the stuff will be in the "public domain" but makes no mention of specific licenses
Just for the record, if it's public domain there is no license. Licenses are predicated on the assumption that there is an "owner". If the code is public domain, there is no owner. The mass media didn't get it, but I'm suprised the Slashdot editors did not correct the submitter on this point....
"it's the implementation code that's a bit messy (with all the explicit $self-references"
Yep. This changes in Perl6, though. In Perl 6, this is a complete class definition:
class Foo;
my $.x; # Instance variable
our $.y; # "Static" instance vairable ala C++
method bar ($param1, $param2) { .super_method($param1);
return $.x+$.y*$param2;
}
Now can you please tell me why the fsck do I need a full-fledged object-oriented language to write scripts for cron jobs and CGI?
You don't. So don't use objects.
I agree with most of your response, and am happy that someone was so level-headed about it. However, I write cron jobs all the time that use LWP, which would be a major pain if it were not OO.
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->timeout(10);
my $rq = new HTTP::Request('GET','http://x.y.z/');
my $rsp = $ua->request($ua);
die "$0: x.y.z is down!\n" if $rsp->is_error;
No, Microsoft is right. Of course, it's a little like saying, "with Linux, you end up having to suffer huge up-times."
Of course, you end up being in the OS business. You have the source. You have the ear of the developers. You get to call the shots. You can be as involved or as passive as you like. If you're a large firm, why not hire a couple of developers to make fixes and contribute in the open source projects that you use most. It's cheaper than Microsoft licensing!
Being able to get into the OS business is one of the strongest advantages of open source for the "enterprise" world....
As for managing conflicts... dunno. I monkey. I put CD in drive. I click install. I wait. I reboot. I done... next job. Linux make I work easy.
A friend and I were thinking about representations on a ternary system. We had to figure out what units of storage would be available.
Obviously, there's the basic unit of storage (1, 0, -1; on, off, undefined; true, false, maybe; whatever). We called this a trit for obvious reasons of parallel to the binary world.
Ok, good enough so far. Then, there's the basic unit that's used to store characters or very simple numbers. We decided that 9 trits would be good (this was to allow for UNICODE-like representations). This seemed to be a shoe-in for the title, tryte.
Then, you occasionally want to have something that is used in firmware to sub-divide trytes into various fields. In binary we call this a nibble, so in honor of Star Trek we called this one (3 trits) a tribble.
But, there it stopped, as we soon realized what we'd be measuring the system's word-size in.... Man, I thought SCSI was a painful phrase to use all the time;-)
On Microsoft's side of the fork, they were working on OS/2 3.0. They took what they had of the code, put the ol' Windows 3.1 GUI on top of it, and released it. However, instead of calling it "OS/2 3.x," they opted instead to rename it "Windows NT 3.x." Ever wonder why Windows XP can run programs that use older OS/2 instruction sets, or why NT up to 3.51 could read HPFS?
Granted, there was some OS2 code in NT, but MS really did write a lot of it from scratch. The microkernel aspects of NT (including its relatively cool LRPCs) were based on (but with no code from) the Mach microkernel and the work that had been done at Digital to turn that into the next version of VMS.
You can call NT OS/2 all you like, but the bottom line is that, below Win32 (and no, that's not just the Win 3.1 GUI... we'd all be a lot better off if that was all that Win32 was), NT is a relatively interesting OS. It's turning into a mutant as time goes by, of course. All closed-source apps eventually do.
All things considered, though, I'd be thrilled with a chance to get my hands on the code, rip Win32 off of it and put some reasonable subsystems in. Heck, I'll bet an NT kernel with subsystems for libc, X, and some security concepts from the UNIX/Linux world would be a decent platform. Oh well, it'll never happen and I already have a decent platoform on my desk;-)
What's in a name: DOS
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The water is getting muddy, here, so let me explain for those who are lost in the buzzword-bingo:
First there was DOS (well, not really, but that's where my story begins). DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others).
When MS decided to build a graphical interface, they did so on top of DOS. DOS was still there as the core interupt handler, but Windows was how the user interacted with the system.
This posed some problems. Windows was not a multi-tasking OS because DOS was not. Windows faked it by giving applications library routines that let them manage their own time-slices in a cooperative multitasking framework. Any app that wanted to take over the system simply avoided calling those routines, but that would be considered bad form.
Eventually, MS build may kludges into Windows to allow memory protection and something resembling premptive multi-tasking. These are good things, but 95, 98 and ME are all still DOS-based.
With NT (2000 and XP are NT versions) MS wrote the whole OS from scratch and did a fairly good job at the low levels (yes, NT is a nice OS down near the hardware where you never interact with it). At the higher levels, they just took the miserable waste of system resources called Win32 (MS' port of Windows to a 32-bit environment) and pasted it on top of NT. Win32 has grown and become more NT-friendly over the years, but it's still the vestige of a DOS-based windowing environment on top of what is arguably a fine OS.
Woefully, the dream that MS engineers had of creating a flexible mircrokernel platform was also squashed. NT was supposed to have several smaller sub-systems to support many types of application access (the POSIX subsystem is a demonstration of the dismal failure of that plan). In reality, all NT, 2000 and XP apps have to go through Win32 to be useful, and Win32 is what most folks think of when they think Microsoft OS.
In the end, the recent press about DOS disapearing is actually misleading. DOS may be gone from NT, 2000 and XP, but the legacy of Windows remains, and will continue to taint MS products for a very long time.
We need to get the story out to the media that strong crypto has been available to the masses for a long time, and can never be taken away. We need it to be understood that cryptographers are trying to make the world a better place by making private transactions more convinient, but that they've always been possible.
Here are some first thoughts, if you end up talking to the media:
The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
Cryptography technology that is available for free to the general public is very sophisticated. Weakening the cryptography available to shoppers on the Internet will not prevent the best and strongest software being used by "bad guys".
Stunting the public's ability to encrypt will hurt everyone from dissedents in oppressive countries to Internet retail companies to international corporations.
It's time to fight back in the war of words. Make this "Internet shopper" vs. "public ignorance". Make it "my credit card for sale". Public opinion is carried on sound bites, so let's get some!
Just use one of the Linux distros that boots from CD. You can mount your Windows partition to read and write files, but otherwise, you're not touching their installation. I've worked with a few insane companies, but as long as you have a boss that will back you up, I think this should work fine.
Bottom line: they're worried about the BSA telling them that they are going to have to pay thousands (or millions) of dollars because of licensing problems. You're booting a CDROM that the distributor tells you to go ahead an make coppies of, if you like. Think about your boss explaining that to some IT manager with a huge grin on his (her?) face;-)
They've just blocked access to the home page. You can go to their sites list and get just about everywhere. Though, why you'd want to is beyond me....
Re:Which releases are production stable?
on
Linux 2.4.13
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
If you're grabbing the kernel-o-the-week, I suggest you're always going to be "less than production quality". Vendors like Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc. spend a whole lot of time integrating new kernel releases with their operating systems. This can include bug-fixing, testing on a number of hardware platforms, retro-fitting patches from development versions that are required for certain business segments and even beta periods for certain cutting-edge features (e.g. Red Hat's long trails internally and externally of the ext3 filesystem).
You should probably think of the stable kernels as just that: stable. That doesn't mean they are ready for prime-time. It's more like a "stable branch". You expect this to be the branch from which the distributions will craft The Right Kernel for their platforms.
Should you use such a kernel, then? Yes, but only if a) you're in a non-mission-critical situation or b) you "must have" a certain bug-fix and are willing to put in the Q/A yourself.
Think of the linux kernel as released on kernel.org like Mozilla. This is like a milestone release. Netscape will come out with something based on it which has Java, Flash, some back-ported bug fixes from later nightlies, etc. The corporate user should probably wait and go with a Netscape release, but here I am submitting this comment from a nightly;-)
I'm sure there will be a back-end for X at some point. When that happens, I'll check DirectFB out.
The UNIX-haters link was funny. For those of you who might have taken it seriously, just don't bother. It's a skewed version of history mixed with a lot of personal bile. I'm particularly amused that he chose to call it "X-Windows", and insisted the publisher use that form because it would "piss off" the X folks. The reason he says this is because the X Consortium goes out of its way to point out that "X-Windows" is an encumbered term, so folks are supposed to say "X" or "The X Window System". Nutball. Nuff said.
I tried to post earlier, but waited forever on the "preview"....
There are several things that I think would help Slash and Slashdot, but bottom line: I'm an avid reader and poster. Please keep it going. I'll happily pay up to about 1/3 of what I pay for cable TV. No-brainer. Slashdot is worth it.
Look back at the discussion,and stop debating tangents.
The question posed to me was relating to Windows' efficiency. Someone was saying that Windows doesn't have the performance problems of Gnome.
Well, I agree. *Windows* does not. When I run Windows + Adobe Photoshop + Mozilla + WinAmp +...
THEN I get some serious performance problems. I was attempting to compare apples and apples.
So, let's talk about your third-party apps. You say that the API for transparency is in W2K. Do you seriously think that that degrades the performance of W2K? No, of course not! USING it does. Linux desktops, on the other hand, ship with applications that use that feature, so many people will see a performance hit because they use it.
Does this make Linux desktops (using eterm or gnome-terminal) more "bloated" or "slower" than Windows? No, it's just that the feature set is different by default. That's been my point all along.
Actually, I'd love to see benchmarks on three hardware platforms, a bottom-end system (min requirements for Windows, since that's so much more than min requirements for Linux), a mid-range system (something like a 300MHz single-processor box with 32MB of RAM) and a high-end system (dual 1.xGHz with whatever max ram is for the system).
The main thing I'd like to know is, with the same screen resolution, the same functional application mix, same features in use (e.g. no pixmap themes, no transparency, no Ximian-style second panel, no multiple desktops).
Problem is, I don't know how to structure such a benchmark. Using specific applications to test is not workable. I guess you could compare Gnumeric to Excel, and so on, but that's just going to show the efficiency of THAT app, not the OS.
Nimda is a good example of what Microsoft is talking about.
There were not legions of script-kiddies running Nimda. It was one programmer who actually had a fair slice of clue (not quite so much as to render him/her too busy to be a problem, though). I doubt that shutting down bugtraq would stop this person from learning that MSIE had a bug in it (or IIS, or Outlook). I *do* think that it would have lead to security admins not knowing the extent of the problem. I *do* think it would have lead to a much greater number of systems being vulnerable.
Windows must now go through what the UNIX world went through in 1987/8. We had screaming/shouting/red-in-the-face "discussions" on USENET for months about the validity of sharing information, sharing exploits, timing, etc, etc.
Bottom line? We came to a reasonable conclusion about how to deal with security and everyone was on-board for a good 2 months before the average admin stopped paying attention.
Most admins could give a rat's petard about security, and will never change. They run around screaming when an "incident" occurs, and otherwise assume the best. MS will have to understand that not accomodating those people by writing safe code will mean a loss of market....
Actually, I withdraw my comments. I had heard that an earlier draft of the bill defined computer intrusion as a terrorist act, when it was done for financial gain (and thus applied the bill's "life without parole" clause for terrorist acts). After having read the most recent form of the bill I see no such reference.
This is a Good Thing(tm), as it indicates that someone with a shred of a clue was listened to by the lawmakers who came up with the compromise legislation. Sorry for spreading old info.
The funny thing is, I can do all this stuff in Windows *without* killing performance
Nope. Can't do pixmap themes (that is, themes where all of the widgets, title-bars, etc have pixmaps, not just flat colors or gradients). Can't do windows with transparent backgrounds. Can't do much of the customization that you can do with Gnome. Sorry, but that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. MS has just failed to put in the features that I'm suggesting low-end users turn off.
Windows does better in terms of MS-only apps will tend to share a lot of code through DLLs. However, as soon as you load an Adobe program or someone else's browser or any other large third-party app, it starts tanking.
There is a lesson here: UNIX apps need to be better integrated. Even among the GNOME apps or KDE apps, much code is duplicated, so you are always in the situation that, under windows, you get into when you start running non-MS apps.
This could be improved, and should be, but you also cannot pretend that MS' desktop is 100% useful without 3rd party apps.
What?! On my Linux box, sawfish runs at just a hair over the memory usage of xscreensaver and three times that of ntpd! I think this is more than fair for something that's displaying so many widgets. Are you trying to tell me that CDE's WM is smaller than Sawfish (not counting shared libs, of course). Sawfish was specifically created in response to the ultra-slick, but massively bloated Enlightenment window manager, which Gnome used for some time.
Here are things to do to improve your Gnome performance on any platform:
Choose a theme for Sawfish and Gtk+ that's light on pixmaps. The "modern" theme for Mozilla is also quite expensive.
Run in 16-bit display mode, not 24 or 32.
Don't use a background image. Instead use a gradient (1-pixel-wide tiled pixmap) or a flat color.
Don't run the gnome-terminal with transparency turned on or with a background pixmap
Reduce the number of virtual desktops
Never leave multiple large apps (e.g. abiword, gnumeric, mozilla, etc) running unless you need to. These are all beastly programs that, while they do a lot of useful things, will kill your performance once several are running at once.
Most of this is just the routine memory-conservation that any desktop can benefit from. Gnome gives you a WHOLE LOT of rope, because some users WANT to take advantage of 512MB of RAM to load background pixmaps, pixmap-heavy themes and 6 huge apps!
It may also be that the Solaris X server is less efficient about loading pixmaps and such into the card. I know PC display technology can often speed up the user experience quite a bit.
Lobbyists for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) tried to glue this hacking-authorization amendment onto a mammoth anti-terrorism bill that Congress approved last week.
A lot of folks are pointing out that this ammendment did not make it through (some others are claiming that it's already legal). I won't even touch that, because it's not the point.
Folks, the RIAA has shown us its true colors! In the face of one of the greatest national tragedies in the U.S., the RIAA decides to use the political momentum to sneak through controvercial legislation granting them the power to subvert the bill of rights without even so much as notifying law enforcement!
This is deeply anti-freedom, anti-American and just downright evil. If the RIAA had pushed for hearings on the topic, or even bought enough of a congress-crittur to get a bill introduced, that's one thing. If they had pushed an amendment to related legislation, that's kind of slimy, but I'm (unfortunately) used to it in the U.S.
But, when you try to hide your actions under the cloak of an anti-terrorism bill, in response to the death of thousands... I don't think I want to have to look at someone associated with the RIAA for a very long time.
Oh BTW, in case you were wondering why anyone would ever want to risk such public backlash, let me clue you in: the RIAA wants this amendment to be part of a bill that the courts dare not strike down. Do you think the supreme court would toss and anti-terrorism law because of an entertainment-industry amendment? Sorry, I can only take so much.... I have to go wash.
Thank you to KDE as well as Gnome, OpenStep, etc.
on
Five Years of KDE
·
· Score: 2
In the dawn of time (the mid 80s:), X battled a number of compettitors for the seat of UNIX graphical display interface. There was News from Sun, a system I can't remember the name of from Digital, Domain/OS and its unusual networked display technology (from which CORBA is, oddly enough, the only surviving descendent).
That battle was won by X because its source code was free and because it was so well designed. But, that battle forced the state of the art to improve.
Today there are many desktops for UNIX and UNIX-like systems. KDE really led us out of the dark ages (from systems like CDE, shudder), and GNOME, OpenStep, and others continue to make interesting and innovative progress. One day, one of these systems will probably win out, but until then I'd just like to say thank you to all of them. You are pushing the state of the art further forward than most of us could have imagined 10 years ago!
Many will not remember the days of VT100 terminals and UNIX-as-endurance-test work environments. I do, and I'm very grateful!
The obvious example is one of the most frequently used. I usually suggest that people use Mozilla as their primary browser and mailer. It's still pre-1.0, but tends to be less buggy than IE, support standards better, provide more privacy features and overall saves a lot of headaches for user and admin alike.
I use the Gimp under Windows, but it's a bit clunky (especially in opening and saving files), so I would not reccomend it to everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. This changes in Perl6, though. In Perl 6, this is a complete class definition:
my $.x; # Instance variable
our $.y; # "Static" instance vairable ala C++
method bar ($param1, $param2) {
return $.x+$.y*$param2;
}
I agree with most of your response, and am happy that someone was so level-headed about it. However, I write cron jobs all the time that use LWP, which would be a major pain if it were not OO.
my $ua = new LWP::UserAgent;
$ua->timeout(10);
my $rq = new HTTP::Request('GET','http://x.y.z/');
my $rsp = $ua->request($ua);
die "$0: x.y.z is down!\n" if $rsp->is_error;
The bottom line is that TMTOWTDI.
No, Microsoft is right. Of course, it's a little like saying, "with Linux, you end up having to suffer huge up-times."
Of course, you end up being in the OS business. You have the source. You have the ear of the developers. You get to call the shots. You can be as involved or as passive as you like. If you're a large firm, why not hire a couple of developers to make fixes and contribute in the open source projects that you use most. It's cheaper than Microsoft licensing!
Being able to get into the OS business is one of the strongest advantages of open source for the "enterprise" world....
As for managing conflicts... dunno. I monkey. I put CD in drive. I click install. I wait. I reboot. I done... next job. Linux make I work easy.
A friend and I were thinking about representations on a ternary system. We had to figure out what units of storage would be available.
;-)
Obviously, there's the basic unit of storage (1, 0, -1; on, off, undefined; true, false, maybe; whatever). We called this a trit for obvious reasons of parallel to the binary world.
Ok, good enough so far. Then, there's the basic unit that's used to store characters or very simple numbers. We decided that 9 trits would be good (this was to allow for UNICODE-like representations). This seemed to be a shoe-in for the title, tryte.
Then, you occasionally want to have something that is used in firmware to sub-divide trytes into various fields. In binary we call this a nibble, so in honor of Star Trek we called this one (3 trits) a tribble.
But, there it stopped, as we soon realized what we'd be measuring the system's word-size in.... Man, I thought SCSI was a painful phrase to use all the time
You can call NT OS/2 all you like, but the bottom line is that, below Win32 (and no, that's not just the Win 3.1 GUI... we'd all be a lot better off if that was all that Win32 was), NT is a relatively interesting OS. It's turning into a mutant as time goes by, of course. All closed-source apps eventually do.
All things considered, though, I'd be thrilled with a chance to get my hands on the code, rip Win32 off of it and put some reasonable subsystems in. Heck, I'll bet an NT kernel with subsystems for libc, X, and some security concepts from the UNIX/Linux world would be a decent platform. Oh well, it'll never happen and I already have a decent platoform on my desk ;-)
The water is getting muddy, here, so let me explain for those who are lost in the buzzword-bingo:
First there was DOS (well, not really, but that's where my story begins). DOS was not really an OS so much as a very simple library and some interupt handlers. The command-prompt was a program that came with it, and a very important one (so were "dir", "del" and others).
When MS decided to build a graphical interface, they did so on top of DOS. DOS was still there as the core interupt handler, but Windows was how the user interacted with the system.
This posed some problems. Windows was not a multi-tasking OS because DOS was not. Windows faked it by giving applications library routines that let them manage their own time-slices in a cooperative multitasking framework. Any app that wanted to take over the system simply avoided calling those routines, but that would be considered bad form.
Eventually, MS build may kludges into Windows to allow memory protection and something resembling premptive multi-tasking. These are good things, but 95, 98 and ME are all still DOS-based.
With NT (2000 and XP are NT versions) MS wrote the whole OS from scratch and did a fairly good job at the low levels (yes, NT is a nice OS down near the hardware where you never interact with it). At the higher levels, they just took the miserable waste of system resources called Win32 (MS' port of Windows to a 32-bit environment) and pasted it on top of NT. Win32 has grown and become more NT-friendly over the years, but it's still the vestige of a DOS-based windowing environment on top of what is arguably a fine OS.
Woefully, the dream that MS engineers had of creating a flexible mircrokernel platform was also squashed. NT was supposed to have several smaller sub-systems to support many types of application access (the POSIX subsystem is a demonstration of the dismal failure of that plan). In reality, all NT, 2000 and XP apps have to go through Win32 to be useful, and Win32 is what most folks think of when they think Microsoft OS.
In the end, the recent press about DOS disapearing is actually misleading. DOS may be gone from NT, 2000 and XP, but the legacy of Windows remains, and will continue to taint MS products for a very long time.
Here are some first thoughts, if you end up talking to the media:
- The strongest form of cryptography was invented in the 19th century and does not require a computer (XOR against one-time-pad), though computers certainly make it faster.
- Cryptography technology that is available for free to the general public is very sophisticated. Weakening the cryptography available to shoppers on the Internet will not prevent the best and strongest software being used by "bad guys".
- Stunting the public's ability to encrypt will hurt everyone from dissedents in oppressive countries to Internet retail companies to international corporations.
It's time to fight back in the war of words. Make this "Internet shopper" vs. "public ignorance". Make it "my credit card for sale". Public opinion is carried on sound bites, so let's get some!Just use one of the Linux distros that boots from CD. You can mount your Windows partition to read and write files, but otherwise, you're not touching their installation. I've worked with a few insane companies, but as long as you have a boss that will back you up, I think this should work fine.
;-)
Bottom line: they're worried about the BSA telling them that they are going to have to pay thousands (or millions) of dollars because of licensing problems. You're booting a CDROM that the distributor tells you to go ahead an make coppies of, if you like. Think about your boss explaining that to some IT manager with a huge grin on his (her?) face
They've just blocked access to the home page. You can go to their sites list and get just about everywhere. Though, why you'd want to is beyond me....
If you're grabbing the kernel-o-the-week, I suggest you're always going to be "less than production quality". Vendors like Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, etc. spend a whole lot of time integrating new kernel releases with their operating systems. This can include bug-fixing, testing on a number of hardware platforms, retro-fitting patches from development versions that are required for certain business segments and even beta periods for certain cutting-edge features (e.g. Red Hat's long trails internally and externally of the ext3 filesystem).
;-)
You should probably think of the stable kernels as just that: stable. That doesn't mean they are ready for prime-time. It's more like a "stable branch". You expect this to be the branch from which the distributions will craft The Right Kernel for their platforms.
Should you use such a kernel, then? Yes, but only if a) you're in a non-mission-critical situation or b) you "must have" a certain bug-fix and are willing to put in the Q/A yourself.
Think of the linux kernel as released on kernel.org like Mozilla. This is like a milestone release. Netscape will come out with something based on it which has Java, Flash, some back-ported bug fixes from later nightlies, etc. The corporate user should probably wait and go with a Netscape release, but here I am submitting this comment from a nightly
I'm sure there will be a back-end for X at some point. When that happens, I'll check DirectFB out.
The UNIX-haters link was funny. For those of you who might have taken it seriously, just don't bother. It's a skewed version of history mixed with a lot of personal bile. I'm particularly amused that he chose to call it "X-Windows", and insisted the publisher use that form because it would "piss off" the X folks. The reason he says this is because the X Consortium goes out of its way to point out that "X-Windows" is an encumbered term, so folks are supposed to say "X" or "The X Window System". Nutball. Nuff said.
I tried to post earlier, but waited forever on the "preview"....
There are several things that I think would help Slash and Slashdot, but bottom line: I'm an avid reader and poster. Please keep it going. I'll happily pay up to about 1/3 of what I pay for cable TV. No-brainer. Slashdot is worth it.
Open source hard-drives are easy. We just take lots of magnets and line them up on an LP. We can get about 2-3 bits per inch at about 5-10rpm!
Look back at the discussion,and stop debating tangents.
...
The question posed to me was relating to Windows' efficiency. Someone was saying that Windows doesn't have the performance problems of Gnome.
Well, I agree. *Windows* does not. When I run Windows + Adobe Photoshop + Mozilla + WinAmp +
THEN I get some serious performance problems. I was attempting to compare apples and apples.
So, let's talk about your third-party apps. You say that the API for transparency is in W2K. Do you seriously think that that degrades the performance of W2K? No, of course not! USING it does. Linux desktops, on the other hand, ship with applications that use that feature, so many people will see a performance hit because they use it.
Does this make Linux desktops (using eterm or gnome-terminal) more "bloated" or "slower" than Windows? No, it's just that the feature set is different by default. That's been my point all along.
Actually, I'd love to see benchmarks on three hardware platforms, a bottom-end system (min requirements for Windows, since that's so much more than min requirements for Linux), a mid-range system (something like a 300MHz single-processor box with 32MB of RAM) and a high-end system (dual 1.xGHz with whatever max ram is for the system).
The main thing I'd like to know is, with the same screen resolution, the same functional application mix, same features in use (e.g. no pixmap themes, no transparency, no Ximian-style second panel, no multiple desktops).
Problem is, I don't know how to structure such a benchmark. Using specific applications to test is not workable. I guess you could compare Gnumeric to Excel, and so on, but that's just going to show the efficiency of THAT app, not the OS.
Nimda is a good example of what Microsoft is talking about.
There were not legions of script-kiddies running Nimda. It was one programmer who actually had a fair slice of clue (not quite so much as to render him/her too busy to be a problem, though). I doubt that shutting down bugtraq would stop this person from learning that MSIE had a bug in it (or IIS, or Outlook). I *do* think that it would have lead to security admins not knowing the extent of the problem. I *do* think it would have lead to a much greater number of systems being vulnerable.
Windows must now go through what the UNIX world went through in 1987/8. We had screaming/shouting/red-in-the-face "discussions" on USENET for months about the validity of sharing information, sharing exploits, timing, etc, etc.
Bottom line? We came to a reasonable conclusion about how to deal with security and everyone was on-board for a good 2 months before the average admin stopped paying attention.
Most admins could give a rat's petard about security, and will never change. They run around screaming when an "incident" occurs, and otherwise assume the best. MS will have to understand that not accomodating those people by writing safe code will mean a loss of market....
Actually, windows can do everything I said it could not, just by installing VMWare and then running Linux inside of it!
No, Windows cannot to pixmap themes and transparency. Sure, there are third-party apps for that, but that's not the point.
Actually, I withdraw my comments. I had heard that an earlier draft of the bill defined computer intrusion as a terrorist act, when it was done for financial gain (and thus applied the bill's "life without parole" clause for terrorist acts). After having read the most recent form of the bill I see no such reference.
This is a Good Thing(tm), as it indicates that someone with a shred of a clue was listened to by the lawmakers who came up with the compromise legislation. Sorry for spreading old info.
No, it's not a terrorist act (according to the bizzare logic of the new anti-terrorism bill) unless they're doing it for financial gain....
Oh wait! That's EXACTLY why they're doing it!
The funny thing is, I can do all this stuff in Windows *without* killing performance
Nope. Can't do pixmap themes (that is, themes where all of the widgets, title-bars, etc have pixmaps, not just flat colors or gradients). Can't do windows with transparent backgrounds. Can't do much of the customization that you can do with Gnome. Sorry, but that's an apples-to-oranges comparison. MS has just failed to put in the features that I'm suggesting low-end users turn off.
Windows does better in terms of MS-only apps will tend to share a lot of code through DLLs. However, as soon as you load an Adobe program or someone else's browser or any other large third-party app, it starts tanking.
There is a lesson here: UNIX apps need to be better integrated. Even among the GNOME apps or KDE apps, much code is duplicated, so you are always in the situation that, under windows, you get into when you start running non-MS apps.
This could be improved, and should be, but you also cannot pretend that MS' desktop is 100% useful without 3rd party apps.
What?! On my Linux box, sawfish runs at just a hair over the memory usage of xscreensaver and three times that of ntpd! I think this is more than fair for something that's displaying so many widgets. Are you trying to tell me that CDE's WM is smaller than Sawfish (not counting shared libs, of course). Sawfish was specifically created in response to the ultra-slick, but massively bloated Enlightenment window manager, which Gnome used for some time.
Here are things to do to improve your Gnome performance on any platform:
- Choose a theme for Sawfish and Gtk+ that's light on pixmaps. The "modern" theme for Mozilla is also quite expensive.
- Run in 16-bit display mode, not 24 or 32.
- Don't use a background image. Instead use a gradient (1-pixel-wide tiled pixmap) or a flat color.
- Don't run the gnome-terminal with transparency turned on or with a background pixmap
- Reduce the number of virtual desktops
- Never leave multiple large apps (e.g. abiword, gnumeric, mozilla, etc) running unless you need to. These are all beastly programs that, while they do a lot of useful things, will kill your performance once several are running at once.
Most of this is just the routine memory-conservation that any desktop can benefit from. Gnome gives you a WHOLE LOT of rope, because some users WANT to take advantage of 512MB of RAM to load background pixmaps, pixmap-heavy themes and 6 huge apps!It may also be that the Solaris X server is less efficient about loading pixmaps and such into the card. I know PC display technology can often speed up the user experience quite a bit.
Folks, the RIAA has shown us its true colors! In the face of one of the greatest national tragedies in the U.S., the RIAA decides to use the political momentum to sneak through controvercial legislation granting them the power to subvert the bill of rights without even so much as notifying law enforcement!
This is deeply anti-freedom, anti-American and just downright evil. If the RIAA had pushed for hearings on the topic, or even bought enough of a congress-crittur to get a bill introduced, that's one thing. If they had pushed an amendment to related legislation, that's kind of slimy, but I'm (unfortunately) used to it in the U.S.
But, when you try to hide your actions under the cloak of an anti-terrorism bill, in response to the death of thousands... I don't think I want to have to look at someone associated with the RIAA for a very long time.
Oh BTW, in case you were wondering why anyone would ever want to risk such public backlash, let me clue you in: the RIAA wants this amendment to be part of a bill that the courts dare not strike down. Do you think the supreme court would toss and anti-terrorism law because of an entertainment-industry amendment? Sorry, I can only take so much.... I have to go wash.
In the dawn of time (the mid 80s :), X battled a number of compettitors for the seat of UNIX graphical display interface. There was News from Sun, a system I can't remember the name of from Digital, Domain/OS and its unusual networked display technology (from which CORBA is, oddly enough, the only surviving descendent).
That battle was won by X because its source code was free and because it was so well designed. But, that battle forced the state of the art to improve.
Today there are many desktops for UNIX and UNIX-like systems. KDE really led us out of the dark ages (from systems like CDE, shudder), and GNOME, OpenStep, and others continue to make interesting and innovative progress. One day, one of these systems will probably win out, but until then I'd just like to say thank you to all of them. You are pushing the state of the art further forward than most of us could have imagined 10 years ago!
Many will not remember the days of VT100 terminals and UNIX-as-endurance-test work environments. I do, and I'm very grateful!
What kind of bugs have you seen in IE?
Nimda.
The obvious example is one of the most frequently used. I usually suggest that people use Mozilla as their primary browser and mailer. It's still pre-1.0, but tends to be less buggy than IE, support standards better, provide more privacy features and overall saves a lot of headaches for user and admin alike.
I use the Gimp under Windows, but it's a bit clunky (especially in opening and saving files), so I would not reccomend it to everyone.