It's been in the pipeline for a while and there was plenty of comment on it right here about a year back.
My views on gun ownership extend to something like "Those that believe they can change the government's view through violent means haven't met the US Army yet".
Not to mention that it is a Win9x failure screen and not a Windows 2000 blue screen. I don't think anyone in their right mind would call Win9x stable, would they?
Freedom of speech in Australia is interesting. You have freedom of political speech (including the ability to criticize the government) in law, but not general freedom of speech - the government can legitimately suppress the media on matters of a non-political nature (I believe). This actually isn't a bad thing (IMHO) - you have the freedom of speech you need: the ability to criticize those in power.
As for children shooting each other - you are absolutely correct. I can see the need for firearms in a society and culture such as the US and you have the right to them in law. In Australia there is certainly no need for a private citizen to carry a firearm in public. Personally I support the idea of gun control in the same way you have car control - licences to use and the vehicle itself must be registered to be used, and can only be used legally in designated areas.
As for needing a second amendment for there to be a first, this is numerically stupid. If it was that way around then the second would be first and the first second. The maths just doesn't make sense.;-)
Being ordered to attack civillians who are in the process of throwing out
government officials who have used their office to supress the Constitution
would be unlawful.
This is true. However, being ordered to attack revolutionist anarchists
bent on overthrowing the democratically elected government, which has the
mandate of the people by the Constitution is a lawful order. The thing you
fail to realise is that by your own Constitution, it is not the people or the
military who are the interpreters of the Constitution itself, but the
judiciary. An order only has to be believed to be lawful for it to be
carried out - a soldier is not a trained lawyer and cannot be expected to act as
one (thank God). To overthrow a government which is abusing its office and
suppressing the Constitution, according to the Constitution should be done
through the legal system. Anyone who suggests a military uprising of the
people is either delusional, crazy, naive or has an ulterior motive.
This has to be one of the most stupid ideas I've ever heard. Just how many people are taking up arms against the US Government over the DeCSS or Napster issues? What would happen if someone decided to organize an armed overthrow of the government?
I'll tell you - they would last about 5 seconds. In fact, why don't you take your gun into the court room, or to the white house and see what happens? Bet you don't change the law.
Saying that the first amendment was put in place to facilitate armed overthrow of the elected government is daft. It was put there (if you read your American history) as a safeguard against foreign invasion in a time when communication was somewhat less rapid than it is today.
Personally I like having the right to expect someone else in the street not to be armed in Australia, and I fail to understand why Americans continually deny themselves that right. Of course, you may indeed choose whatever rights you like - that's the point of democracy and I'll help defend democracy even if I don't believe in the specifics of each nation's laws. I just like having the right to cut someone off in traffic accidentally and not have to worry as much about being shot. I like that. If you've never lived here for any length of time then you have no right, and no perspective to criticise our FREE choice to not arm our citizens.
Your comment is incorrect by the simple fact that Win2k exists. If the collective knowledge of how it works does not exist then it is impossible that it was ever written.
The other fact is that it is relatively easy to get a high level view of how Win2k works (despite your unfounded rhetoric to the contrary). Read the book I mentioned in my original post.
Actually, they aren't the ones I was talking about. They are the
strawmen generally set up when people don't want to admit bugs that are actually
there. Look at these links:
Linus is actually guilty of a fairly major logic error here. Just because he can fix a bug once in Linux doesn't instantly mean the whole source is understood by
him, much less actually understood by anyone. You only have to look on
Kernel Traffic to see there are still bugs in the 2.4.x kernel (has anyone
actually found all the filesystem corruption bugs yet?) that no one is quite
sure of the solution to - just none of them are showstoppers.
Nothing in Linus' speech takes anything from Win2k either - it is entirely
possible that a similar bug could be found in Win2k and fixed in just as fast a
time (ping of death was fixed in under 24 hours for example). That doesn't
instantly mean the Win2k source is completely simple - it just means that one
bug was fixed quickly.
If you read "Inside Windows 2000 - 3rd edition" you'll start to see
that the guts of Win2k actually are fairly well separated, possibly even better
than the current Linux kernel. There is a clean separation between most
components of the executive and the kernel and if there was a plot printed, my
guess would be that it would look more like meatballs than spaghetti - lots of
tightly coupled chunks of code with well defined interfaces between them.
On a project as large as Win2k there is simply no other way you can effectively
work.
Kudos to Linus for fixing a bug in the 2.0 kernel so quickly, but I'm afraid
there is just no logical step you can make to the statement that "No one
understands NT".
Tom's Hardware (somewhat more reputable than the results discussed here) shows a more moderate improvement in performance, but it is definitely remarkable.
Go to www.tomshardware.com and have a look - get the real picture.
If you must make snide comments about the Windows Kernel source, read "Inside Windows 2000 - 3rd edition". Has plenty of information from people who have seen the source and is probably a lot more useful than the source code would be anyhow as a guide to how and why Win2000 works the way it does.
Oh, I forgot. You don't care about facts when bashing Windows - this is Slashdot.
I'm having no problems browsing the site from Netscape 4.6 on my Mac. That's about as non-MS as I could manage at the moment. Are you sure about your results, or did you just pick a page from the search engine to get slashdotted?
I don't know about anyone else, but the software packages I manage all have subscription/maintenance agreements. Basically you have the option of paying a certain amount per year and you get the latest versions whenever (and if they ever) come out.
So far we have these agreements on any MS and non-MS software we use because they end up being quite cost effective and easy to maintain as a regular bill rather than a big hit every 2 years or so.
Is this a bad thing? The answer is a resounding NO as long as you still have the option of a non-subscription version that fills your needs.
I was just pointing out that it has been obvious that this was the case, and more to the point, HAS been the case since about IE2.0 on Win95. If you've only just noticed it, well, you should pay more attention when browsing.
Bite me. Well actually, don't bite me. It would hurt and probably not taste very good.
Open up your favorites. Right click on one of them. Select Properties. Look at the URL. It takes you straight to that address.
Open one of the pre-made bookmarks. Right click on one of them. Select Properties. Look at the URL. What do you know - http://www.microsoft.com/redir?...
Come on, Slashdot. You don't need to do this sort of crap to bash Microsoft. There's plenty of legitimate claims before you have to invent them.
The claim that this is a "victimless" crime, much akin to drug
abuse is false. In the view of the entertainment distribution companies
(who also control the mainstream media remember) and the judicial system there
is a vast difference between drug abuse and the theft of intellectual
property. Never forget that despite the "common sense" view that
most of us on Slashdot have that there is no theft of IP going on here, the
external view and the current legal view is that theft has occurred.
If you can somehow convince me that theft is a victimless crime then maybe
I'll agree, but it is no more victimless than photocopying your university
textbooks to avoid the cost of buying the books themselves. This is
blatant theft and the victim is the publishing house (and occasionally the
author). You are correct in saying that the theft is difficult to track
down, but no more so than tracking down stolen goods through distribution
channels such as pawn shops and the like.
The fact is that while it is currently difficult to enforce, in much the same
way prohibition of alcohol was difficult to enforce, it doesn't mean that it is unenforceable.
A law has never been repealed (to my knowledge) because of its difficulty to
enforce. What usually happens is the police are given more powers to
enforce the law. Because the internet is currently a rather uncontrolled
(by law officials) medium and you can use anonymous remailers to send things
around without them being traced does not mean it will remain this way.
Tools like Carnivore and the basic ability to take a warrant out to impound the
remailers on suspicion of being used in a crime will make this sort of facility
much leaner on the ground. Remember that 20 years ago it would have been
enough to wear a hood on your face and gloves on your hands to get away with
something like a bank robbery. Today it is much more difficult because the
technology of law enforcement has advanced.
If "your hacker is far more sophisticated than your average
burglar" can you explain the sophistication behind the spamming of
DeCSS to net groups. Sounds like about the sophistication of someone who
posts bills on every open wall they can see - rather less than your average
burglar.
The civil rights movement has rarely broken laws to push its point. It
has protested non-violently in many cases to successfully change bad laws, but
it has not distributed illegal material (like DeCSS at the moment) in an effort
to push its case. Like I said before, if you really care about this issue
then write to someone who will make a difference. Posting DeCSS all over
the place just gets you branded as an extremist nut or criminal and you end up
doing more harm than good.
Perhaps it is worthwhile pointing out the difference between Napster and
DeCSS. Banning Napster is akin to banning an list of phone numbers of
people who sell goods. If most of those goods happen to be stolen, does
that make Napster bad? Banning DeCSS is like banning crowbars because they
might be used to break into houses.
Go back a few days and read the suck.com piece on lawyers and the internet.
The internet provides computer oriented people with a wealth of freedom never
found before. Suddenly some rules start getting imposed by the external
world and we cry to each other that because they don't understand they can't
possibly succeed in tying us down. Guess what? Bad news is they
can. In the real world you have the freedom to do anything you
like. There is nothing physically preventing you from going next door and
burning down your neighbour's house if you feel like it. Nothing stops you
from creating a nuclear weapon if you have the materials to do it. You
have all these freedoms. Of course, nothing stops you from selling an
index to where you can pick up goods, of which most are stolen (pretty much what
napster does), or photocopying your own books for the hell of it (what DeCSS
does). Laws prevent you from doing some of these things in the real world,
and pretty soon now laws are going to prevent us from doing that on the
net.
The question of how are they going to find out is stupid. 20
years ago they couldn't trace DNA evidence at a crime scene. They can
now. In 20 years time do you really think they won't have the ability to
enforce the laws which are being made now describing how the internet can
legally work? If we don't stop bitching to ourselves when outside
influences start controlling our sphere of influence then the outside world just
isn't going to care about us any more. Once laws are in place we become irrelevant.
We can bitch and moan all we like to each other but the police and judicial
system are going to keep locking us up, fining us and laughing at how stupid we
are. Don't bitch to each other. Protest to the people who count -
the people that make the laws. If you care about this sort of thing and
haven't sent money to the EFF then you are a hypocrite. If you care about
these laws and haven't written a nice and non-abusive letter to your congressman
or senator then you are a hypocrite.
Stop blowing off steam and do something if you care. Spamming to Usenet
is going to be seen as the equivalent of something like "Well, if we kill
enough niggers then they'll stop making it illegal". Didn't work back
then (thankfully, I might add) and sure as hell won't work now.
Come on here. Kirsch's document is full of blatant bias, misleading references, unverifiable statistics and even blatant lies. This has been debated before and stating it as anything other than an opinionated rant is just fooling yourself.
I'm helping out a friend who is learning programming by correspondence.
As a professional programmer I am amazed by the fact the lecturer is teaching
some incredibly bad programming practices, and requires all programs to be
either DOS executables or EasyWin (Win16) executables compiled with Turbo C++
4.x!!
If you have difficulty believing that an "educational" institution
could be inflicting the horrors of 16 bit DOS/Windows programming on people who
are just learning to code then check out their web site: http://www.infocom.cqu.edu.au/Un its/win2000/85102/
Some things I should point out:
Students are shown how to override the << and >> operators on
their classes to get data from a stream. When doing this they are told
that prompting the user using a hard coded 'cin' or 'cout' is a good idea.
When overloading the stream operators, in some of the lecture notes (Week
4) they completely ignore the stream passed to the override and use cout or
cin directly.
While encouraged to start assignments early they are not given the actual
skills they need until about a week before the assignment is due. In
correspondence work this makes it almost impossible for them to do any work
other than a mad rush in the last few nights.
If there's anything looking back at my own education and looking at what is
happening to others has taught me, it is that Universities exist (in Australia
at least) largely for their own purposes and not for the education of
students. I learned more about programming and computers in my first four
weeks of work than I ever did in five years, one honours degree, and one
bachelor's degree of University. All those five years seem to be good for
is to get my resume past the HR departments and into the interviews.
Porting "the world of bypass backdoors" - NT on this will suck (even after AMD has broken their own rules and made exemptions for it).
Just curious - what makes you think porting NT would be hard? It's been ported to 4 architectures so far and communicates between userland and kernel pretty much with INT 2E.
Of course, if this was just the typical/. anti-M$ rhetoric ignore me.
I got the idea it was mirroring the log drive from the disclosure (which I quoted in my original article):
"Hardware Notes One 9GB 10KRPM disk for OS and paging, 2 for logs, and 4 striped for web pages."
To log to 2 drives, it must be using either some sort of RAID or mirroring. Either way it will cause a small performance hit.
Look, I'm not arguing that TUX is fast. I'm just looking for anything that was different. Hate to be a programmer at MS at the moment - bet they are working around the clock to get IIS 6.0 up to speed.
There should never be a 3x difference on similar hardware between two operating systems which are similarly tuned. Despite each side claiming how much their OS is superior (Mindcraft and then this) there should be some obvious reasons for the discrepancy. Looking closer at the config:
Linux has net.tux.max_cached_filesize = 100000000 Win2k has Inetinfo/Parameters/MaxCachedFileSize=1000000
IIS was only allowed to cache in memory 1M files while TUX could cache 100M files. Possible difference here.
Linux has net.tux.max_backlog = 3000 Win2k has Inetinfo/Parameters/ListenBacklog=1000
IIS cannot have as large a backlog as Linux. Probably not as big an impact.
Linux has 1 disk for OS and logs, 4 disk software RAID0 stripe, using 2MB chunk size, for fileset Win2k has One 9GB 10KRPM disk for OS and paging, 2 for logs, and 4 striped for web pages
Note that software RAID/Mirroring on Win2k for logging is madness - it will kill performance. Linux can log to a single drive. Probably not a great performance impact but hard to tell without performance monitoring.
Linux uses Onboard Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI Win2k uses Dell PERC2
What is the difference here? Perhaps this is significant, but I'm not sure. The disk I/O is very suspicious as the killer and I'm wondering if the PERC2 drivers on Win2k need lots of work. Be interesting to see some performance stats on these.
Ok. I'm trying to defend NT a little and that's suicide on Slashdot. All I can say is despite the collective view here that Linux is better that Win2k, I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks a 3x difference on the same hardware is what is expected.
The PPro would stall if you mixed 8bit/16bit/32bit register uses inside it's rename engine. The P-II and on didn't (well, not just because they are mixed size uses at least). That may seem minor, but it makes a huge diffrence to Win95 and Win98 (and maybe WinME).
I thought the thing that really sped up Win9x on the P2 vs the PPro was the fact that they added segment register caches. Win9x switches segments a lot when compared to code which was designed for a flat memory model and so the CPU spends a lot of time reloading the segment information from the LDT/GDT if there is no cache there (30 or 40 cycles possibly). I was under the impression the rename engine was fairly consistent across the whole P6 architecture.
Generally the biggest problem with converting an MFC program from SDI to MDI is that you've made all sorts of assumptions about your document being the only one in the application, and similar assumptions about your view. If you've been true to the Doc/View architecture, and assuming your MFC code is clean it really isn't that hard to change from one to the other. The easist thing to do is create 2 projects from scratch which are identical except one is SDI and one MDI. Do a diff and see which code is different. It's not a lot - mostly the Application initialisation.
As for MSDev vs Emacs: I've seen both in use where I work and that's on Windows. When given the choice, I prefer to write my code using MSDev because I like the IDE. Even when coding for Linux, I prefer the layout and operation of the system. Then you switch windows and make (assuming you have Samba and share code dirs). Others use Emacs on NT for development.
I've never crashed NT with Dev Studio. Developing on 9x is suicide - you learn to regret it really quickly. Personally I don't mind Win32 development. YMMV of course, but Microsoft really does go out of their way to make things easier for developers. With tools like MSDN on DVD (over 6G of indexed help), Linux's man pages really pale in shame. The only redeeming grace is the "ultimate" documentation - the kernel itself.
but their management team has shown themeselves to be creative and willing to put their balls on the chopping block
I'm not sure where you've got this idea. RAMBUS has only shown creativity in the bigger and bigger lies they can manufacture to show that somehow RAMBUS is faster, cheaper or anything remotely better than DDR-SDRAM. The management team at RAMBUS is worse than the PR team at Microsoft in my opinion for their endless stream of FUD, mininformation and blatant lies.
think about why there is not a HARDWARE equivalent of open source software
If there is an open source solution in Memory then it is most certainly not RAMBUS, but DDR-SDRAM. The DDR spec is openly created for anyone with the manufacturing capabilities to use without the crippling licencing fees charged by RAMBUS. The fact that it is smaller, cooler, cheaper and faster than the equivalent RAMBUS modules and yet somehow RAMBUS and Intel are still peddling their inferior technology smack very much of conspiracy and not of the creativity you suggest.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been in the pipeline for a while and there was plenty of comment on it right here about a year back.
My views on gun ownership extend to something like "Those that believe they can change the government's view through violent means haven't met the US Army yet".
Not to mention that it is a Win9x failure screen and not a Windows 2000 blue screen. I don't think anyone in their right mind would call Win9x stable, would they?
Yeah, I meant the second amendment. Sorry.
;-)
Freedom of speech in Australia is interesting. You have freedom of political speech (including the ability to criticize the government) in law, but not general freedom of speech - the government can legitimately suppress the media on matters of a non-political nature (I believe). This actually isn't a bad thing (IMHO) - you have the freedom of speech you need: the ability to criticize those in power.
As for children shooting each other - you are absolutely correct. I can see the need for firearms in a society and culture such as the US and you have the right to them in law. In Australia there is certainly no need for a private citizen to carry a firearm in public. Personally I support the idea of gun control in the same way you have car control - licences to use and the vehicle itself must be registered to be used, and can only be used legally in designated areas.
As for needing a second amendment for there to be a first, this is numerically stupid. If it was that way around then the second would be first and the first second. The maths just doesn't make sense.
Being ordered to attack civillians who are in the process of throwing out government officials who have used their office to supress the Constitution would be unlawful.
This is true. However, being ordered to attack revolutionist anarchists bent on overthrowing the democratically elected government, which has the mandate of the people by the Constitution is a lawful order. The thing you fail to realise is that by your own Constitution, it is not the people or the military who are the interpreters of the Constitution itself, but the judiciary. An order only has to be believed to be lawful for it to be carried out - a soldier is not a trained lawyer and cannot be expected to act as one (thank God). To overthrow a government which is abusing its office and suppressing the Constitution, according to the Constitution should be done through the legal system. Anyone who suggests a military uprising of the people is either delusional, crazy, naive or has an ulterior motive.
This has to be one of the most stupid ideas I've ever heard. Just how many people are taking up arms against the US Government over the DeCSS or Napster issues? What would happen if someone decided to organize an armed overthrow of the government?
I'll tell you - they would last about 5 seconds. In fact, why don't you take your gun into the court room, or to the white house and see what happens? Bet you don't change the law.
Saying that the first amendment was put in place to facilitate armed overthrow of the elected government is daft. It was put there (if you read your American history) as a safeguard against foreign invasion in a time when communication was somewhat less rapid than it is today.
Personally I like having the right to expect someone else in the street not to be armed in Australia, and I fail to understand why Americans continually deny themselves that right. Of course, you may indeed choose whatever rights you like - that's the point of democracy and I'll help defend democracy even if I don't believe in the specifics of each nation's laws. I just like having the right to cut someone off in traffic accidentally and not have to worry as much about being shot. I like that. If you've never lived here for any length of time then you have no right, and no perspective to criticise our FREE choice to not arm our citizens.
Your comment is incorrect by the simple fact that Win2k exists. If the collective knowledge of how it works does not exist then it is impossible that it was ever written.
The other fact is that it is relatively easy to get a high level view of how Win2k works (despite your unfounded rhetoric to the contrary). Read the book I mentioned in my original post.
Actually, they aren't the ones I was talking about. They are the strawmen generally set up when people don't want to admit bugs that are actually there. Look at these links:
http://kt.linuxcare.com/kernel-traffic/kt20010202_ 105.epl#5
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel /0102.0/0220.html
Maybe your 'summary' was really a strawman and the fact is that Linux is getting complex enough that no one person can fully understand it?
Linus is actually guilty of a fairly major logic error here. Just because he can fix a bug once in Linux doesn't instantly mean the whole source is understood by him, much less actually understood by anyone. You only have to look on Kernel Traffic to see there are still bugs in the 2.4.x kernel (has anyone actually found all the filesystem corruption bugs yet?) that no one is quite sure of the solution to - just none of them are showstoppers.
Nothing in Linus' speech takes anything from Win2k either - it is entirely possible that a similar bug could be found in Win2k and fixed in just as fast a time (ping of death was fixed in under 24 hours for example). That doesn't instantly mean the Win2k source is completely simple - it just means that one bug was fixed quickly.
If you read "Inside Windows 2000 - 3rd edition" you'll start to see that the guts of Win2k actually are fairly well separated, possibly even better than the current Linux kernel. There is a clean separation between most components of the executive and the kernel and if there was a plot printed, my guess would be that it would look more like meatballs than spaghetti - lots of tightly coupled chunks of code with well defined interfaces between them. On a project as large as Win2k there is simply no other way you can effectively work.
Kudos to Linus for fixing a bug in the 2.0 kernel so quickly, but I'm afraid there is just no logical step you can make to the statement that "No one understands NT".
Tom's Hardware (somewhat more reputable than the results discussed here) shows a more moderate improvement in performance, but it is definitely remarkable.
Go to www.tomshardware.com and have a look - get the real picture.
Now why aren't there any Q3A benchmarks??
If you must make snide comments about the Windows Kernel source, read "Inside Windows 2000 - 3rd edition". Has plenty of information from people who have seen the source and is probably a lot more useful than the source code would be anyhow as a guide to how and why Win2000 works the way it does.
Oh, I forgot. You don't care about facts when bashing Windows - this is Slashdot.
I'm having no problems browsing the site from Netscape 4.6 on my Mac. That's about as non-MS as I could manage at the moment. Are you sure about your results, or did you just pick a page from the search engine to get slashdotted?
I don't know about anyone else, but the software packages I manage all have subscription/maintenance agreements. Basically you have the option of paying a certain amount per year and you get the latest versions whenever (and if they ever) come out.
So far we have these agreements on any MS and non-MS software we use because they end up being quite cost effective and easy to maintain as a regular bill rather than a big hit every 2 years or so.
Is this a bad thing? The answer is a resounding NO as long as you still have the option of a non-subscription version that fills your needs.
John Wiltshire
I was just pointing out that it has been obvious that this was the case, and more to the point, HAS been the case since about IE2.0 on Win95. If you've only just noticed it, well, you should pay more attention when browsing.
Bite me. Well actually, don't bite me. It would hurt and probably not taste very good.
John Wiltshire
Open up your favorites. Right click on one of them. Select Properties. Look at the URL. It takes you straight to that address.
Open one of the pre-made bookmarks. Right click on one of them. Select Properties. Look at the URL. What do you know - http://www.microsoft.com/redir?...
Come on, Slashdot. You don't need to do this sort of crap to bash Microsoft. There's plenty of legitimate claims before you have to invent them.
The claim that this is a "victimless" crime, much akin to drug abuse is false. In the view of the entertainment distribution companies (who also control the mainstream media remember) and the judicial system there is a vast difference between drug abuse and the theft of intellectual property. Never forget that despite the "common sense" view that most of us on Slashdot have that there is no theft of IP going on here, the external view and the current legal view is that theft has occurred.
If you can somehow convince me that theft is a victimless crime then maybe I'll agree, but it is no more victimless than photocopying your university textbooks to avoid the cost of buying the books themselves. This is blatant theft and the victim is the publishing house (and occasionally the author). You are correct in saying that the theft is difficult to track down, but no more so than tracking down stolen goods through distribution channels such as pawn shops and the like.
The fact is that while it is currently difficult to enforce, in much the same way prohibition of alcohol was difficult to enforce, it doesn't mean that it is unenforceable. A law has never been repealed (to my knowledge) because of its difficulty to enforce. What usually happens is the police are given more powers to enforce the law. Because the internet is currently a rather uncontrolled (by law officials) medium and you can use anonymous remailers to send things around without them being traced does not mean it will remain this way. Tools like Carnivore and the basic ability to take a warrant out to impound the remailers on suspicion of being used in a crime will make this sort of facility much leaner on the ground. Remember that 20 years ago it would have been enough to wear a hood on your face and gloves on your hands to get away with something like a bank robbery. Today it is much more difficult because the technology of law enforcement has advanced.
If "your hacker is far more sophisticated than your average burglar" can you explain the sophistication behind the spamming of DeCSS to net groups. Sounds like about the sophistication of someone who posts bills on every open wall they can see - rather less than your average burglar.
The civil rights movement has rarely broken laws to push its point. It has protested non-violently in many cases to successfully change bad laws, but it has not distributed illegal material (like DeCSS at the moment) in an effort to push its case. Like I said before, if you really care about this issue then write to someone who will make a difference. Posting DeCSS all over the place just gets you branded as an extremist nut or criminal and you end up doing more harm than good.
Perhaps it is worthwhile pointing out the difference between Napster and DeCSS. Banning Napster is akin to banning an list of phone numbers of people who sell goods. If most of those goods happen to be stolen, does that make Napster bad? Banning DeCSS is like banning crowbars because they might be used to break into houses.
John Wiltshire
Go back a few days and read the suck.com piece on lawyers and the internet.
The internet provides computer oriented people with a wealth of freedom never found before. Suddenly some rules start getting imposed by the external world and we cry to each other that because they don't understand they can't possibly succeed in tying us down. Guess what? Bad news is they can. In the real world you have the freedom to do anything you like. There is nothing physically preventing you from going next door and burning down your neighbour's house if you feel like it. Nothing stops you from creating a nuclear weapon if you have the materials to do it. You have all these freedoms. Of course, nothing stops you from selling an index to where you can pick up goods, of which most are stolen (pretty much what napster does), or photocopying your own books for the hell of it (what DeCSS does). Laws prevent you from doing some of these things in the real world, and pretty soon now laws are going to prevent us from doing that on the net.
The question of how are they going to find out is stupid. 20 years ago they couldn't trace DNA evidence at a crime scene. They can now. In 20 years time do you really think they won't have the ability to enforce the laws which are being made now describing how the internet can legally work? If we don't stop bitching to ourselves when outside influences start controlling our sphere of influence then the outside world just isn't going to care about us any more. Once laws are in place we become irrelevant. We can bitch and moan all we like to each other but the police and judicial system are going to keep locking us up, fining us and laughing at how stupid we are. Don't bitch to each other. Protest to the people who count - the people that make the laws. If you care about this sort of thing and haven't sent money to the EFF then you are a hypocrite. If you care about these laws and haven't written a nice and non-abusive letter to your congressman or senator then you are a hypocrite.
Stop blowing off steam and do something if you care. Spamming to Usenet is going to be seen as the equivalent of something like "Well, if we kill enough niggers then they'll stop making it illegal". Didn't work back then (thankfully, I might add) and sure as hell won't work now.
John Wiltshire
Come on here. Kirsch's document is full of blatant bias, misleading references, unverifiable statistics and even blatant lies. This has been debated before and stating it as anything other than an opinionated rant is just fooling yourself.
I'm helping out a friend who is learning programming by correspondence. As a professional programmer I am amazed by the fact the lecturer is teaching some incredibly bad programming practices, and requires all programs to be either DOS executables or EasyWin (Win16) executables compiled with Turbo C++ 4.x!!
If you have difficulty believing that an "educational" institution could be inflicting the horrors of 16 bit DOS/Windows programming on people who are just learning to code then check out their web site: http://www.infocom.cqu.edu.au/Un its/win2000/85102/
Some things I should point out:
If there's anything looking back at my own education and looking at what is happening to others has taught me, it is that Universities exist (in Australia at least) largely for their own purposes and not for the education of students. I learned more about programming and computers in my first four weeks of work than I ever did in five years, one honours degree, and one bachelor's degree of University. All those five years seem to be good for is to get my resume past the HR departments and into the interviews.
John Wiltshire
Porting "the world of bypass backdoors" - NT on this will suck (even after AMD has broken their own rules and made exemptions for it).
Just curious - what makes you think porting NT would be hard? It's been ported to 4 architectures so far and communicates between userland and kernel pretty much with INT 2E.
Of course, if this was just the typical /. anti-M$ rhetoric ignore me.
I got the idea it was mirroring the log drive from the disclosure (which I quoted in my original article):
"Hardware Notes
One 9GB 10KRPM disk for OS and paging, 2 for logs, and 4 striped for web pages."
To log to 2 drives, it must be using either some sort of RAID or mirroring. Either way it will cause a small performance hit.
Look, I'm not arguing that TUX is fast. I'm just looking for anything that was different. Hate to be a programmer at MS at the moment - bet they are working around the clock to get IIS 6.0 up to speed.
John Wiltshire
Ingo,
Just curious as you seem to be on top of this argument, what do you think causes the 3x speed difference in these benchmarks between IIS and Tux?
Also, can't Win2kAS threads address 3G of user space? I thought this was one of the main differences between Win2kAS and Win2kSVR.
Tux looks b***dy fast. Great work by the way.
John Wiltshire
There should never be a 3x difference on similar hardware between two operating systems which are similarly tuned. Despite each side claiming how much their OS is superior (Mindcraft and then this) there should be some obvious reasons for the discrepancy. Looking closer at the config:
Linux has net.tux.max_cached_filesize = 100000000
Win2k has Inetinfo/Parameters/MaxCachedFileSize=1000000
IIS was only allowed to cache in memory 1M files while TUX could cache 100M files. Possible difference here.
Linux has net.tux.max_backlog = 3000
Win2k has Inetinfo/Parameters/ListenBacklog=1000
IIS cannot have as large a backlog as Linux. Probably not as big an impact.
Linux has 1 disk for OS and logs, 4 disk software RAID0 stripe, using 2MB chunk size, for fileset
Win2k has One 9GB 10KRPM disk for OS and paging, 2 for logs, and 4 striped for web pages
Note that software RAID/Mirroring on Win2k for logging is madness - it will kill performance. Linux can log to a single drive. Probably not a great performance impact but hard to tell without performance monitoring.
Linux uses Onboard Adaptec AIC-7899 SCSI
Win2k uses Dell PERC2
What is the difference here? Perhaps this is significant, but I'm not sure. The disk I/O is very suspicious as the killer and I'm wondering if the PERC2 drivers on Win2k need lots of work. Be interesting to see some performance stats on these.
Ok. I'm trying to defend NT a little and that's suicide on Slashdot. All I can say is despite the collective view here that Linux is better that Win2k, I find it hard to believe that anyone thinks a 3x difference on the same hardware is what is expected.
John Wiltshire
The PPro would stall if you mixed 8bit/16bit/32bit register uses inside it's rename engine. The P-II and on didn't (well, not just because they are mixed size uses at least). That may seem minor, but it makes a huge diffrence to Win95 and Win98 (and maybe WinME).
I thought the thing that really sped up Win9x on the P2 vs the PPro was the fact that they added segment register caches. Win9x switches segments a lot when compared to code which was designed for a flat memory model and so the CPU spends a lot of time reloading the segment information from the LDT/GDT if there is no cache there (30 or 40 cycles possibly). I was under the impression the rename engine was fairly consistent across the whole P6 architecture.
John Wiltshire
Generally the biggest problem with converting an MFC program from SDI to MDI is that you've made all sorts of assumptions about your document being the only one in the application, and similar assumptions about your view. If you've been true to the Doc/View architecture, and assuming your MFC code is clean it really isn't that hard to change from one to the other. The easist thing to do is create 2 projects from scratch which are identical except one is SDI and one MDI. Do a diff and see which code is different. It's not a lot - mostly the Application initialisation.
As for MSDev vs Emacs: I've seen both in use where I work and that's on Windows. When given the choice, I prefer to write my code using MSDev because I like the IDE. Even when coding for Linux, I prefer the layout and operation of the system. Then you switch windows and make (assuming you have Samba and share code dirs). Others use Emacs on NT for development.
I've never crashed NT with Dev Studio. Developing on 9x is suicide - you learn to regret it really quickly. Personally I don't mind Win32 development. YMMV of course, but Microsoft really does go out of their way to make things easier for developers. With tools like MSDN on DVD (over 6G of indexed help), Linux's man pages really pale in shame. The only redeeming grace is the "ultimate" documentation - the kernel itself.
I will say it again: YMMV.
(Brace for flames - this is Slashdot).
John Wiltshire
but their management team has shown themeselves to be creative and willing to put their balls on the chopping block
I'm not sure where you've got this idea. RAMBUS has only shown creativity in the bigger and bigger lies they can manufacture to show that somehow RAMBUS is faster, cheaper or anything remotely better than DDR-SDRAM. The management team at RAMBUS is worse than the PR team at Microsoft in my opinion for their endless stream of FUD, mininformation and blatant lies.
think about why there is not a HARDWARE equivalent of open source software
If there is an open source solution in Memory then it is most certainly not RAMBUS, but DDR-SDRAM. The DDR spec is openly created for anyone with the manufacturing capabilities to use without the crippling licencing fees charged by RAMBUS. The fact that it is smaller, cooler, cheaper and faster than the equivalent RAMBUS modules and yet somehow RAMBUS and Intel are still peddling their inferior technology smack very much of conspiracy and not of the creativity you suggest.
John Wiltshire