I think Telsa would appreciate it. And you could fit more computers in there! YES!
"After that date it was decided not to use Linux"
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911 Calls Linux
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· Score: 1
And where is your link to back up this claim? Personally I would overjoyed if those wild-eyed Amiga loons went and bothered someone else with their fantasies of technical superiority, but I don't think there are any facts to support your case.
In fact, I believe you are confusing the Amiga with the iToaster, perhaps understandable given the relative ratios of hype to shipping product in both cases.
Just to further rub your nose in it, the original Slashdot article to which you referred, http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/24/1342228.shtm l was, in fact, entirely accurate, given the information available at the time of writing. Yes, the headline is "Is the iToaster a Linux Box? Will there be Source?", which someone having an extended fantasy of Slashdot bias could construe into a misleading statement; but the first sentence of the article reads: Allright so several people have noted that the iToaster from Microworkz runs a "BeOS/Linux Hybrid". The article then goes into some depth to investigate this claim.
Perhaps the next time you feel the need to make outrageous claims, you'll take a moment to check your facts first.
Re:A suggestion to prevent this kind of nonsense
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911 Calls Linux
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· Score: 1
There's also a bit too much bias, whether on purpose or not. For example, when Amiga announced its new OS would be a Linux/BeOS hybrid, slashdot reported it'd run Linux, while not mentioning BeOS at all. It turns out BeOS is the only OS that was correct in that statement (Linux is not being used), so the slashdot story was 100% wrong, compared to the 50% wrong of the story it linked to.
If Slashdot was 100% wrong, how wrong does that make you? See http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990709-e.html , in particular "Amiga has selected Linux as the OS kernel for the new Amiga Operating Environment that is scheduled for release later this year."
Of course Slashdot's contributors are biased, but I've never found it reached the level where it made me uncomfortable. Most of the people who complain about bias just seem to be sore that their platform doesn't get mentioned more, or NT weenies who seem to have got lost on the way to msnbc.com (like, seriously, why do those people come here?)
Re:I think you're confusing shared with static
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Mozilla M9 Released
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So, then the windows DLLs *are* position independent, no? Which brings us back to the first question -- why are the linux binaries larger, and do symbol tables have *anything* to do with it?
No no no, Linux shared libraries use position independant code (PIC). This means it works wherever. Windows DLLs use position-dependant code. This means that if you get two DLLs that have the same base address (or overlap), one has to be automagically re-linked to use a different base address. The Linux way is less kludgy but the Windows way results in smaller libraries.
However, the major issue for Mozilla seems to be that the C++ code is producing excessively large symbol tables with gcc. I haven't been following this closely, so I may have the details wrong, but it seems a way has been found to get around this. I think this is only a disk space and download-time issue, and doesn't impact run-time memory consumption.
gcc doesn't produce very compact code at the best of times. Unfortunately, the gcc developers don't seem to consider this a priority.
The existance of the proprietary OSS/Linux sound drivers has been inhibiting the development of proper, full-service, free software sound drivers for far too long. Red Hat should buy 4Front, release their drivers where possible as free software, and work on integrating them into standard Linux. 4Front's employees could continue to work semi-independantly fulfilling existing contracts and developing the NDA'd binary-only drivers. 4Front might actually go for this, since they seem to be in it for the money rather than intentionally crusading to keep Linux multimedia in the dark ages.
Another useful technology Red Hat could set free would be the mtv MPEG player (www.mpegtv.com). I don't know if there are intellectual property issues that would prevent that being turned into free software, but it breaks my heart to see such a good bit of software trapped in shareware limbo.
Reading the GPL doesn't mean you agree to the contract. Using the software doesn't mean you agree to the contract.
As I seem to find myself pointing out every other week, the GPL places restrictions on distribution not on use of software. That you do not appear to realise this does not lend credence to the rest of your arguments.
Not really like "use strict" in perl, but I think "gdb" would be a really sucky movie title...
How about "strace"? That's almost kinda sorta more or less the same thing, and is probably as good a title as TRON. Or alternatively "gprof", but I'm not sure that counts as it's not a real-time profiler.
As tchrist points out, Microsoft aren't the only people who ever made security errors. Even today, there is plenty of free software written that contains security booboos. The difference is, when a free software author sees their name on a security advisory, they get their act together sharpish. When Microsoft sees their name on a security advisory, they damn near laugh it off. They blame the user, they blame the hacker, they blame whoever reported it. They will never learn, ever, because deep down they believe that selling the most software makes them right.
It always makes me laugh when I hear Americans getting all paranoid about the UN. I don't know why they do, since the rest of the world sees the UN as a hopeless beaurocracy and talking shop. I guess it's just part of the American psyche, some deep-seated need for an evil global conspiracy to be frightened about. Gives us a little light relief from worrying about their foreign policy, anyway.
I was making what I consider to be a valid point about user interface design! Are Mac users really so hypersensitive that they won't tolerate any opinion that might be construed as contradicting the gospel of Apple? So much for "Think Different"!
Actually, in my experience non-programmers get just as pissed off with useless error messages as us hackers do. The only way to productively interface with a computer is to get a feel for the way it thinks (the same thing applies to a person, of course). But this is impeded if software companies try to obscure the inner workings.
Don't get me wrong, I think software should be simple and easy to use. I just don't think it should be achieved by welding the box shut. Instead, it should be simple, consistent, and logical at every level, and the beautiful and intuitive interface the naive user sees should reflect the beautiful intuitive interfaces the programmers hack on.
I, for one, expect Windows 2000 to flop rather nicely in the server market.
I, on the other hand, prefer to be more cautious in my predictions. I think Microsoft will successfully leverage y2k panic-buying into massive sales for Windows 2000. The press will gleefully report this as the death of Linux. It will be, as with NT 4, two whole years before there is significant media coverage of the shortcomings of W2k. By the time this happens though, the press will have caught on to the fact that W2k hasn't put a dint in the exponential growth of Linux, and Microsoft will have seen the writing on the wall and begun the transition into a respectable team player in the software industry.
5 years down the road you'll still be seeing Backstreet Boys videos on MTV, only they'll be the subject of ridicule.
Aren't Backstreet Boys videos already the subject of ridicule?
SuSe should be a pushover
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Red Hat Europe
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· Score: 1
The Linux market here in England seems to be largely untapped. The only place you can readily buy it is bookstores, and then it's always RedHat. SuSe don't even seem to be trying outside their tradition teutonic strongholds. RedHat could capture the rest of Europe without a great deal of effort, leaving SuSe nowhere to go. Until SuSe stop trying to proprietize Linux, they'll get no sympathy from me.
Detailed, specific and technically accurate. SGIs stock has gone up in my brain:-) I wish more companies put out real information like this, instead of the usual empty marketing drivel.
Actually, this is so good we could probably point people who want a "Linux roadmap" to it.
All this trash-talking of Linux is not exactly endearing them to the Linux community. And from where I'm sitting, it looks they need us but we're managing perfectly well without them. It's annoying to me that people who don't even have memory protection, security, or built-in networking in their operating system see fit to lecture us on OS design. I guess they've been keeping themselves going on nothing but belief in their own innate superiority for so long they've completely lost touch with reality. I hope they stick with QNX so we don't have to put up with them.
Enough is enough. These Amiga articles have reached the point where they're not funny any more. I'm gonna configure Slashdot not to show them.
I'm only partially joking:-) I recently found that (ony my machine at least), xanim under Linux can play AVI files smoother than Microsoft's player under Windows. Which is weird when you consider that xanim is basically the work of one man, and doesn't contain any x86-specific optimisations.
I guess this is the point where Microsoft announce benchmarks showing that their player is faster on a quad Xeon system with 4Gb of RAM:-)
Damnit Giles, I was about to say that! And I was gonna say it much funnier than you did. Oh well, there's nothing left for me but to namedrop about how I fell asleep in his lectures.
cutting out replayed imiges would have to be done selectively: think about those shows that replay the same footage, for example, Star Trek, when the ship goes into warp.
Yeah, the first series of Babylon 5 would be like swiss cheese after this treatment! Though it might be better... I found all those repeated location shots very annoying.
I'm not sure how workable this is in practice. Hashes work great on digital data that is the same every time. But TV, even digitised, has been through an analogue stage, that means it is different every time. I'm not sure how technically possible it is to remove the "noise" in such a way you get repeatable data that can be hashed. Of course, you also need heuristics about how long a piece of repeated data has to be to be worth removing, but compared to the first problem, this is easy.
Just imagine you succeed. Suddenly everyone can watch their favourite programs at their leisure, without advertising. Networks can fix this problem in two ways: put scrolling text, animated doodads, or Howard Stern along the bottom of adverts to make them different every time and fool the hashing algorithm. Or fill every program with product placement as in the Truman Show. Yuck.
It's always been easier to infiltrate proprietary technology into intranets than into the wider Internet where interoperability is more important. But it's worth remembering why intranets are called intranets this year (and not LANs or company networks or whatever they were called before). Because eventually the benefits of open standards technologies always come to outweigh the costs of dumping the proprietary stuff. Proprietary technologies are always a dead end.
So Microsoft wins the battle for Intranet HTTP servers. So what? All they've done is buy themselves some time. The vast oceans of open standards lapping at the firewall are not going to go away.
The second weakness of this strategy is that it's based on *forcing* people to use IIS. People don't like to be forced to do things. Every time Microsoft forces someone to do something, they're breeding another convert to the Open Source Way. This is a lesson they need to learn badly.
That's odd, I've been using it for over a month! At the moment I only use it for fairly small loopback filesystems (it's still awesomely fast). Once I get a better feeling for how stable and corruption-resistant it is, I'd like to use it for all my filesystems./usr/doc (on Debian systems) would rock using reiserfs (it brings out the worst in ext2). I'd say the transition from ext2 -> reiserfs is almost as awesome as the transition from FAT16 -> ext2. Especially in terms of space efficiency.
The only way we can stamp out spam is by a combination of social, legal, technical and economic pressure. But if we allow the legalisation of spamming for the sake of some short term convenience (for the elite who can create mail filters), then that destroys the legal argument and weakens the effectiveness of the other three.
Consider this scenario: after 10 long years of work, the IETF and other standards bodies have finally managed to transition a critical mass of mail servers to use a new spam-proof version of SMTP. But then J. Random Scumbag sues them for violating their legally-mandated "right to spam".
We're in it for the long haul. Spam is not going to be gone next week, or next year. But we're winning the public opinion battle, most spammers go out of business within 3 months, and the technical solutions are getting better all the time. I'd hate to see us win the battle on the Internet only to lose it in the courtroom. Don't give the spammers what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Telsa would appreciate it. And you could fit more computers in there! YES!
In fact, I believe you are confusing the Amiga with the iToaster, perhaps understandable given the relative ratios of hype to shipping product in both cases.
Just to further rub your nose in it, the original Slashdot article to which you referred, http://slashdot.org/articles/99/06/24/1342228.shtm l was, in fact, entirely accurate, given the information available at the time of writing. Yes, the headline is "Is the iToaster a Linux Box? Will there be Source?", which someone having an extended fantasy of Slashdot bias could construe into a misleading statement; but the first sentence of the article reads: Allright so several people have noted that the iToaster from Microworkz runs a "BeOS/Linux Hybrid". The article then goes into some depth to investigate this claim.
Perhaps the next time you feel the need to make outrageous claims, you'll take a moment to check your facts first.
If Slashdot was 100% wrong, how wrong does that make you? See http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990709-e.html , in particular "Amiga has selected Linux as the OS kernel for the new Amiga Operating Environment that is scheduled for release later this year."
Of course Slashdot's contributors are biased, but I've never found it reached the level where it made me uncomfortable. Most of the people who complain about bias just seem to be sore that their platform doesn't get mentioned more, or NT weenies who seem to have got lost on the way to msnbc.com (like, seriously, why do those people come here?)
No no no, Linux shared libraries use position independant code (PIC). This means it works wherever. Windows DLLs use position-dependant code. This means that if you get two DLLs that have the same base address (or overlap), one has to be automagically re-linked to use a different base address. The Linux way is less kludgy but the Windows way results in smaller libraries.
However, the major issue for Mozilla seems to be that the C++ code is producing excessively large symbol tables with gcc. I haven't been following this closely, so I may have the details wrong, but it seems a way has been found to get around this. I think this is only a disk space and download-time issue, and doesn't impact run-time memory consumption.
gcc doesn't produce very compact code at the best of times. Unfortunately, the gcc developers don't seem to consider this a priority.
Another useful technology Red Hat could set free would be the mtv MPEG player (www.mpegtv.com). I don't know if there are intellectual property issues that would prevent that being turned into free software, but it breaks my heart to see such a good bit of software trapped in shareware limbo.
As I seem to find myself pointing out every other week, the GPL places restrictions on distribution not on use of software. That you do not appear to realise this does not lend credence to the rest of your arguments.
How about "strace"? That's almost kinda sorta more or less the same thing, and is probably as good a title as TRON. Or alternatively "gprof", but I'm not sure that counts as it's not a real-time profiler.
As tchrist points out, Microsoft aren't the only people who ever made security errors. Even today, there is plenty of free software written that contains security booboos. The difference is, when a free software author sees their name on a security advisory, they get their act together sharpish. When Microsoft sees their name on a security advisory, they damn near laugh it off. They blame the user, they blame the hacker, they blame whoever reported it. They will never learn, ever, because deep down they believe that selling the most software makes them right.
It always makes me laugh when I hear Americans getting all paranoid about the UN. I don't know why they do, since the rest of the world sees the UN as a hopeless beaurocracy and talking shop. I guess it's just part of the American psyche, some deep-seated need for an evil global conspiracy to be frightened about. Gives us a little light relief from worrying about their foreign policy, anyway.
Ack, I should get this, but I don't. It has something to do with Perl, right? Is it surrealist comedy?
I was making what I consider to be a valid point about user interface design! Are Mac users really so hypersensitive that they won't tolerate any opinion that might be construed as contradicting the gospel of Apple? So much for "Think Different"!
Until, of course, there's a sunny day and everyone comes in wearing their polarised sunglasses... oops! Security by non-obscurity, anyone? :-)
Don't get me wrong, I think software should be simple and easy to use. I just don't think it should be achieved by welding the box shut. Instead, it should be simple, consistent, and logical at every level, and the beautiful and intuitive interface the naive user sees should reflect the beautiful intuitive interfaces the programmers hack on.
I, on the other hand, prefer to be more cautious in my predictions. I think Microsoft will successfully leverage y2k panic-buying into massive sales for Windows 2000. The press will gleefully report this as the death of Linux. It will be, as with NT 4, two whole years before there is significant media coverage of the shortcomings of W2k. By the time this happens though, the press will have caught on to the fact that W2k hasn't put a dint in the exponential growth of Linux, and Microsoft will have seen the writing on the wall and begun the transition into a respectable team player in the software industry.
Aren't Backstreet Boys videos already the subject of ridicule?
The Linux market here in England seems to be largely untapped. The only place you can readily buy it is bookstores, and then it's always RedHat. SuSe don't even seem to be trying outside their tradition teutonic strongholds. RedHat could capture the rest of Europe without a great deal of effort, leaving SuSe nowhere to go. Until SuSe stop trying to proprietize Linux, they'll get no sympathy from me.
Actually, this is so good we could probably point people who want a "Linux roadmap" to it.
Y'know, the one with Hemos. Love It!
Enough is enough. These Amiga articles have reached the point where they're not funny any more. I'm gonna configure Slashdot not to show them.
I guess this is the point where Microsoft announce benchmarks showing that their player is faster on a quad Xeon system with 4Gb of RAM :-)
Damnit Giles, I was about to say that! And I was gonna say it much funnier than you did. Oh well, there's nothing left for me but to namedrop about how I fell asleep in his lectures.
Yeah, the first series of Babylon 5 would be like swiss cheese after this treatment! Though it might be better... I found all those repeated location shots very annoying.
I'm not sure how workable this is in practice. Hashes work great on digital data that is the same every time. But TV, even digitised, has been through an analogue stage, that means it is different every time. I'm not sure how technically possible it is to remove the "noise" in such a way you get repeatable data that can be hashed. Of course, you also need heuristics about how long a piece of repeated data has to be to be worth removing, but compared to the first problem, this is easy.
Just imagine you succeed. Suddenly everyone can watch their favourite programs at their leisure, without advertising. Networks can fix this problem in two ways: put scrolling text, animated doodads, or Howard Stern along the bottom of adverts to make them different every time and fool the hashing algorithm. Or fill every program with product placement as in the Truman Show. Yuck.
So Microsoft wins the battle for Intranet HTTP servers. So what? All they've done is buy themselves some time. The vast oceans of open standards lapping at the firewall are not going to go away.
The second weakness of this strategy is that it's based on *forcing* people to use IIS. People don't like to be forced to do things. Every time Microsoft forces someone to do something, they're breeding another convert to the Open Source Way. This is a lesson they need to learn badly.
That's odd, I've been using it for over a month! At the moment I only use it for fairly small loopback filesystems (it's still awesomely fast). Once I get a better feeling for how stable and corruption-resistant it is, I'd like to use it for all my filesystems. /usr/doc (on Debian systems) would rock using reiserfs (it brings out the worst in ext2). I'd say the transition from ext2 -> reiserfs is almost as awesome as the transition from FAT16 -> ext2. Especially in terms of space efficiency.
Consider this scenario: after 10 long years of work, the IETF and other standards bodies have finally managed to transition a critical mass of mail servers to use a new spam-proof version of SMTP. But then J. Random Scumbag sues them for violating their legally-mandated "right to spam".
We're in it for the long haul. Spam is not going to be gone next week, or next year. But we're winning the public opinion battle, most spammers go out of business within 3 months, and the technical solutions are getting better all the time. I'd hate to see us win the battle on the Internet only to lose it in the courtroom. Don't give the spammers what they want.