GDB, can do C++ and C# competently too.
Worst case I can get a stack trace, get a rough idea of what may be going wrong, and send that to a mailing list.
To a point, yes.
Some things are complicated. I don't think I could figure out laptop suspend issues for instance, because issues there probably involve some deep understanding of ACPI and various hardware internals. But if I manage to make the kernel oops with a NULL pointer dereference, I'll probably be able to figure it out, and actually have once.
There are many problems in software that aren't caused by deep magic going wrong, but by such common things as incorrectly handling an exceptional situation that never happened to the developer writing the code, but that I happened to run into.
But I'm not "most people", and actually can do this stuff. It happens to drive me bonkers to know that some issue that bothers me particularly could be fixed in a couple hours but remains in the vendor's bug list for months because they can't be bothered.
But sometimes they're not working on it anymore, or consider it low priority, or don't agree that the program should do what you want at all. In such cases it's good to be able to do it yourself.
Do you realize that getting the apps themselves isn't the point?
I can get things like GCC and bash on Linux, Windows, Solaris, OS X and so on.
The difference is in that when something goes wrong, on Linux and OpenSolaris I can debug all the way up to the kernel, while on Windows and OS X I'm stuck if the problem happens to be somewhere in the closed components of the system, and the core system is very unfriendly towards any kind of interesting customization.
That's until it reappears on some site hosted in China or random servers that were broken into.
So great job, you managed to keep the information from the sysadmins and other upstanding people, but it's still available in the dark corners of the net, where people with questionable motivations can still get at it.
Now for the company it's all good, but from the global point of view, things are worse than before.
Yep, that worked really well with the AACS key.
Not everything has to be tested on the largest possible scale.
You don't need to poison a whole river to conclude that mercury is bad for fish. You can poison a small aquarium in an experimental setting, calculate the LD50, and from there calculate how much mercury will it take to kill half the fish in a given river.
Of course, the results in a real river won't be as neat as in an aquarium. It'll turn out that currents result in an uneven concentration, maybe it'll accumulate unevenly with depth and perhaps some things in the river will absorb large amounts of it lowering the overall concentration. But that still doesn't mean mercury doesn't have an effect on fish.
Same way, the effect of CO2 is known and well tested, the volume and composition of the atmosphere is also known, the main energy input into the system (the Sun) is also known, and where that energy goes after that is also known. Figuring out that with the same input, making it harder for energy to leave the planet will make things hotter isn't rocket science.
Now of course the atmosphere is big and complicated, there exist sinks and sources in various places, so changes don't necessarily have immediate or linear results. But still, in the end, there's an input and an output. If you reduce the output, stuff HAS to accumulate somewhere.
Well, guess what the IT guy did to find out the answer to your question. He probably googled the answer, before or after you asked him. Since googling isn't exactly complicated, it's not such a terrible requirement to expect you try to figure out on your own first.
Also, there's a large set of questions that are hard to answer from memory. For instance, I don't remember how to mail merge in MS Word, yet I could still do it easily, by looking around in the menus and checking in which of them is it.
People seem to assume the IT guy just remembers the exact steps for everything, when most of the time what they know is where should they look to find an answer.
Well, and why couldn't you? Google and the help file exist for a reason.
The modern interpretation of "Thou shalt not kill" is "You shall not murder", where "murder" means "unlawful killing"
So if the scripture says you should kill the heathens, or stone somebody for some offense, assuming the scripture equals law, such a thing is lawful, and therefore not murder.
Taking "Thou shalt not kill" literally would imply that for instance Christianity should be an extremely pacifistic religion, when the Bible is full of killing, including animals for sacrifices and children.
I don't remember there being a Braille version. I figure the notice is for the benefit of the people who can see, so that they know they shouldn't touch things, even if there's a group people touching everything.
I imagine blind people get an organized tour with a guide.
In the British Museum, there's a notice saying something along the lines of "Do not touch these exhibits, unless you're on the blind tour"
You have no right to such a thing.
No, it's about UNfairness. You're talking of guaranteeing your own income through legal means, even if the entire planet decides they don't want to pay you anything.
That's what makes you a parasite -- you're talking about making it impossible for society to decide that they don't find your services worth paying for.
I already explained -- the only way I'm willing to pay is on a one to one payment basis: you make it, and I buy it.
Apparently in your world, if there's a group of people making swords, and people for whatever reason decide they don't want to buy them, the government should institute some sort of tax to ensure they get paid anyway, as to preserve the fine swordmaking tradition, even if nobody has an use for them anymore.
In my world, the government does no such thing, and the swordmakers go out of business or figure out something else to do, such as switching to making kitchen knives.
And come on, "admit to myself"? There's nothing to admit, I outright stated several times here that I think that if people won't pay voluntarily for your work, then you should consequently get no money. And if that makes you stop making music, then yes, you should stop making music.
Yes, then it'll be a minor tax for the movies, and another minor tax for news, and another... no, NO WAY. I will do everything in my power to prevent such a thing from happening.
Fortunately most people can see where such things are going, and such proposals have been shot down so far. Any politician proposing such a system won't get my vote. Any ISP proposing it will see me switch to a competing one that doesn't. Any artist supporting such a measure will never, ever see a single cent from me in any shape or form.
I would argue that such a thing makes you a parasite, living on other people's money whether they want it or not. And sooner or later they'll see you as such, and decide they'll be better off without you. You're not doing yourself any favours by pretty much declaring yourself as one.
Yes it is?
I don't support industries. I support products I like. Eg, I don't buy books for the sake of the "books on computer stuff" industry, I buy books from authors that write well on things I'm interested in.
No. If you can't manage to sell enough, that's your problem and nobody else's. Not the CD manufacturer's, not my ISP's, and certainly not mine.
If you attempt to force a compensation, I will attempt to force a compensation in the opposite direction. I don't *need* to buy music, so you can't really force me to pay, though you can annoy me enough that I refuse to pay anybody in the music industry a cent. There's plenty free (legal) music online I find perfectly acceptable. Also, I believe compensation to be inherently wrong, and whether you make money or not has nothing to do with it.
No. It isn't. You don't deserve any compensation. You're certainly welcome to try to sell your stuff, but you're not owed a profit, nor any compensations if people don't want to buy it. If it doesn't work you should consider earning money in some other way.
I'm completely serious when I say I value my internet access, unrestricted access to my computer and freedom in general far above music. I'll gladly do without the entire music industry if I must to avoid restrictions on my connection, and this tax nonsense.
I don't see what that has to do with anything I said. I'll restate my argument in a more condensed version:
If you're a music fan, then you should not like the levy, because it forces you to spend part of your money on paying people who aren't the ones you wanted to give money to. For instance, if you're a big fan of celtic music and buy exclusively celtic music CDs, why in the world would you want to have your blank CDs support gangsta rap? It doesn't make sense. Any of your money that has to go to Eminem is money you can't give to your favourite artist.
If you don't care about music, then you shouldn't like it either, because why would you want to support it with the media you bought for your weekly backups? If you wanted to give money to a musician you'd have bought their music.
If you're an artist, you probably shouldn't like it either, unless you're on the top, because every dollar your fans pay as a tax is a dollar that gets arbitrarily distributed among popular artists, when you could be getting most of that instead. The thing is, people have a limited amount of money to spend on music. Adding a tax doesn't make people pay more, it distributes money differently. And if you're a starving artist with dedicated fans, that distribution isn't in your favor. Additionally, some people like myself get annoyed at this state of things, think "screw those assholes", and decide to spend that money on something else instead. So you end up worse off.
Then you signed a stupid contract, and I don't see why is that anybody's problem but yours.
Again, you seem not to understand my point of view. I do NOT care about those bands. I don't care about the music industry itself. I care about very specific artists I like, and couldn't care less about what happens to the rest of them. I actually do think that if a band can't make enough money it shouldn't get anything from the govenment -- it should simply go bankrupt, like any other business that can't attract enough interest.
That's not a good thing. That's horrible. Why is my money paying for bands I don't care for? The government shouldn't give them any, and if that makes them unable to go on tour, they should be unable to go on tour. Period.
I repeat, there's only one thing I approve of here: You make a song, I buy it, and you get my money. That's it. You shouldn't be getting paid because I buy CDs, or ipods, or have an internet connection. You should be getting paid only when I pay for your music.
Anything else just pisses me off, and your attempts to present it as a good thing only annoy me more and turn me off buying any more music.
I don't think anybody was stopping him from spending time on it. He can spend all the time he wants, even if nobody else in the universe is interested.
Just like Ryan is free to code whatever he likes, other developers are free to care or not about what he codes.
That's not really a statement of user friendliness. I made installers for Windows. I didn't really *want* to because it's boring as heck, but it has to be done, because that's how software is distributed on Windows.
In the same way I don't really enjoy packaging on Linux, but I have to, because that's how it's done there.
Being unwilling to comply with the platform's normal way of doing things isn't doing it in a friendlier manner, it's generally just being lazy or having too much of an ego. For instance, you could shoehorn a Mac style menu bar into a Windows application, but I doubt it'd get a good reception, or be able to obtain the "Designed for Windows" certification.
I don't get why people keep bringing this up, when the whole FatELF thing has nothing to do with this style of application deployment. Doing a Mac style install system on Linux would be a different project entirely. Mac could lose fat binaries and still have applications installed in the same way, or switch to using a package manager and keep fat binaries. Both things are really separate.
Really you can do Mac style deployment on Linux if you really want to. You just have to package the binary, data, every library it uses, and add a script that sets LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Then you can really drop a folder in a random location, click the script, and have it work.
On Linux, non-tech-savy people use the package manager. They don't go download tar files to random websites, because on Linux, that's the unfriendly way of doing things.
I'm not assuming. It *is* the end-all of linux installation. You have a very specific and unusual setup, which doesn't apply to 99% of the userbase.
Using tar files with binaries under Linux is roughly equivalent to deploying software in Windows by copying files to directories by hand and running regsvr32 instead of providing an .msi. It's an ad-hoc, user unfriendly way of getting software on the system, generally reserved to advanced users and sysadmins.
It still won't help you, because the architecture problem is not even half the issue. A binary compiled in Ubuntu will link against Ubuntu versions of libraries and may fail to work under a Red Hat that ships older version libraries.
But it won't do that. All you'll get is a binary that works on both i386 and amd64 Ubuntu Karmic. And it'll still fail to work on an older release or another distro, because nothing about FatELF involves packaging dependencies.
Thing is I fail to see any advantages either. Why spend time on something if it won't bring a benefit?
The way I see it, this is unnecessary because computing in general is getting divided in 3 rough groups:
1. Desktops. All modern hardware will run i386 code, macs included. All modern Linux distros will run 32 bit code. So if you feel a need to ship a tarred binary for some reson, ship 32 bit code, and no problem. No need to compile twice.
2. Special purpose devices. Those have special screens, small disk sizes, slow CPUs, and so on. It makes very little sense to provide a fat ELF for those, because even if OpenOffice came with a fat ELF with code that could technically work on my cell phone, it probably wouldn't work right anyway, if it managed to find enough memory to load. If the application does work fine, you're still wasting very limited resources.
3. Niche architectures like SPARC and Itanium. Nobody cares about these for "user friendliness" purposes.
Why would it? Linux users install openoffice as a package. I don't really know anybody who downloads it from a website, it's just not the standard way to install things on Linux. If you're doing that, you're not a typical user, but have a special need of some sort. If you're a third party provider, you provide a third party package server.
I doubt you'll save much RAM on that. You'd be better off sticking to one architecture exclusively.
The moment you start a 32 bit app on a 64 bit system you've got to load the 32 bit version of glibc, as well as every other library the program uses. You'll probably lose more with that than you'll save with the smaller pointers.
Having two versions of everything will also take more disk space. On a 10GB limit, an extra 300MB can be quite significant.
Well, 64 bit mode lets you do things like mmapping large files. Such as DVD images for instance. I happen to think that's a pretty good thing to have.
There's no need to assume, you make a package. If they're needed, it'll fetch them
This is a weak justification. It's what already happens for everything else. If you install KMail on a gnome system you're going to get lots of KDE packages pulled in. In fact pretty much any non-trivial application will have quite a few dependencies. For instance, for me to install blender right now would take downloading 7 other packages. I don't really see anything wrong with that.
No, it won't be. Because you can't just check "build for all 8 architectures" and leave it at that. You need to make your code portable, which involves endianess and alignment issues for a start. That's what will take the real work, the shell script is a tiny thing in comparison.
No, it wouldn't.
The userspace ABI is stable. But that's not where drivers are. Drivers are in kernel space, and the stability or lack of it would remain unchanged by this development.
I have right now: a nice color laser printer, a very decent scanner, and an old webscam by brother can no longer use but that I can, because he upgraded to XP64, which comes with no drivers for any of those. Meanwhile, Linux supports all that perfectly fine.
In fact my brother bought a new scanner that looks near identical to the old one. As far as I can tell any improvements if they exist at all are insignificant.
So, Windows has a stable driver ABI, why doesn't all that stuff work? Because it works so much better for the manufacturer to make you buy a new product instead.
Ok, but what do you expect to come out of this?
For instance, suppose this patch goes in. But you won't get an i386/amd64/ARM binary from me, because I don't have an ARM system, so I won't compile for something I can't test. Some architectures have things like alignment requirements. Not all code will work everywhere even if a binary for the platform can be produced. Different byteorder will require writing code that will correctly read data files on all platforms.
And why would you want code for 8 different architectures on a low power device that has a much more limited amount of space than a desktop?
If your architectures are i386 and amd64 then you can just ship i386 and not bother with this at all.
If you're shipping something like Linux PPC or Sparc binaries, you're very, very unusual. You could also ship a shell script that runs the right binary, which may not be as cool, but should work just as well.
Well, please explain what would the usefulness be.
Especially when the two architectures most people care about is i386 and amd64, and the former works perfectly fine on the later.
That would seem to point to that the idea wasn't really useful in that case
But it went through a considerable architecture shift from one CPU to another that was incompatible. It isn't the case with amd64, you can ship an i386 binary and it'll work.
Well, please explain, what benefit do you see coming out from this?
All distributions I know of ship 32 bit libraries. The developer can just ship an i386 binary, and it'll work. So what does this improve?
I don't get the point in bringing it up.
Things get rejected from the kernel all the time -- because not all things are good, useful, well coded, or solve a problem that needs solving. It's not new in any way.
This in particular seems like a solution in search of a problem to me. Especially since on a 64 bit distro pretty much everything, with very few exceptions is 64 bit. In fact I don't think 64 bit distributions contain any 32 bit software except for closed source that can't be ported, and compatibility libraries for any applications the user would like to install manually. So to me there doesn't seem to be a point to try to solve a problem that exists less and less as the time passes and proprietary vendors make 64 bit versions of their programs.