You're forgetting that all distro CDs may be freely copied.
In our office, one person buys the lastest disks (usually a different person each time, and this includes the BSDs) and everyone else gets a CD-R copy if they want one.
That's as near to zero-cost as makes any difference.
But the experienced sysadmins and free/open-source developers are doing precisely what you suggest on Slashdot, and the academic-style Internet old-timers with their well-reasoned logical posts likewise I expect, whatever their diverse experiences.
It is only the rest of the posters that are doing the opposite of what you suggest. Frankly, "rabble" is too generous a term for them.
You may be right, but as none of the people that I know with top-end audiophile systems rate their turntables anymore, I extrapolated that it was a rare affliction. Maybe my acquaintances aren't typical. Maybe yours aren't. Who knows?!
All of those liberal, free thinking European countries you describe are themselves Christian, and the vast majority of people here see themselves as trying to live by basically Christian moral values also.
Wrong. Speaking as a Brit, the vast majority of people here see themselves as just getting on with what their commonsense tells them is OK. Their only contact with religion is when they hear on the news that yet another Catholic or Protestant has been murdered on the streets of Belfast, and they certainly don't identify with it. If anything, it reinforces the view that religion is a dark force, or at least a misused one.
Religion had its day, but that has long gone with the new generation. Of course, some fans will always remain, just as there are fans of basket weaving and coin rubbing, but you musn't confuse marginal niches with the main direction of a culture.
The writer made some really silly points, like the Transmeta hardware being open-sourced and given away for free. It's silly because you can't replicate hardware for nothing, at least not until nanotech reaches maturity. But a few of his conclusions were sensible, despite poor reasoning in arriving at them.
The Code Morphing Software *can* be replicated at zero cost, so the argument then hinges on whether you understand the positive effects of open sourcing or are tied to the traditional views of proprietary developers.
I don't have any doubt that Linus believes in free software, and if he does then he will have fought long and hard to get Code Morphing source released. It is very likely that he simply failed to convince the suits.
That's tragic for Transmeta, in my view, because the reasons that they gave for keeping it closed seem totally flawed: they would not lose the ability to change the underlying hardware arbitrarily, because they would need to integrate only those changes they see fit into their internal version, and on releasing a new chip then the onus would be on everyone else to catch up. No, that's just an excuse put out by the suits.
Open sourcing the Code Morphing Software would be extremely good for Transmeta: the quality of their code would improve for the usual OSS reasons, it would have numerous new features added by the world's gurus, the external development would cost them nothing, it would get ported to dozens of non-x86 instruction sets very rapidly, and perhaps most importantly of all, thousands of developers would buy into the CMS idea straight away. That's a priceless package.
And of course, meanwhile the only people to supply the underlying hardware would be Transmeta. They would become collosal, the next Intel but bigger, since their hardware can in principle subsume that of all other computer manufacturers.
Instead they're going to die in a few years' time without trace, just because their suits don't understand OSS. A pity.
... and that's not a joke. Each time it caused much hilarity at work, but eventually we got tired of the fun and just reformatted all the "company standard O/S's" into Linux, and we've never looked back since.
Apart from NT, I've never known any other system to crash while in its idle loop.
Solaris uses a journaled filesystem so a fsck is not too much of an issue
You only get a full journaling filesystem if you buy the Veritas product on top. I think DiskSuite comes free so you don't need to pay extra for aggregating and mirroring disks (that works a treat), but I don't recall DiskSuite offering much in the way of competition for Veritas in its trans metadevices.
Maybe Sun should incorporate that recently released IBM JFS for Linux into its own base product.
Most notibly Sun's GBIC (interface between the box and an external disk array) is a total piece of crap. I've seen entire arrays get corrupted because of a GBIC failure,
Yes indeed! However, I seem to recall a Sun hardware engineer that came to replace ours saying that they were bought in from IBM. Either way, *crap* seems to be the right word for those particular components.
We run very large numbers of Sun boxes of all sizes, and occasionally Sun gets it wrong in a big way. The problem might indeed be in their QA division, as you suggest. However, once the problem is identified, they pull out all the stops in fixing it, at least for big customers like ourselves. That's in my experience.
Don't forget that QA is a statistical thing though. Good QA can't make up for lousy engineering, and I think it's fair to say that on the whole, Sun engineering is good. It's almost certainly better than PC engineering, but then you have to pay massively more than for PCs and it's difficult to justify that fact against the intangibles of better engineering. I think Sun are going to have a difficult time in the next few years because of that.
Yes, this forum is biased, but then, Microsoft propaganda is biased, don't you think?
Since the zero-cost base O/S means that Linux sales will never be able to support a marketing budget of any size, it's only right that other forums take over that role, like Slashdot does.
The difference though is that large numbers of sysadmins of large systems relate their horror stories here, so even the rabble Slashdot element gains a bias based on real life experience in large systems.
And that doesn't happen in pure propaganda forums. What you get here is bias, yes, but it's a clued-up bias.
Why do you seem to believe that Slashdot people are so stupid that they would fail to find any sort of historical link between Windows and Win2k?
They don't need to try out Win2k personally to realize that when a new product is derived from an old, hopelessly buggy product, then the new product is highly likely to share those same traits.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that. Only a total newbie in the field of O/S's would believe that some sort of miracle happened during the development of Microsoft's latest gem. Sorry, no flying pigs, no miracles.
Nope, the typical stance of Slashdot posters is based on the horror stories with Windows which they are relating constantly. That then creates a bias, and a very understandable one.
Your own pro-Windows bias is probably based on the absence of pesonal horror stories, otherwise you wouldn't be foolish enough to stay with a flawed product. Good for you, you've been lucky. Unfortunately my organization hasn't, so the Slashdot stance rings a very strong bell here.
Your time will come. I hope for your sake that your own company survives the experience, because that's not a foregone conclusion.
Win2k is derived from previous versions of Windows, so it's totally reasonable for people to believe that Win2k will be as bad as the versions which they already know intimately. In fact, it's highly likely to be worse, at least in its initial releases, because it has many new bits which will not have the benefit of long-term testing in the field. As far as reliability goes, it's a case of the worst of the old plus the worst of the unknown. It's in the nature of the beast, and there is no reason to believe overwise at this time.
[My experience of Windows flakiness is based on NT, which is just plain appalling. Compared to our Sun boxes that just stay up forever, NT is just a toy, or worse. Children's toys that were that bad would be taken off the market as unsafe.]
So your argument is poor, little different to "Who says you'd die if you were run over by a train, you haven't tried it yet." Bleh.
The lego one doesn't hint at the subject matter at all.
Or perhaps a music or hifi or A/V icon would be more appropriate, ie. to avoid offending those who don't think vinyl is a retro topic, particularly scratching DJs.
... I do agree that too many people take the title "Christian" without having clue 1 about what Jesus meant.
That is seriously funny! If you think you know what Jesus meant then you're blissfully unaware of the vast distance in time between then and now, the huge uncertainties in how faithfully the message has survived its passage down the ages, the immensity of the misunderstandings that result from the cultural differences over 2000 years, the sheer imperfection of the documentary record, and the maliciousness and self-serving of the multiple human hands that have transported the alleged words of Jesus across the millenia into the world of today. Alas, digital signatures weren't in common use back then.
No, I'm afraid not, you do not know what Jesus meant either. All you can do is believe in a particular package of values that the frail hand of Man has delivered to you, and have faith that it might at least in part represent what Jesus might have meant so long ago.
I believe that religion has no place in politics, education, or technology, but the moral ethics taught by Christianity should be present everywhere.
That's a very narrow point of view. There are numerous areas where Christian morality is widely regarded as rooted in the dark ages and totally unacceptable today. The classic example is of course in its attitude to sex and nudity. Most of Europe is rather relaxed in this area nowadays, and as a result Christian moral ethics are about as useful and relevant on European beaches as the Victorian aversion to the sight of a bare female ankle is relevant on the high street.
Sorry, but Christian morality is NOT the static universal that you think it is. It's just a set of value judgements belonging to a place and a time, and like all value judgements, they are not relevant in a different place or a different time.
In particular, the US seems to be stuck in a sex/nudity time warp of its own from which it may not emerge for a small eternity because of the political power of its bible bashers. Well, that's a local hangup. Please don't try to export it to the rest of the world.
The appearance of Java in Slashdot banners is *not* a welcome new feature! Not only does it add to the page load times, but it kills off a large proportion of the Netscapes currently in use on Linux.
I have three different versions of Netscape running on RedHat 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1, and they *all* die during Java loads. (Yes, I *have* fixed the RH font path omission.)
I know the problem is Netscape's and not Slashdot's, but since Netscape is the browser most used on Linux, the end effect worldwide of this introduction of Java really sucks for Slashdot fans.
You are licensed to watch the DVD, on a licensed player. That's the missing element.
There is no such restriction declared on any of my DVDs, neither on the packing nor inside.
If such a restriction were visible on a DVD at the point of sale, I would not buy it, in the same way as I choose not to buy any Region 2 disks despite living in Region 2 (I regard the implied censorship and time and price fixing unacceptable). But there is no restriction of the type you mention declared on the DVDs on sale, and I'm not surprised, as it would limit their sales.
In all of this, there appears to be something missing: it is *WE* that keep the studios in profit, yet *our* viewing requirements never get a say. It's time we did something about it.
True, but a LARGE part of that is - sadly me thinks - sex/porn related.
Just because one doesn't find sex & porn interesting, educational or uplifting oneself, doesn't mean to say that it's any less worthy of bandwidth on network news, any less deserving of protection as a customer service, or any better or worse in accordance with some hypothetical universal morality or absolute value judgement. There are no such universals, despite the hoards of coercive moralists that continually try to impose their own particular values in place of our own.
Personally I prefer to take part in discussions about object orientation, kernel architecture, nanotech and futurism, but that doesn't mean that my own preferred interests are in any way "better" than porn is for those that want it. And for what it's worth, I know that many people would consider my technical interests either a complete waste of time, plain boring, exploitative of the third world, or destructive to the environment of the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
You're forgetting that all distro CDs may be freely copied.
In our office, one person buys the lastest disks (usually a different person each time, and this includes the BSDs) and everyone else gets a CD-R copy if they want one.
That's as near to zero-cost as makes any difference.
Well said.
Slashdot delivers news of course, but it's relatively poor at that. Slashdot's THREADS are what make Slashdot the site it is, nothing else.
You're 100% right.
But the experienced sysadmins and free/open-source developers are doing precisely what you suggest on Slashdot, and the academic-style Internet old-timers with their well-reasoned logical posts likewise I expect, whatever their diverse experiences.
It is only the rest of the posters that are doing the opposite of what you suggest. Frankly, "rabble" is too generous a term for them.
You assume Konstant is speaking as a Microsoft user, but he's not. He works for Microsoft--with their word processor team, I believe.
:-)
That's hillarious! Thanks for spotting it.
You may be right, but as none of the people that I know with top-end audiophile systems rate their turntables anymore, I extrapolated that it was a rare affliction. Maybe my acquaintances aren't typical. Maybe yours aren't. Who knows?!
All of those liberal, free thinking European countries you describe are themselves Christian, and the vast majority of people here see themselves as trying to live by basically Christian moral values also.
Wrong. Speaking as a Brit, the vast majority of people here see themselves as just getting on with what their commonsense tells them is OK. Their only contact with religion is when they hear on the news that yet another Catholic or Protestant has been murdered on the streets of Belfast, and they certainly don't identify with it. If anything, it reinforces the view that religion is a dark force, or at least a misused one.
Religion had its day, but that has long gone with the new generation. Of course, some fans will always remain, just as there are fans of basket weaving and coin rubbing, but you musn't confuse marginal niches with the main direction of a culture.
Yeah, sure, there's no disputing that.
Let me rephrase my point then. NT is the only O/S I know that crashes while doing bugger-all. Happier?
The writer made some really silly points, like the Transmeta hardware being open-sourced and given away for free. It's silly because you can't replicate hardware for nothing, at least not until nanotech reaches maturity. But a few of his conclusions were sensible, despite poor reasoning in arriving at them.
The Code Morphing Software *can* be replicated at zero cost, so the argument then hinges on whether you understand the positive effects of open sourcing or are tied to the traditional views of proprietary developers.
I don't have any doubt that Linus believes in free software, and if he does then he will have fought long and hard to get Code Morphing source released. It is very likely that he simply failed to convince the suits.
That's tragic for Transmeta, in my view, because the reasons that they gave for keeping it closed seem totally flawed: they would not lose the ability to change the underlying hardware arbitrarily, because they would need to integrate only those changes they see fit into their internal version, and on releasing a new chip then the onus would be on everyone else to catch up. No, that's just an excuse put out by the suits.
Open sourcing the Code Morphing Software would be extremely good for Transmeta: the quality of their code would improve for the usual OSS reasons, it would have numerous new features added by the world's gurus, the external development would cost them nothing, it would get ported to dozens of non-x86 instruction sets very rapidly, and perhaps most importantly of all, thousands of developers would buy into the CMS idea straight away. That's a priceless package.
And of course, meanwhile the only people to supply the underlying hardware would be Transmeta. They would become collosal, the next Intel but bigger, since their hardware can in principle subsume that of all other computer manufacturers.
Instead they're going to die in a few years' time without trace, just because their suits don't understand OSS. A pity.
... and that's not a joke. Each time it caused much hilarity at work, but eventually we got tired of the fun and just reformatted all the "company standard O/S's" into Linux, and we've never looked back since.
Apart from NT, I've never known any other system to crash while in its idle loop.
Solaris uses a journaled filesystem so a fsck is not too much of an issue
You only get a full journaling filesystem if you buy the Veritas product on top. I think DiskSuite comes free so you don't need to pay extra for aggregating and mirroring disks (that works a treat), but I don't recall DiskSuite offering much in the way of competition for Veritas in its trans metadevices.
Maybe Sun should incorporate that recently released IBM JFS for Linux into its own base product.
Most notibly Sun's GBIC (interface between the box and an external disk array) is a total piece of crap. I've seen entire arrays get corrupted because of a GBIC failure,
Yes indeed! However, I seem to recall a Sun hardware engineer that came to replace ours saying that they were bought in from IBM. Either way, *crap* seems to be the right word for those particular components.
You missed a key word: "occasionally".
We run very large numbers of Sun boxes of all sizes, and occasionally Sun gets it wrong in a big way. The problem might indeed be in their QA division, as you suggest. However, once the problem is identified, they pull out all the stops in fixing it, at least for big customers like ourselves. That's in my experience.
Don't forget that QA is a statistical thing though. Good QA can't make up for lousy engineering, and I think it's fair to say that on the whole, Sun engineering is good. It's almost certainly better than PC engineering, but then you have to pay massively more than for PCs and it's difficult to justify that fact against the intangibles of better engineering. I think Sun are going to have a difficult time in the next few years because of that.
Yes, this forum is biased, but then, Microsoft propaganda is biased, don't you think?
Since the zero-cost base O/S means that Linux sales will never be able to support a marketing budget of any size, it's only right that other forums take over that role, like Slashdot does.
The difference though is that large numbers of sysadmins of large systems relate their horror stories here, so even the rabble Slashdot element gains a bias based on real life experience in large systems.
And that doesn't happen in pure propaganda forums. What you get here is bias, yes, but it's a clued-up bias.
Why do you seem to believe that Slashdot people are so stupid that they would fail to find any sort of historical link between Windows and Win2k?
They don't need to try out Win2k personally to realize that when a new product is derived from an old, hopelessly buggy product, then the new product is highly likely to share those same traits.
It doesn't take a genius to understand that. Only a total newbie in the field of O/S's would believe that some sort of miracle happened during the development of Microsoft's latest gem. Sorry, no flying pigs, no miracles.
Nope, the typical stance of Slashdot posters is based on the horror stories with Windows which they are relating constantly. That then creates a bias, and a very understandable one.
Your own pro-Windows bias is probably based on the absence of pesonal horror stories, otherwise you wouldn't be foolish enough to stay with a flawed product. Good for you, you've been lucky. Unfortunately my organization hasn't, so the Slashdot stance rings a very strong bell here.
Your time will come. I hope for your sake that your own company survives the experience, because that's not a foregone conclusion.
Win2k is derived from previous versions of Windows, so it's totally reasonable for people to believe that Win2k will be as bad as the versions which they already know intimately. In fact, it's highly likely to be worse, at least in its initial releases, because it has many new bits which will not have the benefit of long-term testing in the field. As far as reliability goes, it's a case of the worst of the old plus the worst of the unknown. It's in the nature of the beast, and there is no reason to believe overwise at this time.
[My experience of Windows flakiness is based on NT, which is just plain appalling. Compared to our Sun boxes that just stay up forever, NT is just a toy, or worse. Children's toys that were that bad would be taken off the market as unsafe.]
So your argument is poor, little different to "Who says you'd die if you were run over by a train, you haven't tried it yet." Bleh.
I seem to recall that 90% or more of human DNA is identical to that of everything that came before us, say, dinosaurs.
So, presumably any moment now someone will get prosecuted for some of Godzy's mayhem.
That's a good point which I hadn't considered before. Yes, there must be quite a few such uses for turntables yet.
:-)
However, the MAJOR use of new turntables (by numbers sold) is still by DJs, whether you like them or not.
The lego one doesn't hint at the subject matter at all.
Or perhaps a music or hifi or A/V icon would be more appropriate, ie. to avoid offending those who don't think vinyl is a retro topic, particularly scratching DJs.
... I do agree that too many people take the title "Christian" without having clue 1 about what Jesus meant.
That is seriously funny! If you think you know what Jesus meant then you're blissfully unaware of the vast distance in time between then and now, the huge uncertainties in how faithfully the message has survived its passage down the ages, the immensity of the misunderstandings that result from the cultural differences over 2000 years, the sheer imperfection of the documentary record, and the maliciousness and self-serving of the multiple human hands that have transported the alleged words of Jesus across the millenia into the world of today. Alas, digital signatures weren't in common use back then.
No, I'm afraid not, you do not know what Jesus meant either. All you can do is believe in a particular package of values that the frail hand of Man has delivered to you, and have faith that it might at least in part represent what Jesus might have meant so long ago.
You write:
I believe that religion has no place in politics, education, or technology, but the moral ethics taught by Christianity should be present everywhere.
That's a very narrow point of view. There are numerous areas where Christian morality is widely regarded as rooted in the dark ages and totally unacceptable today. The classic example is of course in its attitude to sex and nudity. Most of Europe is rather relaxed in this area nowadays, and as a result Christian moral ethics are about as useful and relevant on European beaches as the Victorian aversion to the sight of a bare female ankle is relevant on the high street.
Sorry, but Christian morality is NOT the static universal that you think it is. It's just a set of value judgements belonging to a place and a time, and like all value judgements, they are not relevant in a different place or a different time.
In particular, the US seems to be stuck in a sex/nudity time warp of its own from which it may not emerge for a small eternity because of the political power of its bible bashers. Well, that's a local hangup. Please don't try to export it to the rest of the world.
The appearance of Java in Slashdot banners is *not* a welcome new feature! Not only does it add to the page load times, but it kills off a large proportion of the Netscapes currently in use on Linux.
I have three different versions of Netscape running on RedHat 5.2, 6.0, and 6.1, and they *all* die during Java loads. (Yes, I *have* fixed the RH font path omission.)
I know the problem is Netscape's and not Slashdot's, but since Netscape is the browser most used on Linux, the end effect worldwide of this introduction of Java really sucks for Slashdot fans.
You are licensed to watch the DVD, on a licensed player. That's the missing element.
There is no such restriction declared on any of my DVDs, neither on the packing nor inside.
If such a restriction were visible on a DVD at the point of sale, I would not buy it, in the same way as I choose not to buy any Region 2 disks despite living in Region 2 (I regard the implied censorship and time and price fixing unacceptable). But there is no restriction of the type you mention declared on the DVDs on sale, and I'm not surprised, as it would limit their sales.
In all of this, there appears to be something missing: it is *WE* that keep the studios in profit, yet *our* viewing requirements never get a say. It's time we did something about it.
True, but a LARGE part of that is - sadly me thinks - sex/porn related.
Just because one doesn't find sex & porn interesting, educational or uplifting oneself, doesn't mean to say that it's any less worthy of bandwidth on network news, any less deserving of protection as a customer service, or any better or worse in accordance with some hypothetical universal morality or absolute value judgement. There are no such universals, despite the hoards of coercive moralists that continually try to impose their own particular values in place of our own.
Personally I prefer to take part in discussions about object orientation, kernel architecture, nanotech and futurism, but that doesn't mean that my own preferred interests are in any way "better" than porn is for those that want it. And for what it's worth, I know that many people would consider my technical interests either a complete waste of time, plain boring, exploitative of the third world, or destructive to the environment of the planet.
So, to each his/her own.
After all, almost no one coming online these days even knows that DNS exists.
;-)