This is a very nice and balanced story; the kind of story you can show to prospective customers when you're trying to convice them to use Linux. This story is good for Linux for the following reasons:
It's a high profile site
It's a rational discussion about the relative merits of Linux
It specifically adresses the validity of the Mindcraft benchmark (ie: you don't need huge boxes to serve static pages and you're not going to get billions of hits/day)
To paraphrase Frank Drebin (from the Naked Gun movies): No matter how silly we find the idea of having a queen, we'll make her feel at home:-) Lets be glad that they're using Linux rather than NT...
I understand that hacking (actually cracking) is not what corporate types want to happen, but it bugs me that this fellow from IBM just looks at all this in terms of it 'being a felony'. That may be true, but that's certainly not the outlook I would expect from a fellow computer geek (who's looking at this from the other side of the fence). Come on, even if you work for IBM, surely you have something more exciting to say about hacking/cracking than 'it's a felony'.
Car Salesman: But it goes 500Mph at 200 miles per gallon, and it only costs $500... Corporate type: Yes, but breaking the speed limit of 55 Mph is a felony... Car Salesman: Excuse me while I go shoot myself...
Yes, you're right... I should probably have mentioned that I'm really happy with an 8CPU server we have; it makes Oracle databases faster than any other machine I've ever seen (although having seen it's price tag I would expect no less); the only machine that come close (or equaled it) was a recent AIX box I installed on...
I think Sun's coolest product is Java, which ironically is probably what they make the least direct money off (although indirectly it probably payed for itself quite handily by turning quite a few heads/minds their way)...
Having tried a SPARC based personal workstation a while ago, I can only say that this is good news for Sun. Their systems may deliver nice I/O throughput, but their processors seem to be outclassed by Intel, especially so when taking into account the price tag of SPARC hardware.
I think Sun has 2 problems: Linux, which from a free download gives you a much more polished software install than the factory pre-installed Suns have (and which is certainly good enough unless you're doing realy high-end stuff) and of course the ix86 chips. Intel and AMD might not be there for the really high-end market yet, but for the workstation market they are dirt cheap at similar (or in my case even better) performance than Sun could provide for twice (or even more) the price. Sun's success is increasingly mysterious to me...
Ah, but they can't just block everything, otherwise our economy and part of our social system would crumble... I would hope that this price would even be too high for the NSA and their equally paranoid counterparts...
Would it not be wonderful if all of a sudden, rathern than scanning a billion (or whatever the current number is) of daily emails in plaintext, they'd have to sort through a billion encrypted messages. This would be the best way to get back at them; if nothing else this would make scanning all mail traffic next to impossible (unless they can break encryption almost efforless, something I don't quite buy).
Now why is it that there's this big fuss about Echelon in the US and here in Europe nobody seems to give a rats ass (or even know it exists). I think us Europeans can learn something from our American friends here: political activism about these things is imortant/essential. I really wish us Europeans would have the political tradition of writing/complaining to your congressmen about things you don't like. As far as I can tell, Europeans are more complacent when it comes to interacting with their chosen representatives...
I went to college in the US (here) and my parents paid themselves silly in order to send me there, but I believe that the US college system has certain advantages. You don't have to go to an expensive private school; there are many state schools that are very good and much more affordable. The big difference is though, that the (at least private) universities see themselves as a business, and such strive to provide the best service to their students, an attitude which in many European countries is unthinkable. Also, the fact that a US college has the right to ativeley choose who they accept, is something that we in Europe could learn from. I was surrounded by highly intelligent people in College (after the less motivated ones had flunked out); a very challenging and humblig experience that I truly value.
If you think private colleges rob you and take your last cent consider this: if you go to take a week of course work at a company (Oracle, IBM, etc), you will pay about $1500 per week. At that rate, even CMU was cheap and I learned more than I ever would though company coursework/education. Also, in my experience, people don't value what they don't pay for. This seems to be corroborated by what I see in the Austrian universites; they are overcrowded, underfunded... I'm glad I went to college in the US even though it cost my parents a bundle...
About this bidding system: I think it will only work out well for extremely gifted students, the kind of student that universities would like to get on their campus. If they see a lot of potential in you, they'll cut you a break (and throw in a nice scholarship), but what if you're not? What incentive do they have to make you a special offer? College tuituion is very public information anyways, I'm not sure how much sense bidding makes in this area. Do you really believe that through this system, there will be radical savings for the students. It's not like MIT will let you attend at $1000 per semester just because that's what you bid...
Hackers (the book) simply rules. If you are into the whole OpenSource/GNU mindset, you should really read this book. If nothing else, it will trace back some of the historial roots of the whole hacking scene which in turn serves as a good example of the openness which ruled at MIT labs (and of course other places) in the beginning of the computer age, when computers were huge monstrosities which were rarely seen by normal mortals.
The other thing which I remember from reading Hackers, was a sort of vague feeling (which I've since refined a bit) of being a disciple of an art rather than just a programmer. The way I look at this (for myself) is, that yes, I'm payed by my employer, but my ultimate allegiance is to the field of computers, not to any particular manifestation of it (such as a company). As such the field (art) itself means much more to me than any one company and Linux (to me) is the/an embodyment of this spirit... by engineers, for engineers, from each according to his interestes and possibilities. It is this purity of vision/interest that I miss in most people I meet in the field...
This book drives home the fact the openness of information (or source code for us geeks) is a good thing, a concept that a few years ago seemed to wither away and which has now been (due to the success of Linux) thrust again into the public's view. If you want a good read of where much of this comes from, read Hackers...
So we've figured out that neither RISC or CISC were an optimal solution and that we need something new/better. Excuse me for not being impressed by this conclusion: I've been programming for quite a few years now and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are no optimal solutions. Every design, every optimization is biased towards some specific situation/bias, evey optimization has a tradeoff which may have far reaching implications. What may work well in one area, might be horrible in another. It' just that in the CPU world architectures have to last for a while, so the general turnaround of fundamental designs is a bit slow, but this is hardly news and should not be surprising to you if you're more than just a causual programmer.
I think this is all blown out of proportion. Lets say company X wants to implement their own Linux version and adds some stuff to the kernel that Linus won't accept into the main distribution. I would think that the resulting backlash of such an action (shipping a custom kernel or for that matter a custom libc) by the hordes of Linux hackers would be enough to change that companies mind. If they persist on still keeping their custom enhancements, then they will have to re-apply their patches against every new kernel (or every new libc); no small feat in the Linux world where releases are measured in days rather than months.
Second, there are 2 kinds of fragmentation: API and binary. If you change the API, then you fragment and may the hordes of angry Linux hackers persecute you for the rest of your miserable days. In terms of binary fragmentation, we're there already (at least we were when some distros had already changed to glibc while others where still using libc). This however, I don't see as a major problem, as it (in most cases) can be fixed by a recompile.
In summary: Yes, someone could fork the kernel tree, but at what price? I would hate them for it (as probably/hopefully millions of other people also would), which would automatically reduce their chances of successfully marketing whatever it is they make. Plus, they would have to run like hell to keep up with the rest of Linux development. I really do think that the Linux development model (ie: the speed at which Linux evolves) is actually a pretty good defense against fragmentation: both from a technical standpoint as well as from a social one. Lets not forget that even companies like Toshiba can be swayed by enough angry emails threatening to boycot them.
This is my favorite one of the entire bunch. Basically Windows DLL management is basically broken by design and should be tought as a prime example of how not to build a stable system. Consider the facts:
1) Every little (or bit) P.O.S. application can (and often will) overwrite system DLLs. I would not dare to overwrite libc.so on my system every time I install a new app.
2) You have very little control over where you go to find your libraries. Compare this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH where you can set exactly where you look for your libraries (thus giving you the ability to use different versions without harming each other).
This is a prime example where MS's design is fundamentally broken, but they turn it around and blame the user for not understanding the beartraps that lurk under the surface. Of course installing a service pack, then installing your app and then re-applying the service pack (to make sure that all your DLLs match) is not quite intuitive. IMHO, the only way to have a stable windows machine is to do the following:
1) Install the OS 2) Apply all necessary service packs 3) Install your apps 4) Re-apply the service packs 5) Don't touch the machine anymore
Anybody with half a brain should see right away that something is fundamentally wrong here. It's admirable (or rather quite daring) of MS's marketing machine to blame this on the user. If they would have desgined it right the first time, you wouldn't end up in DLL hell everytime you install something new...
This is way good news. One of the problems of Linux has been that some/much of bleeding edge hardware just wasn't supported. If companies see a gaming scene develop around Linux, then they will realize (much more so than the do already) that ignoring Linux (and thus not getting their hardware supported) will eat into their sales/profits.
Maybe within a year or so we'll be able to buy PCs with all the modern hardware available and have all of it work without anymore headaches about hardware compatability... this would be the last step Linux needs to really applicable to the masses...
I saw this announcement yesterday and remembered all the trolls that diss Mozialla everytime it's announcen on Slashdot. This time I figured, what that hell, it's only a download, let's give it a try.
I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there are some incomplete things and little bugs, but it renders far faster than netscape and is generally usable. In my book, that's pretty good for pre-beta software, especially considering where these guys are coming from... kudos to the Mozilla guys...
He's a bit biref on the AIs. Since they evolve so much faster, what do they do? Do we just get a new neighbour in cyberspace or do we end up with something like the Borg, or worse yet the AI cores in Simmon's 'Hyperion' series?
Now if this is the case, we have a good answer for all those people saying, "This free software thing must be a bubble because we can't figure out how anybody's going to make money at it." My argument is that people are already making more money at it than we can count.
Very nice, but not quite right. The current media hype is a bubble that will eventually burst, but open source (ie: Linux, *BSD, Apache, Perl) got where it is now with no (or at least very little) commercial backing. If the commercial backing disappeared tomorrow, lots of us would still be hacking code for free. Remember, true innovation seldom comes from large, established players, but rather from kids experimenting around in a garage. If all the money disappeared tomorrow, Linux would still thrive in the hands of competent programmers. Open Source (for me) is not about money, bur rather about technological freedom. Think of free speech, not free beer...
Too bad that ESR and RMS seem to have their squabbels. I think that without RMS (a workable distribution of) Linux would not have been possible. As such the OSS community owes RMS a debt of honor: for providing the code to all the GNU tools and compilers, and for starting the FSF and devoting a few years of his life to build a free/open software infrastructure.
Yes, RMS is an extremist in his own way, but basically RMS, ESR and the entire OSS community have a common background and interest in this matter and should stop squabbling and focus on the things that unites them rather than bickering about minor differences. We're all approaching this from our own perspective, but we need to realize that we're all rooting for the same team; something that seems to be forgotten from time to time...
This might just be the ultimate argument against the by now well known MS FUD: MS has no roadmap to guide it's development. Yes, MS has such a roadmap although it seems they've fallen off the cliff a few times. The proliferation of all the different Win9X flavors combined with the (8 ?) different version of Win2000 sure don't sound like much of a roadmap to me.
So what if we have no roadmap! Again Linux is showing that decentralized development is able to advance an OS (or any other piece of code for that matter) faster than any company could. Add to this the increasing technology 'donations' by companies like SGI and Siemens, and you have a turbocharged development process that makes MSs progress from WinNT4 to NT5 seem pretty glacial.
On a related note: does anybody know if Ultra-DMA 66 will be supported by the new kernels? Right now I have to use my UDMA66 disk as a UDMA33 disk as Linux 2.2 will not recognize UDMA 66 disks...
While I sincerely doubt that this will happen anytime soon, even if Microsoft would open their source code, I personally would not care much. Knowning MS, I guess we can assume that they won't really go open source; it will be some sort of community licence, along the lines of what Sun is doing. All this really boils down to, is that it's still their source code. As such, response would at best be lukewarm and probably ignored alltogether by the open source community.
Even if MS released their sources under the GPL (big chance of that happening before hell freezes over), so what? I work in what's basically a Windows-only environment and have grown to pretty much hate Windows and it's features. If I could, I would turn my back on Windows and never look back. I could care less about MS's source code as I'd rather avoid Windows alltogether, in both source and binary form...
Very nice but reality is not so simple
on
K8 Details
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· Score: 3
Following its architectural triumph with the Athlon chip, Advanced Micro Devices next week will detail the K8, a 64-bit chip that will compete against Intel's Merced.
Very nice, unfortunateley it's not a question of having a good CPU architecture, but to a much larger degree a marketing question. I don't doubt that AMD can design a good K8 chip, but in order to do that, they first have to make the K7 a success. They are pretty strapped for cash and unless they can stop bleeding red ink, they might not even be around long enough to see the introduction of the K8. So they can design decent CPUs. This is good, but hardly news. In the past they had good chip designs falter due to manufacturing problems. Lets hope they can ramp up K7 production fast enough so they have a product to sell.
Having said that with a light undertone of sarcasm, I should probably note that I am/was a satisfied AMD customer. I wish them well because Intel deserves some competition, but they need to be careful not to repeat past mistakes. They have to become profitable soon, which is no easy task when you face a giant like Intel.
This is a typical Sun move. In the face of overwhelming odds, they pretend to make the right move. Let me elaborate:
Why it's too little: Their community source licence is not really open source. They still keep final control of the sources. Yes you can look at the source, but it's not really open source the way the GPL is. They are trying to ride the open source success, not more and not less. Given their history and their (BSD) roots, this is basically an insult to the intelligence of open source developers.
Why it's too late: A few years ago, a true open source release of Solaris would have won them over the hearts and minds of developers all over the world. But now? Who cares. Yes Solaris is still ahead of Linux in high end scalability, but I am quite certain that Linux will catch up with and overtake Sun even in the scalability game within a few short years. On the desktop Sun has long since lost any lead they might have had (check out the discussion about the OSOpinion article yesterday for some anecdotal evidence about this from other Slashdotters and myself) and the basic Solaris installation is rather pathetic when compared to a modern Linux distribution.
I'd much rather spend my time futher developing Linux where I'm ensured that the sources will remain public and accessible to everyone around the world, than fix Sun's bugs for them and not get jack squat in return... what really surprises me about Sun is that it seems that they just don't get what the open source movement is really about...
I think this question is sort of funny as we recently received a Sun Solaris (SPARC) box and found the (factory pre-installed) software setup to basially blow chunks. Yes, Solaris may have better top-of-the-line performance and scalability for huge database servers, but the default software installation they deliver is (at least when compared to Linux) is incomplete and butt ugly. Let's see:
- no compilers shipped. This in my book is a cardinal sin for a UNIX environment - default graphical environment is CDE. Yes, it's a standard but it's butt ugly and feels very slow. - default graphical setup is very 80s looking (then again, plain X and Motif never were very pretty). Comprared to KDE or GNOME it looks pretty pathetic. Maybe it can be made to look better, but the default configuration is boring/ugly. For a desktop environment this will make or break your distribution/system. - limited tool set. You really start to appreciate GNU/Linux once you're used to having nice little things like locate, perl, apache, PHP and other stuff installed by default. - try running Intel Solaris on the same box you run Linux on. It is sssllloooowwww.
Solaris has it's place in the high-end server space. In terms of the desktop though, I don't think there's much of a contest anymore. After a few years of endless tinkering by the Linux hordes, Linux shines in this respect while Solaris increasingly seems like an example of how NOT to build a desktop machine. Sure, you could download and compile all the GNOME stuff, perl, the GNU utilities and make your solaris box a bit nicer to work with. But why bother when you can get a $2 Linux CD (or a free download) that outshines Solaris by far in a desktop environment. Comments like this make me wonder if McNealy actually ever sat behind a properly configured (modern) Linux distribution such as Red Hat, Mandrake or Suse (those being the ones I tried over the past year). I would choose a modern Linux distro over Solaris any day (for the desktop); not for ideological reasons (although those also come into play) but simply because Linux is such a nicer desktop environment and comes with a complete set of software.
Do you know anything about venture capitalists? Anything? They are the most ruthless, heartless people in the world. The CIA doesn't even come close.
Maybe so, but venture capitalists have a definite interest in spreading your product as far and wide as possible to generate a profit. I think the CIA would be more inclined to make you product disappear off the face of the earth into some big steel vault only they have the keys to. They are in the business of secrecy. Venture capitalists don't want your product to remain a secret; they want everyone to buy it...
I'm not sure how this will play out, but I would be weary to let an organization like the CIA own part of my business. It seems that in the current climate, if you have a decent idea/product, you can get venture capital anyways (at least in Silicon Valley that theory seems to hold). So why turn to the CIA?
Sure the CIA will give you money to fund research/development, but they will also own part of your company for it. Looking at the mess the US government made (and is making) with crypto legislation, I sincerely doubt that the CIA will simply sit on the sidelines. Government institutions often seem rather paranoid and don't want to relinquish control of any worthwhile technologies. I'd rather have to report to venture capitalists who want to spread/sell the technology (or products) then government institutions who classify anything moderateley modern/interesting as a national secret.
For a company the size of IBM, they have turned to support OSS/Linux remarkably quickly. Unlike Sun who can't seem to relinquish control (witness their community source licence), IBM is actually willing to offer us (some of their) crown jewles.
Of course the fact that IBM has lots of (technological) crown jewels probably made this decision easier for them. Still, they have put their money where their mouth is. I hope that the Linux community appreciates their contributions and rewards them, be in with money or simply mindshare. A decent Java implementation would do much to further demonstrate the enterprise-readiness of Linux...
Slashdot Mirror
To paraphrase Frank Drebin (from the Naked Gun movies): No matter how silly we find the idea of having a queen, we'll make her feel at home
I understand that hacking (actually cracking) is not what corporate types want to happen, but it bugs me that this fellow from IBM just looks at all this in terms of it 'being a felony'. That may be true, but that's certainly not the outlook I would expect from a fellow computer geek (who's looking at this from the other side of the fence). Come on, even if you work for IBM, surely you have something more exciting to say about hacking/cracking than 'it's a felony'.
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Car Salesman: But it goes 500Mph at 200 miles per gallon, and it only costs $500
Corporate type: Yes, but breaking the speed limit of 55 Mph is a felony
Car Salesman: Excuse me while I go shoot myself
Yes, you're right ... I should probably have mentioned that I'm really happy with an 8CPU server we have; it makes Oracle databases faster than any other machine I've ever seen (although having seen it's price tag I would expect no less); the only machine that come close (or equaled it) was a recent AIX box I installed on ...
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I think Sun's coolest product is Java, which ironically is probably what they make the least direct money off (although indirectly it probably payed for itself quite handily by turning quite a few heads/minds their way)
Having tried a SPARC based personal workstation a while ago, I can only say that this is good news for Sun. Their systems may deliver nice I/O throughput, but their processors seem to be outclassed by Intel, especially so when taking into account the price tag of SPARC hardware.
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I think Sun has 2 problems: Linux, which from a free download gives you a much more polished software install than the factory pre-installed Suns have (and which is certainly good enough unless you're doing realy high-end stuff) and of course the ix86 chips. Intel and AMD might not be there for the really high-end market yet, but for the workstation market they are dirt cheap at similar (or in my case even better) performance than Sun could provide for twice (or even more) the price. Sun's success is increasingly mysterious to me
Ah, but they can't just block everything, otherwise our economy and part of our social system would crumble ... I would hope that this price would even be too high for the NSA and their equally paranoid counterparts ...
Would it not be wonderful if all of a sudden, rathern than scanning a billion (or whatever the current number is) of daily emails in plaintext, they'd have to sort through a billion encrypted messages. This would be the best way to get back at them; if nothing else this would make scanning all mail traffic next to impossible (unless they can break encryption almost efforless, something I don't quite buy).
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Now why is it that there's this big fuss about Echelon in the US and here in Europe nobody seems to give a rats ass (or even know it exists). I think us Europeans can learn something from our American friends here: political activism about these things is imortant/essential. I really wish us Europeans would have the political tradition of writing/complaining to your congressmen about things you don't like. As far as I can tell, Europeans are more complacent when it comes to interacting with their chosen representatives
I went to college in the US (here) and my parents paid themselves silly in order to send me there, but I believe that the US college system has certain advantages. You don't have to go to an expensive private school; there are many state schools that are very good and much more affordable. The big difference is though, that the (at least private) universities see themselves as a business, and such strive to provide the best service to their students, an attitude which in many European countries is unthinkable. Also, the fact that a US college has the right to ativeley choose who they accept, is something that we in Europe could learn from. I was surrounded by highly intelligent people in College (after the less motivated ones had flunked out); a very challenging and humblig experience that I truly value.
... I'm glad I went to college in the US even though it cost my parents a bundle ...
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If you think private colleges rob you and take your last cent consider this: if you go to take a week of course work at a company (Oracle, IBM, etc), you will pay about $1500 per week. At that rate, even CMU was cheap and I learned more than I ever would though company coursework/education. Also, in my experience, people don't value what they don't pay for. This seems to be corroborated by what I see in the Austrian universites; they are overcrowded, underfunded
About this bidding system: I think it will only work out well for extremely gifted students, the kind of student that universities would like to get on their campus. If they see a lot of potential in you, they'll cut you a break (and throw in a nice scholarship), but what if you're not? What incentive do they have to make you a special offer? College tuituion is very public information anyways, I'm not sure how much sense bidding makes in this area. Do you really believe that through this system, there will be radical savings for the students. It's not like MIT will let you attend at $1000 per semester just because that's what you bid
Your reply seems to indicate the you have gotten your Transmeta chip yet. Now I'm not bitter anymore, now I feel discriminated :-)
Hackers (the book) simply rules. If you are into the whole OpenSource/GNU mindset, you should really read this book. If nothing else, it will trace back some of the historial roots of the whole hacking scene which in turn serves as a good example of the openness which ruled at MIT labs (and of course other places) in the beginning of the computer age, when computers were huge monstrosities which were rarely seen by normal mortals.
... by engineers, for engineers, from each according to his interestes and possibilities. It is this purity of vision/interest that I miss in most people I meet in the field ...
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The other thing which I remember from reading Hackers, was a sort of vague feeling (which I've since refined a bit) of being a disciple of an art rather than just a programmer. The way I look at this (for myself) is, that yes, I'm payed by my employer, but my ultimate allegiance is to the field of computers, not to any particular manifestation of it (such as a company). As such the field (art) itself means much more to me than any one company and Linux (to me) is the/an embodyment of this spirit
This book drives home the fact the openness of information (or source code for us geeks) is a good thing, a concept that a few years ago seemed to wither away and which has now been (due to the success of Linux) thrust again into the public's view. If you want a good read of where much of this comes from, read Hackers
So we've figured out that neither RISC or CISC were an optimal solution and that we need something new/better. Excuse me for not being impressed by this conclusion: I've been programming for quite a few years now and if there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are no optimal solutions. Every design, every optimization is biased towards some specific situation/bias, evey optimization has a tradeoff which may have far reaching implications. What may work well in one area, might be horrible in another. It' just that in the CPU world architectures have to last for a while, so the general turnaround of fundamental designs is a bit slow, but this is hardly news and should not be surprising to you if you're more than just a causual programmer.
I think this is all blown out of proportion. Lets say company X wants to implement their own Linux version and adds some stuff to the kernel that Linus won't accept into the main distribution. I would think that the resulting backlash of such an action (shipping a custom kernel or for that matter a custom libc) by the hordes of Linux hackers would be enough to change that companies mind. If they persist on still keeping their custom enhancements, then they will have to re-apply their patches against every new kernel (or every new libc); no small feat in the Linux world where releases are measured in days rather than months.
Second, there are 2 kinds of fragmentation: API and binary. If you change the API, then you fragment and may the hordes of angry Linux hackers persecute you for the rest of your miserable days. In terms of binary fragmentation, we're there already (at least we were when some distros had already changed to glibc while others where still using libc). This however, I don't see as a major problem, as it (in most cases) can be fixed by a recompile.
In summary: Yes, someone could fork the kernel tree, but at what price? I would hate them for it (as probably/hopefully millions of other people also would), which would automatically reduce their chances of successfully marketing whatever it is they make. Plus, they would have to run like hell to keep up with the rest of Linux development. I really do think that the Linux development model (ie: the speed at which Linux evolves) is actually a pretty good defense against fragmentation: both from a technical standpoint as well as from a social one. Lets not forget that even companies like Toshiba can be swayed by enough angry emails threatening to boycot them.
This is my favorite one of the entire bunch. Basically Windows DLL management is basically broken by design and should be tought as a prime example of how not to build a stable system. Consider the facts:
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1) Every little (or bit) P.O.S. application can (and often will) overwrite system DLLs. I would not dare to overwrite libc.so on my system every time I install a new app.
2) You have very little control over where you go to find your libraries. Compare this to LD_LIBRARY_PATH where you can set exactly where you look for your libraries (thus giving you the ability to use different versions without harming each other).
This is a prime example where MS's design is fundamentally broken, but they turn it around and blame the user for not understanding the beartraps that lurk under the surface. Of course installing a service pack, then installing your app and then re-applying the service pack (to make sure that all your DLLs match) is not quite intuitive. IMHO, the only way to have a stable windows machine is to do the following:
1) Install the OS
2) Apply all necessary service packs
3) Install your apps
4) Re-apply the service packs
5) Don't touch the machine anymore
Anybody with half a brain should see right away that something is fundamentally wrong here. It's admirable (or rather quite daring) of MS's marketing machine to blame this on the user. If they would have desgined it right the first time, you wouldn't end up in DLL hell everytime you install something new
This is way good news. One of the problems of Linux has been that some/much of bleeding edge hardware just wasn't supported. If companies see a gaming scene develop around Linux, then they will realize (much more so than the do already) that ignoring Linux (and thus not getting their hardware supported) will eat into their sales/profits.
... this would be the last step Linux needs to really applicable to the masses ...
Maybe within a year or so we'll be able to buy PCs with all the modern hardware available and have all of it work without anymore headaches about hardware compatability
I saw this announcement yesterday and remembered all the trolls that diss Mozialla everytime it's announcen on Slashdot. This time I figured, what that hell, it's only a download, let's give it a try.
... kudos to the Mozilla guys ...
I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, there are some incomplete things and little bugs, but it renders far faster than netscape and is generally usable. In my book, that's pretty good for pre-beta software, especially considering where these guys are coming from
He's a bit biref on the AIs. Since they evolve so much faster, what do they do? Do we just get a new neighbour in cyberspace or do we end up with something like the Borg, or worse yet the AI cores in Simmon's 'Hyperion' series?
Very nice, but not quite right. The current media hype is a bubble that will eventually burst, but open source (ie: Linux, *BSD, Apache, Perl) got where it is now with no (or at least very little) commercial backing. If the commercial backing disappeared tomorrow, lots of us would still be hacking code for free. Remember, true innovation seldom comes from large, established players, but rather from kids experimenting around in a garage. If all the money disappeared tomorrow, Linux would still thrive in the hands of competent programmers. Open Source (for me) is not about money, bur rather about technological freedom. Think of free speech, not free beer ...
Too bad that ESR and RMS seem to have their squabbels. I think that without RMS (a workable distribution of) Linux would not have been possible. As such the OSS community owes RMS a debt of honor: for providing the code to all the GNU tools and compilers, and for starting the FSF and devoting a few years of his life to build a free/open software infrastructure.
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Yes, RMS is an extremist in his own way, but basically RMS, ESR and the entire OSS community have a common background and interest in this matter and should stop squabbling and focus on the things that unites them rather than bickering about minor differences. We're all approaching this from our own perspective, but we need to realize that we're all rooting for the same team; something that seems to be forgotten from time to time
This might just be the ultimate argument against the by now well known MS FUD: MS has no roadmap to guide it's development. Yes, MS has such a roadmap although it seems they've fallen off the cliff a few times. The proliferation of all the different Win9X flavors combined with the (8 ?) different version of Win2000 sure don't sound like much of a roadmap to me.
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So what if we have no roadmap! Again Linux is showing that decentralized development is able to advance an OS (or any other piece of code for that matter) faster than any company could. Add to this the increasing technology 'donations' by companies like SGI and Siemens, and you have a turbocharged development process that makes MSs progress from WinNT4 to NT5 seem pretty glacial.
On a related note: does anybody know if Ultra-DMA 66 will be supported by the new kernels? Right now I have to use my UDMA66 disk as a UDMA33 disk as Linux 2.2 will not recognize UDMA 66 disks
While I sincerely doubt that this will happen anytime soon, even if Microsoft would open their source code, I personally would not care much. Knowning MS, I guess we can assume that they won't really go open source; it will be some sort of community licence, along the lines of what Sun is doing. All this really boils down to, is that it's still their source code. As such, response would at best be lukewarm and probably ignored alltogether by the open source community.
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Even if MS released their sources under the GPL (big chance of that happening before hell freezes over), so what? I work in what's basically a Windows-only environment and have grown to pretty much hate Windows and it's features. If I could, I would turn my back on Windows and never look back. I could care less about MS's source code as I'd rather avoid Windows alltogether, in both source and binary form
Following its architectural triumph with the Athlon chip, Advanced Micro Devices next week will detail the K8, a 64-bit chip that will compete against Intel's Merced.
Very nice, unfortunateley it's not a question of having a good CPU architecture, but to a much larger degree a marketing question. I don't doubt that AMD can design a good K8 chip, but in order to do that, they first have to make the K7 a success. They are pretty strapped for cash and unless they can stop bleeding red ink, they might not even be around long enough to see the introduction of the K8. So they can design decent CPUs. This is good, but hardly news. In the past they had good chip designs falter due to manufacturing problems. Lets hope they can ramp up K7 production fast enough so they have a product to sell.
Having said that with a light undertone of sarcasm, I should probably note that I am/was a satisfied AMD customer. I wish them well because Intel deserves some competition, but they need to be careful not to repeat past mistakes. They have to become profitable soon, which is no easy task when you face a giant like Intel.
This is a typical Sun move. In the face of overwhelming odds, they pretend to make the right move. Let me elaborate:
... what really surprises me about Sun is that it seems that they just don't get what the open source movement is really about ...
Why it's too little: Their community source licence is not really open source. They still keep final control of the sources. Yes you can look at the source, but it's not really open source the way the GPL is. They are trying to ride the open source success, not more and not less. Given their history and their (BSD) roots, this is basically an insult to the intelligence of open source developers.
Why it's too late: A few years ago, a true open source release of Solaris would have won them over the hearts and minds of developers all over the world. But now? Who cares. Yes Solaris is still ahead of Linux in high end scalability, but I am quite certain that Linux will catch up with and overtake Sun even in the scalability game within a few short years. On the desktop Sun has long since lost any lead they might have had (check out the discussion about the OSOpinion article yesterday for some anecdotal evidence about this from other Slashdotters and myself) and the basic Solaris installation is rather pathetic when compared to a modern Linux distribution.
I'd much rather spend my time futher developing Linux where I'm ensured that the sources will remain public and accessible to everyone around the world, than fix Sun's bugs for them and not get jack squat in return
I think this question is sort of funny as we recently received a Sun Solaris (SPARC) box and found the (factory pre-installed) software setup to basially blow chunks. Yes, Solaris may have better top-of-the-line performance and scalability for huge database servers, but the default software installation they deliver is (at least when compared to Linux) is incomplete and butt ugly. Let's see:
- no compilers shipped. This in my book is a cardinal sin for a UNIX environment
- default graphical environment is CDE. Yes, it's a standard but it's butt ugly and feels very slow.
- default graphical setup is very 80s looking (then again, plain X and Motif never were very pretty). Comprared to KDE or GNOME it looks pretty pathetic. Maybe it can be made to look better, but the default configuration is boring/ugly. For a desktop environment this will make or break your distribution/system.
- limited tool set. You really start to appreciate GNU/Linux once you're used to having nice little things like locate, perl, apache, PHP and other stuff installed by default.
- try running Intel Solaris on the same box you run Linux on. It is sssllloooowwww.
Solaris has it's place in the high-end server space. In terms of the desktop though, I don't think there's much of a contest anymore. After a few years of endless tinkering by the Linux hordes, Linux shines in this respect while Solaris increasingly seems like an example of how NOT to build a desktop machine. Sure, you could download and compile all the GNOME stuff, perl, the GNU utilities and make your solaris box a bit nicer to work with. But why bother when you can get a $2 Linux CD (or a free download) that outshines Solaris by far in a desktop environment. Comments like this make me wonder if McNealy actually ever sat behind a properly configured (modern) Linux distribution such as Red Hat, Mandrake or Suse (those being the ones I tried over the past year). I would choose a modern Linux distro over Solaris any day (for the desktop); not for ideological reasons (although those also come into play) but simply because Linux is such a nicer desktop environment and comes with a complete set of software.
Do you know anything about venture capitalists? Anything? They are the most ruthless, heartless people in the world. The CIA doesn't even come close.
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Maybe so, but venture capitalists have a definite interest in spreading your product as far and wide as possible to generate a profit. I think the CIA would be more inclined to make you product disappear off the face of the earth into some big steel vault only they have the keys to. They are in the business of secrecy. Venture capitalists don't want your product to remain a secret; they want everyone to buy it
I'm not sure how this will play out, but I would be weary to let an organization like the CIA own part of my business. It seems that in the current climate, if you have a decent idea/product, you can get venture capital anyways (at least in Silicon Valley that theory seems to hold). So why turn to the CIA?
Sure the CIA will give you money to fund research/development, but they will also own part of your company for it. Looking at the mess the US government made (and is making) with crypto legislation, I sincerely doubt that the CIA will simply sit on the sidelines. Government institutions often seem rather paranoid and don't want to relinquish control of any worthwhile technologies. I'd rather have to report to venture capitalists who want to spread/sell the technology (or products) then government institutions who classify anything moderateley modern/interesting as a national secret.
For a company the size of IBM, they have turned to support OSS/Linux remarkably quickly. Unlike Sun who can't seem to relinquish control (witness their community source licence), IBM is actually willing to offer us (some of their) crown jewles.
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Of course the fact that IBM has lots of (technological) crown jewels probably made this decision easier for them. Still, they have put their money where their mouth is. I hope that the Linux community appreciates their contributions and rewards them, be in with money or simply mindshare. A decent Java implementation would do much to further demonstrate the enterprise-readiness of Linux