I'm no Microsoft fan, but I rather watch them beat a stupid patent than see anyone stuck with such a stupid verdict. At least this establishes recent precedent for judges overturning lunacy.
Yeah, I know we all hoped it would be the straw that broke the camel's back and Microsoft would say, "wow, this is idiocy and we need to see the light!" This wouldn't have been that straw. This straw would've left them saying, "wow, I'm glad we can afford it! Too bad for our poorer competitors who can't!"
I have one. It's great for novels. I've read ten sci-fi novels on it so far.
If you bought it at the reduced price of $299.99 and the novels were free, then you've paid an average of $30 a novel for the sake of dealing with the cumbersome, slow joystick thingy.
OS X is not set up or friendly to any kind of power user.
Go to any technical convention and count notebooks. I think you'll find that a majority of hardcore geeks disagree with you.
Odd you should bring this up as OS X decides that the entire world outside your user profile doesn't exist. Granted there are no warning when you try to access it via the GUI, in fact there is no accessing the file system using the GUI.
WTF are you on about? Open the Finder. Click the topmost icon in the left column - that's your local hard drive. Now explore as you see fit.
I'm typing this on Ubuntu - I usually pick Linux+KDE when given the choice of desktops - but have been around Macs enough to know that you've never actually touched one.
Yes, but then those of us who want a shell get... the freaking MS-DOS Command Prompt. Quite possibly the worst shell interface known to mankind.
Ugh. Sometimes a coworker will drop by and ask me a question most easily answered by running a shell command. I hit the hotkey to pop up Zsh and type something in. They ask if that's like the DOS prompt. I don't say (but want to) that it is, in the same way that a Yugo is like a Ferrari.
Snicker. I love FreeBSD and run it on all the servers I administer, but the Linux compatibility stuff pretty much ends at usermode. Good luck firing up VMWare or anything else that requires an un-ported kernel module! In practice, every program I personally want to run on FreeBSD is available as a native binary or in ports, with the exception of programs that require kernel mods, in which case they won't work at all anyway.
Writing fast / optimized code doesn't mean writing hard to read code, it just means writing the best code.
That's just darling! For some reason, I picture you writing an MD5 library that keeps a hash table of inputs to their computed outputs so that you won't have to recalculate them. That'd be fast! And optimized!
Image file formats and HTML pages are not Turing complete
Hey, ultranova! I'd like you to meet my friend, PostScript.
Consequently, the former are "safe" in that it's possible to prove that a particular implementation is free of exploits that would allow running arbitrary code,
Mr. Hofstadter has the most interesting record player...
I know what you mean on a non-literal level, but you have some interesting definitions of "safe" and "prove" that don't match well with computer science.
Every operating system can be further optimized. What's being tested here are the 'Default Settings' as proposed by the installer directly off the Installation Disk.
Until recently, those default settings for FreeBSD slowed it way down in the interest of collecting extra debugging data. That's no longer the case as pointed out by a couple of ACs above (and I hadn't updated to the most recent prerelease version to notice yet).
Are those options enabled out of the box as a standard new-to-the-platform sysadmin would install and configure a firewall, Apache Webserver, or fileserver? If so...
They are if a standard new-to-the-platform sysadmin installs pre-release testing versions.
Look, we aren't all fulltime sysadmins -- some of us work for small shops and wear many hats, and do the best we can.
So install the normal release versions that don't have these quirks.:-)
I'll admit, if there's "advanced configuration options" (recompiling your kernel counts as advanced--especially since in the BSDs I've seen that will cost you *all* user support)
So you've only seen OpenBSD? I've never heard of that being a problem on the FreeBSD or NetBSD mailing lists. Now, people will want to see your kernel configuration file if you've changed stuff and are having problems, but it's sort of expected that you'll want to build your own kernel at some point and no one thinks much of it.
I which I'd seen this before I posted my last comment:
FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 BenchmarksFreeBSD performed awful in comparison to Ubuntu when doing random writes, where the latencies were extremely high and off the charts compared to Mark Shuttleworth's operating system.
How "awful" for FreeBSD and good for the OS that Mark wrote. My grammar and clarity aren't always perfect, but hey, I don't get paid to write this stuff.:-)
NOTE TO PEOPLE WHO THINK THAT FreeBSD 8.x IS SLOW:
FreeBSD 8.x has many debugging features turned on, in
both the kernel and userland. These features attempt to detect
incorrect use of system primitives, and encourage loud failure
through extra sanity checking and fail stop semantics. They
also substantially impact system performance. If you want to
do performance measurement, benchmarking, and optimization,
you'll want to turn them off. This includes various WITNESS-
related kernel options, INVARIANTS, malloc debugging flags
in userland, and various verbose features in the kernel. Many
developers choose to disable these features on build machines
to maximize performance. (To disable malloc debugging, run
ln -s aj/etc/malloc.conf.)
Since the article didn't mention anything about disabling all the debugging options, I'll consider this an invalid benchmark until shown otherwise.
I haven't run the numbers for anywhere in Europe but Canada's government, in terms of budget per capita, is considerably smaller than that of the US even though we have universal health care and are frequently held up as the "socialist" bogeyman to Americans.
What are the odds of America allowing anyone to invade Canada unchallenged? What are the odds that your government realizes this and allocates military spending appropriately? You're welcome.
Now, if everyones' insurance companies gave discounts for safe eating, like car companies do for safe driving, maybe you'd start to see a change.
My company started a wellness program earlier this year that does exactly that. Our insurance premiums were going up, and my boss decided to offset them by rewarding healthy behavior. We get something like $20/month for not using tobacco, and they cover the costs of programs to quit smoking. We get another $20 for having an appropriate body mass index or body fat measurement; a consultant measures both values and you only have to meet at least one of those standards. The awesome part is that they also count it if you don't currently meet the goal but are closer to it than you were at the last quarterly measurement. I still have a few pounds to shed, but I'm making progress so I still get the money.
My boss is taking the long-term position that healthier employees will translate into lower premiums, and is directly paying us to become healthier. As a result, almost every single employee is participating in some way or another.
First of all, I don't think "What do I care" is anything but flamebaiting. Who cares if you don't care?
I didn't say that I didn't (or wouldn't) care, but was asking why I should care. I thought I was fairly clearly about that. The story basically boiled down to "some group you've never heard of is falsifying data that you may or may not be interested in, but I didn't want to bother to explain any of this and would rather make every single reader figure it all out for themselves".
There you go: the company is mad about being uncovered and is doing the next step any stupid assholes do when their misdeeds come to light: sue in a vain attempt to keep the information from becoming well known. Therefore, -everyone- should know they're faking the results. I'm tempted to e-mail all their clients with a link to the article. If they go out of buisiness, maybe other shitty companies will finally realize you don't sue people who expose you as charlatans.
First, I don't have a dog is this hunt. I don't know who the accuser or target of accusation is, and certainly don't have opinions about either of them.
Playing devil's advocate, what if the accuser really was slandering the target? It's evident that you believe the accusation and want to get vigilante justice against them. In that case, what should they do? Keep quiet and leave the slander unanswered, or take out full-page ads to claim their innocence, or what?
But again, the story didn't get into any of that. It just said that a few people who aren't well-known here on Slashdot are throwing accusations and threats back and forth. If it were Linus accusing SCO of fibbing, then OK, I have the background and context to evaluate that information. I'd suspect the same hypothetical story in "CEO Magazine" would at least tell who the main actors are.
Pretend I know nothing about Pollster (which happens to be true). Why should I care whether they've faked results? By that, I mean: do they research options of favorite flavors of cotton candy, or public support for health care reform, or the best style of car, or...? In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
Except that it isn't. Sure, it starts, runs for a few seconds, and then exits due to typing error.
Except that you're full of shit and this tired old troll needs to die.
I've never seen a type error in production. In development? Sure, just as I've accidentally tried to pass a char instead of a *char when programming C until the compiler complained and I fixed it. But never once in a live environment, ever, in programs I've written or gotten from someone else, have I ever seen a type error in a duck-typed program. I know this is a popular Slashdot meme among the inexperienced ("WHAT IF I GIVE AN INT INSTEAD OF A FILE READER HAR HAR HAR!") but it just doesn't jibe with reality.
Seriously, find another hypothetically possible but never seen in the real world problem to harp on. This one's expired.
Yes... because Microsoft makes piles of money off of Internet Explorer.
In the low billions of dollars, at least. I know plenty of corporate types who are locked into Windows solely because of internal web apps that are hardcoded against IE6 or older. Unsurprisingly, IT doesn't want to pay for a beefier desktop machine for them to run their OS of choice plus a licensed copy of Windows in a VM just so they can access a certain site plus having to support twice the software for each person using such a system.
I'm happy to believe that IE8 actually has a good security model.
And I thought that included sandboxing plugins? How can any plugin be a serious security threat with MS went through such pains to make IE bulletproof?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no Microsoft fan, but I rather watch them beat a stupid patent than see anyone stuck with such a stupid verdict. At least this establishes recent precedent for judges overturning lunacy.
Yeah, I know we all hoped it would be the straw that broke the camel's back and Microsoft would say, "wow, this is idiocy and we need to see the light!" This wouldn't have been that straw. This straw would've left them saying, "wow, I'm glad we can afford it! Too bad for our poorer competitors who can't!"
shift-apple-G, /tmp, enter. Also works in all file dialogs.
I have one. It's great for novels. I've read ten sci-fi novels on it so far.
If you bought it at the reduced price of $299.99 and the novels were free, then you've paid an average of $30 a novel for the sake of dealing with the cumbersome, slow joystick thingy.
OS X is not set up or friendly to any kind of power user.
Go to any technical convention and count notebooks. I think you'll find that a majority of hardcore geeks disagree with you.
Odd you should bring this up as OS X decides that the entire world outside your user profile doesn't exist. Granted there are no warning when you try to access it via the GUI, in fact there is no accessing the file system using the GUI.
WTF are you on about? Open the Finder. Click the topmost icon in the left column - that's your local hard drive. Now explore as you see fit.
I'm typing this on Ubuntu - I usually pick Linux+KDE when given the choice of desktops - but have been around Macs enough to know that you've never actually touched one.
Yes, but then those of us who want a shell get... the freaking MS-DOS Command Prompt. Quite possibly the worst shell interface known to mankind.
Ugh. Sometimes a coworker will drop by and ask me a question most easily answered by running a shell command. I hit the hotkey to pop up Zsh and type something in. They ask if that's like the DOS prompt. I don't say (but want to) that it is, in the same way that a Yugo is like a Ferrari.
"Except in Nebraska!"
Crap. I wish they'd saved that restriction until now so I could avoid this latest iteration.
The current ones are grey. Trust me: you wouldn't be missing anything.
freebsd is 100% binary compatible with linux.
Snicker. I love FreeBSD and run it on all the servers I administer, but the Linux compatibility stuff pretty much ends at usermode. Good luck firing up VMWare or anything else that requires an un-ported kernel module! In practice, every program I personally want to run on FreeBSD is available as a native binary or in ports, with the exception of programs that require kernel mods, in which case they won't work at all anyway.
Writing fast / optimized code doesn't mean writing hard to read code, it just means writing the best code.
That's just darling! For some reason, I picture you writing an MD5 library that keeps a hash table of inputs to their computed outputs so that you won't have to recalculate them. That'd be fast! And optimized!
Image file formats and HTML pages are not Turing complete
Hey, ultranova! I'd like you to meet my friend, PostScript.
Consequently, the former are "safe" in that it's possible to prove that a particular implementation is free of exploits that would allow running arbitrary code,
Mr. Hofstadter has the most interesting record player...
I know what you mean on a non-literal level, but you have some interesting definitions of "safe" and "prove" that don't match well with computer science.
When I built / designed my final year project in College my software was built for Speed!, there's literally nothing else that can get as important.
I bet your coworkers just love seeing a big commit with your name on it coming down from version control.
Dude, we don't talk about Fight Club!
Every operating system can be further optimized. What's being tested here are the 'Default Settings' as proposed by the installer directly off the Installation Disk.
Until recently, those default settings for FreeBSD slowed it way down in the interest of collecting extra debugging data. That's no longer the case as pointed out by a couple of ACs above (and I hadn't updated to the most recent prerelease version to notice yet).
Are those options enabled out of the box as a standard new-to-the-platform sysadmin would install and configure a firewall, Apache Webserver, or fileserver? If so...
They are if a standard new-to-the-platform sysadmin installs pre-release testing versions.
Look, we aren't all fulltime sysadmins -- some of us work for small shops and wear many hats, and do the best we can.
So install the normal release versions that don't have these quirks. :-)
I'll admit, if there's "advanced configuration options" (recompiling your kernel counts as advanced--especially since in the BSDs I've seen that will cost you *all* user support)
So you've only seen OpenBSD? I've never heard of that being a problem on the FreeBSD or NetBSD mailing lists. Now, people will want to see your kernel configuration file if you've changed stuff and are having problems, but it's sort of expected that you'll want to build your own kernel at some point and no one thinks much of it.
I which I'd seen this before I posted my last comment:
How "awful" for FreeBSD and good for the OS that Mark wrote. My grammar and clarity aren't always perfect, but hey, I don't get paid to write this stuff. :-)
From the update notes in /usr/src/UPDATING:
Since the article didn't mention anything about disabling all the debugging options, I'll consider this an invalid benchmark until shown otherwise.
I haven't run the numbers for anywhere in Europe but Canada's government, in terms of budget per capita, is considerably smaller than that of the US even though we have universal health care and are frequently held up as the "socialist" bogeyman to Americans.
What are the odds of America allowing anyone to invade Canada unchallenged? What are the odds that your government realizes this and allocates military spending appropriately? You're welcome.
Now, if everyones' insurance companies gave discounts for safe eating, like car companies do for safe driving, maybe you'd start to see a change.
My company started a wellness program earlier this year that does exactly that. Our insurance premiums were going up, and my boss decided to offset them by rewarding healthy behavior. We get something like $20/month for not using tobacco, and they cover the costs of programs to quit smoking. We get another $20 for having an appropriate body mass index or body fat measurement; a consultant measures both values and you only have to meet at least one of those standards. The awesome part is that they also count it if you don't currently meet the goal but are closer to it than you were at the last quarterly measurement. I still have a few pounds to shed, but I'm making progress so I still get the money.
My boss is taking the long-term position that healthier employees will translate into lower premiums, and is directly paying us to become healthier. As a result, almost every single employee is participating in some way or another.
First of all, I don't think "What do I care" is anything but flamebaiting. Who cares if you don't care?
I didn't say that I didn't (or wouldn't) care, but was asking why I should care. I thought I was fairly clearly about that. The story basically boiled down to "some group you've never heard of is falsifying data that you may or may not be interested in, but I didn't want to bother to explain any of this and would rather make every single reader figure it all out for themselves".
There you go: the company is mad about being uncovered and is doing the next step any stupid assholes do when their misdeeds come to light: sue in a vain attempt to keep the information from becoming well known. Therefore, -everyone- should know they're faking the results. I'm tempted to e-mail all their clients with a link to the article. If they go out of buisiness, maybe other shitty companies will finally realize you don't sue people who expose you as charlatans.
First, I don't have a dog is this hunt. I don't know who the accuser or target of accusation is, and certainly don't have opinions about either of them.
Playing devil's advocate, what if the accuser really was slandering the target? It's evident that you believe the accusation and want to get vigilante justice against them. In that case, what should they do? Keep quiet and leave the slander unanswered, or take out full-page ads to claim their innocence, or what?
But again, the story didn't get into any of that. It just said that a few people who aren't well-known here on Slashdot are throwing accusations and threats back and forth. If it were Linus accusing SCO of fibbing, then OK, I have the background and context to evaluate that information. I'd suspect the same hypothetical story in "CEO Magazine" would at least tell who the main actors are.
This is Slashdot. We don't do that here.
Pretend I know nothing about Pollster (which happens to be true). Why should I care whether they've faked results? By that, I mean: do they research options of favorite flavors of cotton candy, or public support for health care reform, or the best style of car, or...? In other words, do they do stuff that actually matters?
Except that it isn't. Sure, it starts, runs for a few seconds, and then exits due to typing error.
Except that you're full of shit and this tired old troll needs to die.
I've never seen a type error in production. In development? Sure, just as I've accidentally tried to pass a char instead of a *char when programming C until the compiler complained and I fixed it. But never once in a live environment, ever, in programs I've written or gotten from someone else, have I ever seen a type error in a duck-typed program. I know this is a popular Slashdot meme among the inexperienced ("WHAT IF I GIVE AN INT INSTEAD OF A FILE READER HAR HAR HAR!") but it just doesn't jibe with reality.
Seriously, find another hypothetically possible but never seen in the real world problem to harp on. This one's expired.
Yes... because Microsoft makes piles of money off of Internet Explorer.
In the low billions of dollars, at least. I know plenty of corporate types who are locked into Windows solely because of internal web apps that are hardcoded against IE6 or older. Unsurprisingly, IT doesn't want to pay for a beefier desktop machine for them to run their OS of choice plus a licensed copy of Windows in a VM just so they can access a certain site plus having to support twice the software for each person using such a system.
Sarcasm doesn't fly too well with you, does it?
I'm happy to believe that IE8 actually has a good security model.
And I thought that included sandboxing plugins? How can any plugin be a serious security threat with MS went through such pains to make IE bulletproof?