Technically, planets are orbited by satellites and there is but one Moon, the largest narual satellite of the Earth.
I don't get the problem? First, start off with the idea that a planet must be orbiting a star... similar to how moons are defined as orbiting a planet
And I do stress technically. In Chemistry, physics and even lowely IT humans use specialized jargon and words with precise definitions. It's like a network protocol, if you going to exchange information about something it would be nice to have the schema understand that information. Otherwise it's just a bunch of useless data. Crypography is all about hiding information: turning it into raw data by obscuring the schema, lowering the (apperent) information content of information exchanges to that of entropy. Alchemists used elaborate symbolic schemes to retard discovery of their secrets. Chemistry took off when people started aggreeing on the definition of what to call the various chemicals, lab equipment and common lab tasks.
Then the article mentions the possibility of having planet sized objects orbiting each other the same way binary stars orbit one another. OK, make that a seperate category. After that just define the mass need to be called a planet and be done with it. I'm sure there are plenty of other scenarios out there that need to be defined, but the basic rules don't seem difficult to set up.
But that's not sexy or sleek or marketing friendly. If you are going to sell people tourist packages what sounds better: trip the the fourth satelite of Jupiter or trip to the Jovian Moon Callisto, large enought to be a planet in it's own right? Scientists what excact definitions of their labels, usually with clear methods of determing when and what to apply those labels. Romantics want to daydream about sailing their light ships past the shores of the planet Pluto, minor status be damned.
But since he thinks the problem is that "there are not enough engineers with the appropriate skill sets"
Not hardly. The problem really is "there are no engineers cheap enough and with the appropriate skill sets." When was the last time you saw a job requiring Senior level engineering skills, but only offering fresh-out-of-college pay?
FTA:
"without H-1B visas, we would have economic dislocation," Cresanti said.
Oh poo hoo, we have to pay top dollar for top quality says industry shrill. Instead, how about we import some cheap labor and dangle VISA restructions over their head to keep them working like slaves?
You want the skill$ you hand over the bill$. What ever happened to paying a good days wages for a good days work? Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford his new cars. The money he paid out came right back into his pocket because he through globally and invested locally. If you keep pouring money into $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY don't be surpised when their highly trained employees cost as much as local ones. (HINT: rising wages <--> rising standard of living.)
Again, FTA:
"Math and science are ingrained. We're a country of laws and men. They're a country of engineers."
says the man with a Polical Science degree. You won't get any argument about that from me, though. The No. 1 concern of politicos when discussion H1-B's and international trade is pushing our lawyer-based society (e.g. claiming patents = invention and lawsuits = income) on China. The irony in that be hip deep.
Management can either enable employees or get out of the way. If you look at your workforce and think 'they're undertrained, I wonder if I can replace them with equally undertrained but cheaper forgein imports.' Which one are you doing?
It still sounds like a GPL violation to me. Now, we have to watch what FSF does. They own the C library that literally every program on Novell Linux uses.
Novell has had several long standing lawsuits over technology used by Microsoft. This clears those out of the way. This is not exactly a new business or legal process. The GPL can't be used to prevent Novell from sharing Linux with Microsoft. (I'd assume that downloading an opensuse.org source DVD would have been cheaper.) As long as the GPL parts are licensed and re-distributed under the GPL there is nothing the FSF can do.
Microsoft has their own C library. A C library that has been proven to support most userland UNIX utilities. With enough patches you could ship SuSE with something other than glibc (that engineering feat is left as an exercise for the reader.) Not that I would want to call SuSE 'Linux,' let alone GNU/Linux if such a horrible thing came about.
The biggest worry is that Novell pollutes open source projects with known patent-infringing code. Or that several large patents are being violated by FSF's C library and Linus's kernel and SCO just wasn't smart enough to find them. Linus et al had tried to play innocent by not looking at any patents while developing kernel code. Unforunately, just because you never saw widget X and independently developed it later the holder of the patent papers still wins in court. It just makes is easier when the patent holder can show you ripped off his designs directly. Either way, it might be prudent to watch the code checkins from @novell.com as if they came from @microsoft.com.
Furthermore, a lot of the GNU/Linux libraries important to a GUI shop such as Microsoft, such at GTK, are LGPL on Linux - not GPL. Microsoft can write Office against them and sell the binaries without so much as a line of Microsoft source code distributed. Far be it from me to be the first to point out that you can compile and sell traditional, proprietary applications on Linux. I hear this little company called ID Software does this a lot (it even ports some apps to Micosoft Windows the last time I checked.)
Solaris turned BSD into a commercial closed-source UNIX because the BSD license lets you do that. This is the danger that people warn about with LGPL software and it's lack of "viral" teeth. Microsoft could turn SuSE into another Xenix via this hole. Consider the competition in the market for commercial 'Enterprise grade' Linux and the potential for the community to cut off a pariah. Infecting SuSE would kill it off in the process. One less competitor; killed from the inside by a bad case of Mono and on the outside by public fear of software patents.
I've used Google search to find all sorts of code snippets over the years,
Back in the day, being someone that 'asked the internet' for any non-trivial information was considered n00bish. Now teh Intarweb is all-knowing and all-seeing[1].
These sites have been around a while (in Internet time) and specialize in source code search[2].
A good 3/5s of my help for people in Linux starts with Google'ing on error messages, #defines, and name of programmers in sourcecode[3]. Without reliable searching on error message there are some things in Linux I would never have been able to do; from fixing obscure errors with propreitary ATI graphics installers to debugging PHP installation wonkiness. That being said, Internet forums, How-to forge and Wikipedia are no substitution for good API level documention[4].
How many programmers left your names and email references in your source code comments? How long do you think it will be before a Spammer starts vacuuming those up? What percent of larry.wall@perl.com's incomming email is SPAM? Is it time to think about using throw away emails for those comments?
---- 1. Apparently most of what we know concerns advertsiments for 'reproduction enhancers' and most of what we (want to) see is pr0n.
2. Okay, planet-source-code.com is a tacky site, but their code search bar is at the top of the page before the hideious streams of click-vert spam.
3. I hate formus that expect me to subscribe and/or pay-per-view for 3rd rate community submited partial-solutions for issues that don't even match my problem half the time.
4. Perl has POD. Javadoc comes with Java. Doxygen exists for a reason. No, these are not subsitutions for usage examples, design documents or functional specifications.
>I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
You just described the endgame for Sharepoint. Once upon a time, buying a copy of MS Word meant you could write letters to grandma on your PC. In the future, you will be able to collaborate with Gandma, via an Xbox Live style 'family' service, on a scrapbook of what went on during your last vacation, childbirth, marriage, etc. The thin clients application you might buy at the store would be nothing more than a way to track your license usage.
Today you can walk down any small marketplace in China and buy 'real' Windows XP and Office XP for less than a cup of water at a Starbucks in the USA. Microsoft looks at the WoW model and sees a Citrix Server in every garage and money pouring to Redmond from every desktop. Joe Shmoe on the street will take whatever Microsoft gives them (unless the curent version is 'good enough'.) The risks are how to sell this to corporate America, Europe and Asia.
Why would an Account want to use a subscription editor? Maybe it came in a shrink wrapped server that you 'just plug in' and let dial home to Microsoft for self service. Why would a lawyer? Maybe it has a backed-up verifiable 'paper trail' for your documents vetted by a 3rd party. Why would middle to C-level management? Because they already do subscription for so many other services in the form of per-seat licensing. This is just a tiny step from per-seat to per-use.
However, it will by a true dystopia for data exchange. Soon not only is my data at the mercy of Microsoft's patching their own server to repair this week's h4>0r attack, but also that my data is in a proprietary program which won't even let me take screenshots to pull it out. Google got rich connecting people to stuff other people made. Microsoft got rich helping people make some of that stuff. Now Microsoft wants to do both. With ClippySense AdWindows or whatever model, this is a potential cash cow. Just ask the RIAA: is better to own the content, the distribution network or both?
Why not just do your job and fix their computer like they asked you to. Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
A waitress last night spent 5 minutes trying to convince me that I needed to buy pie. It was a more relaxed atmosphere than 'my PC is broke, fix it.' However, upsell is an important fact of life. You can order everything on the McDonadls Menu and get ask if you want more with that. That's part of why McDonalds sells to billions of people (who are steadily getting fatter.)
If you are not willing to upsell OSS to clients, don't be in the OSS game at all. I and others are will to risk 'file assocation issues' and people given bad word of mouth. For every friend that had a problem with firefox, etc there should be a dozen replaying 'funny, it works for great for me.'
Your question is funny: he didn't metion specifically what people asked him to do. If he had offered all this free software to people I doubt someone would turn him down. Do you think people pay their computer savy 'friends' to fix their PC never get tons of pirated software on it for free? People sometimes rate the support they get from guys like this based on the amount of free pirated software he is willing to install. Every small time PC repair man I know has a library of copyright neutered install disks ready to go and improve you Windows experience.
What this guy is doing is not only legal but also how everyone else sells stuff for a living. Why should FOSS, becuase it's free, be any different?
Wizards are like many UI constructs; they are often abused but they can be very useful. Access data import Wizards, installation Wizards, Visual Studio database creation Wizards, etc.
I couldn't help but notive Rule 6: Aero Wizards. The screenshot of an Aero Wizard resembles the GNOME wizards from Anjuta[1]. They have Similar title bar pacement, similar boarder spacing for elements, etc. But then, both Aero and GNOME inherit a lot from the layout expected of a 'Wizard.'[2] I guess Wizards, like most desktop metaphors used to enforce a particular workflow, experience convergant evolution.[3]
Microsoft recommending compressible PNG's for icons embedded in.EXEs? That's a nice touch, though, considering IE's[4] initial lack of PNG support back in the burn-all-gifs days. Hopefully that will help with icon extrctors when I install Windows software with Wine.
Icons This content hasn't been written yet. Please check back later for updated guidelines.
If I had to decide, I'd also select the web. Email is one of many communication modes available today (and its functionality is easily emulated elsehow), but when it comes to information collection/dissemination, the web is really unique.
What is the difference between an http: and a mailto: in the scheme of things?
A Wiki can be used for email-like communications. What is the difference from PHPboard forum websites and google groups (besides SPAM, pr0n and security vulnerabilities?) Heck, the customer comment fortune page at ThinkGeek has been used/abused/repurposed as a forum.
The article seemed to be more about passive information collection (TV model) vs. interactive (Internet model) of communication. Many of the arguments against email suported the idealistic notion that face to face contact is always better (Hint: email = paper trail.) Unforuntately, as applications on teh Intarweb, both the world wide web and the network of email relays are communication tools. You can put up a website and so can I. With our browsers and a lot of page reloading we can have a nearly realtime, if akward conversation. Likewise, I can subscribe to a mailing list which runs a bot to scrape webpages and deliver them to my HTML enabled mail client (insert rant about security here.) While not as interactive or freeform as casual surfing on the web, am I somehow missing something in that my HTML is being delivered via RFC 2821 (SMTP) in instead of RFC 2616 (HTTP?)
Both the web and email, with MySpace/Geocities/AOL and Viagra/Sandford Wallace/AOL included, are killer applications. Today I'd say they were seperate but cleaverly intertiwned where people need or want new views on the conversation that is the Internet.
From the article:
"That is quite a choice," says Keith Rosenberg. "Being an IT geek, both are critical to my job and I really cannot do without either.... So I would get rid of both and get a job as a vacation tester!".
Then, perhaps the only way to win is to not play the game?
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function.
Actually, Tuffte talkes about this very phenomina using terms familiar to anyone in design: affordances. Affordances are learned aspects of a particular domain. Affordances, as Tufte has touched upon in his design for information clairty are to be used, not avoided. Everyone had to learn what MP3 meant. Everyone had to learn how to read a chart (or, if they weren't a jock on a fast road to CEO at Daddy's firm, fail High School geometry.)
For example, I am a big fan of functional naming. Instead of a variable named $CORNED_BEEF I would use $HASH_PIVOT. However, if you are an ESL like 95% of the world, it won't matter what you call your variables becuase the non-native aspect will always stand in the way. You will have to learn what those identifiers mean and then remember that.
The same holds for software. The 'lingua franca' of Computer Science, hence much programming and software marketing, is English. The language of musical notation is Italian. From study I know what agitato and determinato are. But it does not help me that they are Italian for agitated and determined, respectfully, because I had to learn their definitions in English. If I spoke Italian I could have pulled the names for those musical styles out of thin air just listening to music. However, they are just words attached to those concepts for me, abstract labels and nothing more. However, I do not see any difference between this hundreds of year old phenomina and sotware naming.
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context.
I don't think we'd get a lot of benefit if TWiki had been called VersionGroupwareType003.
People hunting online for MP3s might dissagree. After all, MP3 just says 'music file' doesn't it? MP3 is a Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up. I might think that has something to do with the movies, but music? Wiki means HTML TEXTAREA editor with special markup for you web browser. (Really the groupware aspect of Wikis is kinda of a dominating secondary effect.) Ogg Vorbis stands for Vorbis encoded audio inside an Ogg format container.
This is far from the point thougt. Tufte's expertise is to spot on eliminate distracting garbage in a design. Powerpoint is very good at packing in garbage, hence his critisim of it. Simple, silly names are appripirate when differentiating. When they are clutter, like bullets points that take up 40% of the slide, names won't serve this purpose. For evern search.com there is a competitor not wanting to lose mindshare (or trademark infringement lawsuits) by having a very similar name. But pardon me, I have more google'ing to do before I can flesh out that point.
The federal government classified them as vegetables along with ketchup.
Pffft. A tomato is a fruit, so is ketchup technically a watery, thin jam or jelly?
Either way, You won't catch me making ketchup and peanut-butter sandwitches anytime soon.
From the article: Luncheon meats are particularly vulnerable to Listeria since once purchased they typically aren't cooked or reheated, which can kill harmful bacteria like Listeria, Zajac said.
The FDA is approving this baterial treatment for Poultry, ham, et cetera and note that it targets Listera pretty specifically. This means that every other thing growing on that food now has less competition. During high school biology lab we used to get a good culture of strep from old chinese takeout chicken. However, outside of botullism, I don't recall anything really nasty comming off of those old meat experiments.
Too bad we don't nuke food, it'd solve all these 'growing things on food' problems really quick. But, that involves them thar evil nuclear raditions that mutates ya' in stuff. But that is a rant for another day.
The F/OSS Way is just different than the Microsoft Way(tm): the reboot, reformat, reinstall dance. Most problems in both OSS and proprietary cases are misconfiguration and misuse of APIs or resources like memory, bandwidth and scheduling. It just takes a little more training to solve the real problem than to have a grunt punch the power button every 30 days.
All software is complex. It is perhaps the most complex technology developed by mankind. (Almost) everybody that has walked on a bridge knows how bridges work at some simple level. You can't say the same for a web browser or video game. Completely virtual, arbitrarily defined and so abstract it takes years of study just to understand the basics.
With all ISV's it's a select your platform game:
Pick your proprietary OS (Windows 2000, 2003, XP Home,XP Pro).
Pick your proprietary DB(MS SQL Server, SQL Server 2003, Access, Oracle).
Pick your proprietary UI toolkit (COM, ActiveX,.Net, Qt).
Pick your proprietary webserver (IIS, PWS (I'm not kidding on this one),IBM Weblogic).
etc...
Is this less complex than OSS? No. Just different.
OSS is very often written to solve the problem a developer has, and is then supported and primarily used by developers.
And proprietary software is written to make a quick buck. There is software you can put in your datacenter in which 70% of the code is dedicated to license enformcement: copyright checks, license servers, date bombs, vendor backdoors and product key checkers. I installed a zip library on a system in the mid 90s that was about 2k in size, but the software to enforce product key cheking was over 50k. They did wonderful Q&A on the installer to make sure nobody cheated on the product key, but screwed up the library. Had to get a patch for the library from the vendor back in the day when you had to get CDs and disketts of patches shipped.
That has to be one of the only reasons a good graphical installer for Linux doesn't exist today.
Please define 'good.' If you are using a graphical installer, you aren't in a large server envrionement[1]. In data centers and computer rooms, standardization is so important that jumpstarting Solaris and kickstarting RHEL is required. You define what is your platform for 100+ servers then enforce that through automted installation. No WIMP-iness here. These are text mode and command line tools: drop in a CD and let'er rip methods of standardizing your platform.
M$ gets away with using graphical installers on their desktop-OS-sitting-on-a-server becuase you get squat for software on the installation disks. There is nothing to verify when a complete bells-n-whistles install includes the base OS and Minesweeper. You have to get extra 'software X' to make Microsoft platforms usefull, so your configuration boils down to MS+software X when talking to a vendor. This is no less complex than the OSS model. For support puropses, it might be less complete with OSS since the software is all from (supported by) 1 company (the distro maker) and all on the same disk(s.)
Why do people focus on the installer anyway? With OSS you shouldn't be needing to reboot/reinstall to fix things. Working in a larger datacetners, you will focus on the disgnostics your can get out of a program to manage it. The quality of installers doesn't matter too much unless you are doing lots of turnover.
Now, that doesn't have anything to say about proprietary software, as the GP poster pointed out - often proprietary software is just as difficult to install, maintain, etc.
I aggree whole heartily that OSS solutions are at least as difficult as commercial. However, the point of the FUD in the article is that OSS is a babylon of platforms, not that the installers suck. From the article:
Photo editing is another big thing.. and no, the gimp does suck... not feature wise, function/UI wise.. GimpShop goes a bit towards making it better, would be nice to see those changes migrated into the main tree... I've always liked Paint Shop Pro..
Applications like the GIMP on Linux suffer from the crappy X11 protocol limitations on cursor resolution, too. Makes the pointer feel gooey compared with Windows on the same hardware.
I grew up with PSP on Windows PCs and can feel your anguish. My parents dutifully bought version after version so I got to see how Paint Shop Pro's UI (and price tag) evolved over time. I've also used the GIMP to produce icons and effects for friends in-college video game projects nad more than a few websites over a similar span of time.
The GIMP vs. the world flamewar boils down to style. The GIMP has a unique style, modal everything floating around, which contrasts with everything else, MDI with anchored UIs. Neither of these relates to the real world model of a painter with canvas and brush. Each paint program has a certain feel to the way the brushes work due to implementation details. In some kid's paint programs you can pick up the pencil tool and start creating quality artwork. Some other "art applications" require you to work around how your natural skills differ from the developers using things like path-selections and multi-layered filters. In the end, the style of art that results is almost tracable back to the original app: this was photoshopped, this other made in PSP and that's a GIMP painting.
But all this is exactly where Paint Shop Pro was about 1995. If you look at a cira '95 copy of PSP it is ugly, bland and the tools are rough. In 10 years, with an eye to good design an functionality, you get today's PSP - the cheaper Photoshop. In 10 years you might see 3rd party packages that completely transform the GIMP's UI into whatever (Photoshop, MS Paint, Paint Shop Pro) that you want. Or you could pick up a compiler and do it now. The GIMP unlike the others is Open Source.
All this discussion is moot because of that last point. If booring OSS is developed for the Linux desktop, what keeps some enterprising person from porting it to Microsoft or Apple platforms and selling it for $14.95 a pop[1]? Already we have a lot of office/legal (booring) OSS on Windows.
But, really, what do you buy a home PC for: internet/games or tax software?
----
1. Yes, GPL lets everyone share it afterwards and they have to provide source code.)
All of them required you to update if you wanted to use the features. You can't run a DX9 app on DX3 hardware and get the advantages of DX. The necessary transistors aren't on the DX3 board.
In terms of DirectX, you are quite correct. When programming a DirectX game engine you have to query the given hardware capability (hwcaps) for the PC on which your game engine is being installed.
There's nothing different on the OpenGL side. To run OpenGL 1.x along with you *need* given board. If you don't have it the extension won't work.
No.
I don't know where you took your graphics CS classes, but OpenGL is very different from DirectX in this matter. OpenGL presents a consistent API to the programmer. If the hardware doesn't implement a required API there is a known software implementation which must be present. This may not be true for all extensions. But a game engine don't have to query some bitmap of known support and refuse to install or shut off funcationality. However, like with MMUs in the 386/486 era, the software version of the routines will be extremly slow.
So instead of saying "screw you and your non-DX10 card, you can't play my game" I can say "the more eye candy you want the slower my game will run, and you can leave the visual quality at low and still play fine."
I never thought the grammar and spelling quality of the 'average' person was declining due to AIM'ng, SMS, etc. What I have belived is that the smart people are already on the 'net. In a pervese variation of Metcalf's Law, each new person that gets on is much more likely to be an idiot that detracts from the 'net than benefit it. With nearly every US teenager on, everybody gets to see what mass produced education has done to your mass produced USA 'citizen.' It's not that the average product of the US public education system's skills declined, they just always sucked. Nobody knew it because those poor at writing either hid it well or stayed away from situations that required it.
Fortunately we have the Internet with places like slashdot, where everybody's bad grammar and spelling can shine.
(And when I starting talking in l33t3, just do what a guy I knew does: go to the mall. Being around all the Valley-speak tends to normalize the speech centers somewhat.)
What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.
Why is a file not an "object"?
I don't get this. We call them 'files' and try to think of them as pieces of paper and folders as boxes, but the things on out harddrives are very different from their real-world analogs. They are abstract collections of data.
There are well known methods for getting information about a file: name, contents, attributes. There are well known methods forming an orthogonal action set upon a file: move/rename, delete, make, get/set contents, enumerate attributes. Files (directories) can contain other files in a 'has a' relation. However, filesystems use workarounds for 'is-a' relationships: mime types (like object dictionaries,) filename extensions (like C++ name mangling,) extended ACLs. Filesystems are usually class to instatiation vs. mutli-level or mutli-sourced inheritance. But inheritance could be considered to occur only in the abstract as you instantiate a particualr class to make an object or create a specific file of a given type. What is the difference in managing 'is-a' relationships by maniplating a meta-information system such as language keywords in source code and editing patterns in the magic keyword database?
Filesystems are just databases managed by software in the operating system. Is it an issue with the heirarchial interface to filesystems? Other interfaces like relational (bunch of tables) or object (hide random pile behind a query manager) have been restricted to niches like application data and IPC, respectively. And if they suck so bad, why are hierarchial filesystems used to store those relational databases, object repositories and their logfiles? These hierarchial filesystems map so well to 'real-world" storage systems that a common class in an OOS is the 'file,' acting as a gateway out of the applcation's process space and into the external world.
The problem is they lack support for recent ATi hardware (lacking good 3D support for vaguely recent, e.g. R300 and up
Funny way to define recent. You don't happen to be a Debian developer, do you?
I just threw away a R300 series card (ATi 9800 XT) for an nVidia SLI. I bought the ATi back in mid '05 and it has sit on the store shelves for 1/2 a year before I picked it up for the "Free" Half-life 2 and then "stable" accelerated proprietary drivers.
I game under Linux. But with an ATi card, nothing worked well or for very long. Wine, the commercial Cedega, even native games would kill the driver. I had to install nVidia dependancies for my team's 3d software. Software which in the end wouldn't work without the nVidia drivers.
If you meant ATis' own drivers, yeah, they suck. But really, if ATi just made docs available, the much better X.org drivers would be able to support far more of their hardware..
I don't see that improving quickly unless somebody is a big itch to scratch builds a community like the one around nVidia. A lot of people doing games in Linux only develop and test with nVidia hardware. Not everyone can afford two $600-800 rigs with recent cards.
Once I switched to nVidia 3D a ton of games that only worked on Windows now install and play as well if not better than native on Windows. Older 3d games like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Startopia fly at high frames-per-second (> 60-100._ Current generation games like Tron 2.0, Guildwars and Half-life 2 get respectible fps (~30) where the ATi drivers would struggle to get 2-3 fps and often crash if anything changed the drawing state.
I hope AMD care about open drivers..
This assumes that AMB comes out on top. Or that the ATi proprietary midset doesn't infect AMD. On one side you have two companies that are basic chip fabbers, spewing out GPUs, CPUs and chipset engineeing specs as fast and cheaply as possible. On the other you have ATi, buried deep in a race with nVidia, and AMD, who won the last round of CPU wars with x86_64. As has been mentioned by others, mergers are little more than one company eating another. I for one would not be surpised if after any such ATi/AMD merger that the next (last?) AMD nVidia motherboard chipsets are at least 6 months to a year behind the next ATi releases.
At the best, it would be intersting to see a dual-core CPU with one core a GPU and a metric ton of cache. I'd be almost like the old 468SX vs. 468DX days.
Problem: Why doesn't the driver work on 64-bit and bigendian systems?
I can confirm that it compiles, installs and works on 64-bit SuSE Linux 10.1 (AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+.) It does require you to get the latest 2.5 fuse (http://fuse.sourceforge.net/). And I do have a complete 32-bit environment installed, but the./configure was clearly x86_64. # arch x86_64 # uname -r 2.6.16.13-4-default #lsmod | grep fuse fuse 39192 2 #/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g/dev/hda1/windows/C -o rw,user # cd/windows/C # ls # touch autoexec.bat # ls autoexec.bat
And I am just one checkinstall away from an rpm. (Too lazy to write yet another custom SPEC file today.)
I believe the OP misspelled reality check. As in the mid-project/life crisis that prompts people to go off to a commune to find themselves. Or to Fiji. And the only copy of the code to your projects sits on their triple-DES encrypted workstation's only (and flaky) hard drive. No CVS. No backup tapes/CD/hardcopy.
I will believe it when I see it, I just got told in no uncertain terms by our site IT security officer
Is the IP of his personal workstation publicly routable? I'm sure a few people would like to run Nessus...um, I mean a some unapproved software against it.
How much personal stock in your DOD-approved Vendor of the Month(tm) does your security officer own? Seriously, if there is a widely distributed 100% free tool used by people knocking at your doors Right Now, why is your (in)security officer too stupid...um, hesitant to realize that script kiddies can run warez or anything OSS? I garuntee you that a real attaker won't be restricted to approved software list published by a lifetime-job-security desk serfing pencil pusher.
I know people that still run windows 95 and they dont care that it is "unsupported" the masses dont care if something is supported anyways, they dont call microsoft, they typically dont go patching or updating.
I see a dark future. Bright hackers and dull-witted script kiddies loading up tons of Win98 exploits. Then someone write the Dewininator. And another person drops in Depenguinator into a worm based on an exploit in the Dewininator's distro of choice. Someone writes an Exorcist worm to purge the devil from a PC and let the Penguins run free.
A battle royal begins as Win98 machines, many previously infected with SPAM bots, are mysteriously rebooting. Every BSD and Linux mirror wilts as the hundreds (thousdands?) of left-over Win98 users come home to the horror. Netcraft implodes as new webservers pop in and out of existence: what was once an MS Personal Webserver one moment now bounces from Linux to BSD with each hourly reboot. Turely the endtimes will have begun.
The beast has 64MB which is not enough for any modern Linux KDE/Gnome system
Why? Are you planning on using this machine as your primary desktop? Are you going to try WoW on it?
Your 'average' Microsoft Windows 98 Desktop has as much ram as my Fedora Core 4 webserver, running blog and wiki, which doubles as my guild's teamspeak and CVS and Subversion server.
If you handed me that PC I would not see a Win98 desktop (suitable only for a young child's toy, IMHO.) I would see another webserver, firewall, IDS, samba domain controler (PDC or SDC,) mail server or low-end game server (Quake 3, Counterstrike, UT4K.)
The hard disc is too small (fixable, I have another unused one floating around)
Even the big, fat commercial distros fit in the 500 MB range with minimal install, no compiler tools and 1 or 2 full-blown server stacks. Heck, throwing 2-4 of my old IDE HDs in your old PC might not being the total space to 50GB, but that old PC would serve as a tftp, ftp, smbfs or nfs fileserver for 90% of the files I move.
Anther man's trash, as they say.
As for the Win98 license, I'd stick it into a VM image with qemu and grab all the patches I could before burning to CD. I do have apps that require Win98 to run, but they crashed the OS so badly that running in a Virtual Machine was needed just to get any work done anyway. You'd be surprised at how responsive Win98 in unaccelerated qemu is on an Amd 3000 with a 2.6 Linux kernel. Just don't network anything less than 98se unless you like reloading the image every 15 mintues or so.
The beast has 64MB which is not enough for any modern Linux KDE/Gnome system (my old Laptop has 96MB and is pretty turgid)
And you want to run a modern KDE/Gnome desktop on that why? That would be like running Half-Life 2 on the Win 98 box because Half-Life seemed to run okay. My current Linux laptop (IBM Thinkpad 380XD) has Xubuntu (was regular Ubuntu) with an xfce desktop. 96MB RAM and 2GB fs on a Pentuim 2 ain't zippy, but I can still run modern Gimp, modern ssh and modern firefox at the same time. When it had Windows ME, I'd have to close notepad to load http://updates.microsoft.com/ in IE.
Anyone who has a machine of that generation is going to leave it as it is. Linux is not an option.
If you are a geek or computer nerd or just looking to get into IT, dusting off an old PC or two can lead to making a nice basement test lab (as long as you overlook the heat, electric bill and the noise.) At the least, an afternoon with a beer and a network connection and you could have that old Win98 PC hosting the next Chip'n'Dips Site.
The kernel is written in C, and so are those system calls. I don't believe you can overload a C function.
There is no overloading going on here. Overloading is to create a new function with the same name, but taking different parameters.
Ahem. The original function, sendfile(2), was rewritten to call splice() instead of doing something else.
Everybody that wrote code that used the old function now has to deal with splice() running instead of the old function's logic.
Just to hammer it home: Old - app -> sendfile(2) -> some logic -> return to app New - app -> sendfile(2) -> splice() -> splice's logic -> return to sendfile(2) -> return to app
With the Linux kernel, as this exepmlifies, you can improve the original code and get everyone (well, those to lazy to revert the changes) to use it. In this case you have a fixed API (sendfile(2) which is well known and published) so you don't just want to tell everybody to recompile with called to splice().
See the difference? Feel the difference.
The kernel is GPL and thus the actual source code used to compile the binary kernel you use is available to you. With a closed source kernel you might be able to purchase an SDK with linkable binaries and some (probably undocumetned) header files. Programmers in this situation need things like function overloading and class inheritence just to do anything. One way of looking at the history of languages like C++ is as a technical solution to the ethical problem of closed source programming. Those languages focus on extending on the outside. With OSS you can usually replace, fix and improve on the inside. BSD and GNU differ on a the point of GNU wanting everyone to share the source to those fixes if they share the resulting binaries. But I digress.
Like every other system administrator I have to write and read reports or run tests on hardware and software. To shortcut a lot of problems I start by critizising the (far too often flawed) methodology of any study I get before I base a decision upon it. This is not ment as a personal attack, but (maybe because of marketing mangling) I saw real flaws and a lot of bias in the case study that was originally used in Get The Facts. The biases I claim to have seen were subtle and very nasty, but of a completely different nature than the one in TFA[1].
I wrote a Microsoft-funded white paper last year with the assistance of two subject matter experts - a Microsoft expert and a linux expert, both certified veterans of their fields.
Case studies are an important part of understanding a wide variety of phenomena, however, in textbooks containing them there is often a disclaimer: those were particular people, with particular skillsets in a particular situation[2]. Neither I nor anyone else (say Microsoft's marketing department) is justified in generalizing that situation to anyone else. Hence the demand for surveys such as this one. You can translate the metrics used in the Get-the-facts paper into variables and then show that many others, with very different situations still show these results. Unfortunately, this article does no such thing. There is no specification of what kinds of servers, the platform configurations or even the application loads.
We compared many factors including user management, authentication, "ghosting" new machines remotely, remote application installs, file sharing, delegating authority to subordinate administrators, and much much more.... We wrote about all these factors and rated them on 10-point scales per lab, and condensed those into one comprehensive graph showing overall ease-of-use of each NOS.
I would hope that, given an expert on any topic that I'd get a good ease-of-use for that topic. At that level of operator skill and performance, which I have tried to mention is very atypical, I would surprised if the huge resources of Microsoft had put out a failure. Was there was something that the Microsoft product could do the Linux one could not[3]? What features were missing? Why was that feature missing? That was then, this is now, how do those compare today? The pace of change in Linux features is not determined by a single vendor[4].
Long story short, Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything.
The reason systems administators exist is because of their skills at doing things that are not easy. Otherwise they don't keep their jobs very long (but this is the same for any job.) I really can't argue for or against ease as a metric.
I would hope that with the huge desktop penetration that Microsoft's OS leads in intuitiveness. Now if your Windows admin had grown up in a Macintosh home, used a Mac and home and on his workstation at work I'd be inclined to consider the intuitiveness argument. 20 years ago, that Linux admin would probably have come from a Unix desktop and Unix workstation and Unix or Mainframe server envrionment. How can we be sure that 20 years from now it will be Linux or OS XXX on the desktop? (On the other hand, the byzantine way OSS is developed does encourage only-developer-friendly interfaces.)
MS soon compiled our white paper into marketing materials and stuck them on http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts (but it's been replaced by more recent studies).
I belive that Novell, one of those 'niche players' in the Linux world (11% Linux webserver share vs 49% RedHat Netcraft 2004,) released a much better take on those marketing materials with it's Get the Truth campaign.
I personally was funded by MS to spearhead an impartial study, and MS management had a genui
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive. Or put a stove together before you can cook.
Do much camping or fishing? The campfire is your stove. You usually have to assemble those by hand each time. If you have ever gone camping, you really want someone that can start and put out a fire. (And not burn up the day's catch of fish and your nice steaks becuase they don't know that well-done does not mean 'make it charcoal.')
I will agree that the modern automobile is encasuplated enough that most people will never have the challenge -or joy- of building a car from parts. Additionallly, a whole economy exists to keep drivers out from under the hood.
Computers, like anything else, is a GIGO enterprise. The more you put in, the more you get out. PCs, Mac or Unix or Microsoft, have long been glorified typewriters. 10 years ago, you needed basic typing, mousing and -yes- printing skills. A Personal Computer was all about printing stuff.
The 21st century PC is a telephone + TV + arcade + soapbox. (Even if some people insist on printing out every webpage they see.) Basic skills for those uses include (the rarely taught in school) social ones: Bullsh*t filtering and howoto avoid common scams. Before you only needed to know what is a file, filesystem and how to use at least one document editor. Now you need to know what is a network, email/IM, webpages and basic security.
[RANT] Teaching basic skills is one thing, getting people to use them is another. The latter is far harder. I'd love to think people are smart enough to learn the basics, but experience has shown that people will screw up campfires, park their car's but leave the windows down and browse the web with IE. It should come as no surprise that forests burn, cars are stolen or ransacked and enough Microsoft PCs get owned each day to make zombie networks a sellable comodity. [/RANT]
So, with google, how do I search for the difference between the following LaTeX commands
Have you tried Koders, Codebase or even the OSS Gonzui? Source-code specific search enginers are nothing new. (However, the ones I listed are limited to C and C type languages. And I'd hate to be a STFW troll, but if you spent < 5 minutes at Google looking for, say, "latex source code search engine" you might get lucky.)
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, planets are orbited by satellites and there is but one Moon, the largest narual satellite of the Earth.
I don't get the problem? First, start off with the idea that a planet must be orbiting a star... similar to how moons are defined as orbiting a planet
And I do stress technically. In Chemistry, physics and even lowely IT humans use specialized jargon and words with precise definitions. It's like a network protocol, if you going to exchange information about something it would be nice to have the schema understand that information. Otherwise it's just a bunch of useless data. Crypography is all about hiding information: turning it into raw data by obscuring the schema, lowering the (apperent) information content of information exchanges to that of entropy. Alchemists used elaborate symbolic schemes to retard discovery of their secrets. Chemistry took off when people started aggreeing on the definition of what to call the various chemicals, lab equipment and common lab tasks.
Then the article mentions the possibility of having planet sized objects orbiting each other the same way binary stars orbit one another. OK, make that a seperate category. After that just define the mass need to be called a planet and be done with it. I'm sure there are plenty of other scenarios out there that need to be defined, but the basic rules don't seem difficult to set up.
But that's not sexy or sleek or marketing friendly. If you are going to sell people tourist packages what sounds better: trip the the fourth satelite of Jupiter or trip to the Jovian Moon Callisto, large enought to be a planet in it's own right? Scientists what excact definitions of their labels, usually with clear methods of determing when and what to apply those labels. Romantics want to daydream about sailing their light ships past the shores of the planet Pluto, minor status be damned.
Not hardly. The problem really is "there are no engineers cheap enough and with the appropriate skill sets." When was the last time you saw a job requiring Senior level engineering skills, but only offering fresh-out-of-college pay?
FTA:
Oh poo hoo, we have to pay top dollar for top quality says industry shrill. Instead, how about we import some cheap labor and dangle VISA restructions over their head to keep them working like slaves?
You want the skill$ you hand over the bill$. What ever happened to paying a good days wages for a good days work? Henry Ford paid his workers enough to afford his new cars. The money he paid out came right back into his pocket because he through globally and invested locally. If you keep pouring money into $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY don't be surpised when their highly trained employees cost as much as local ones. (HINT: rising wages <--> rising standard of living.)
Again, FTA:
says the man with a Polical Science degree. You won't get any argument about that from me, though. The No. 1 concern of politicos when discussion H1-B's and international trade is pushing our lawyer-based society (e.g. claiming patents = invention and lawsuits = income) on China. The irony in that be hip deep.
Management can either enable employees or get out of the way. If you look at your workforce and think 'they're undertrained, I wonder if I can replace them with equally undertrained but cheaper forgein imports.' Which one are you doing?
I for one do not like that train of thought:
It still sounds like a GPL violation to me. Now, we have to watch what FSF does. They own the C library that literally every program on Novell Linux uses.
Novell has had several long standing lawsuits over technology used by Microsoft. This clears those out of the way. This is not exactly a new business or legal process. The GPL can't be used to prevent Novell from sharing Linux with Microsoft. (I'd assume that downloading an opensuse.org source DVD would have been cheaper.) As long as the GPL parts are licensed and re-distributed under the GPL there is nothing the FSF can do.
Microsoft has their own C library. A C library that has been proven to support most userland UNIX utilities. With enough patches you could ship SuSE with something other than glibc (that engineering feat is left as an exercise for the reader.) Not that I would want to call SuSE 'Linux,' let alone GNU/Linux if such a horrible thing came about.
The biggest worry is that Novell pollutes open source projects with known patent-infringing code. Or that several large patents are being violated by FSF's C library and Linus's kernel and SCO just wasn't smart enough to find them. Linus et al had tried to play innocent by not looking at any patents while developing kernel code. Unforunately, just because you never saw widget X and independently developed it later the holder of the patent papers still wins in court. It just makes is easier when the patent holder can show you ripped off his designs directly. Either way, it might be prudent to watch the code checkins from @novell.com as if they came from @microsoft.com.
Furthermore, a lot of the GNU/Linux libraries important to a GUI shop such as Microsoft, such at GTK, are LGPL on Linux - not GPL. Microsoft can write Office against them and sell the binaries without so much as a line of Microsoft source code distributed. Far be it from me to be the first to point out that you can compile and sell traditional, proprietary applications on Linux. I hear this little company called ID Software does this a lot (it even ports some apps to Micosoft Windows the last time I checked.)
Solaris turned BSD into a commercial closed-source UNIX because the BSD license lets you do that. This is the danger that people warn about with LGPL software and it's lack of "viral" teeth. Microsoft could turn SuSE into another Xenix via this hole. Consider the competition in the market for commercial 'Enterprise grade' Linux and the potential for the community to cut off a pariah. Infecting SuSE would kill it off in the process. One less competitor; killed from the inside by a bad case of Mono and on the outside by public fear of software patents.
Back in the day, being someone that 'asked the internet' for any non-trivial information was considered n00bish. Now teh Intarweb is all-knowing and all-seeing[1].
It's as if not code-specific search is new:
These sites have been around a while (in Internet time) and specialize in source code search[2].
A good 3/5s of my help for people in Linux starts with Google'ing on error messages, #defines, and name of programmers in sourcecode[3]. Without reliable searching on error message there are some things in Linux I would never have been able to do; from fixing obscure errors with propreitary ATI graphics installers to debugging PHP installation wonkiness. That being said, Internet forums, How-to forge and Wikipedia are no substitution for good API level documention[4].
How many programmers left your names and email references in your source code comments? How long do you think it will be before a Spammer starts vacuuming those up? What percent of larry.wall@perl.com's incomming email is SPAM? Is it time to think about using throw away emails for those comments?
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1. Apparently most of what we know concerns advertsiments for 'reproduction enhancers' and most of what we (want to) see is pr0n.
2. Okay, planet-source-code.com is a tacky site, but their code search bar is at the top of the page before the hideious streams of click-vert spam.
3. I hate formus that expect me to subscribe and/or pay-per-view for 3rd rate community submited partial-solutions for issues that don't even match my problem half the time.
4. Perl has POD. Javadoc comes with Java. Doxygen exists for a reason. No, these are not subsitutions for usage examples, design documents or functional specifications.
>I've always balked at the idea of people being willing to do software subscriptions. However, I look at the huge success of World of Warcraft, which is basically the same thing, and think it might work.
You just described the endgame for Sharepoint. Once upon a time, buying a copy of MS Word meant you could write letters to grandma on your PC. In the future, you will be able to collaborate with Gandma, via an Xbox Live style 'family' service, on a scrapbook of what went on during your last vacation, childbirth, marriage, etc. The thin clients application you might buy at the store would be nothing more than a way to track your license usage.
Today you can walk down any small marketplace in China and buy 'real' Windows XP and Office XP for less than a cup of water at a Starbucks in the USA. Microsoft looks at the WoW model and sees a Citrix Server in every garage and money pouring to Redmond from every desktop. Joe Shmoe on the street will take whatever Microsoft gives them (unless the curent version is 'good enough'.) The risks are how to sell this to corporate America, Europe and Asia.
Why would an Account want to use a subscription editor? Maybe it came in a shrink wrapped server that you 'just plug in' and let dial home to Microsoft for self service. Why would a lawyer? Maybe it has a backed-up verifiable 'paper trail' for your documents vetted by a 3rd party. Why would middle to C-level management? Because they already do subscription for so many other services in the form of per-seat licensing. This is just a tiny step from per-seat to per-use.
However, it will by a true dystopia for data exchange. Soon not only is my data at the mercy of Microsoft's patching their own server to repair this week's h4>0r attack, but also that my data is in a proprietary program which won't even let me take screenshots to pull it out. Google got rich connecting people to stuff other people made. Microsoft got rich helping people make some of that stuff. Now Microsoft wants to do both. With ClippySense AdWindows or whatever model, this is a potential cash cow. Just ask the RIAA: is better to own the content, the distribution network or both?
Why not just do your job and fix their computer like they asked you to. Would you like your waiter to try and convince you to change your order because they don't think it's right to eat lamb?
A waitress last night spent 5 minutes trying to convince me that I needed to buy pie. It was a more relaxed atmosphere than 'my PC is broke, fix it.' However, upsell is an important fact of life. You can order everything on the McDonadls Menu and get ask if you want more with that. That's part of why McDonalds sells to billions of people (who are steadily getting fatter.)
If you are not willing to upsell OSS to clients, don't be in the OSS game at all. I and others are will to risk 'file assocation issues' and people given bad word of mouth. For every friend that had a problem with firefox, etc there should be a dozen replaying 'funny, it works for great for me.'
Your question is funny: he didn't metion specifically what people asked him to do. If he had offered all this free software to people I doubt someone would turn him down. Do you think people pay their computer savy 'friends' to fix their PC never get tons of pirated software on it for free? People sometimes rate the support they get from guys like this based on the amount of free pirated software he is willing to install. Every small time PC repair man I know has a library of copyright neutered install disks ready to go and improve you Windows experience.
What this guy is doing is not only legal but also how everyone else sells stuff for a living. Why should FOSS, becuase it's free, be any different?
I couldn't help but notive Rule 6: Aero Wizards. The screenshot of an Aero Wizard resembles the GNOME wizards from Anjuta[1]. They have Similar title bar pacement, similar boarder spacing for elements, etc. But then, both Aero and GNOME inherit a lot from the layout expected of a 'Wizard.'[2] I guess Wizards, like most desktop metaphors used to enforce a particular workflow, experience convergant evolution.[3]
Microsoft recommending compressible PNG's for icons embedded in
Hmm...maybe published is a strong word.
__________
What is the difference between an http: and a mailto: in the scheme of things?
A Wiki can be used for email-like communications. What is the difference from PHPboard forum websites and google groups (besides SPAM, pr0n and security vulnerabilities?) Heck, the customer comment fortune page at ThinkGeek has been used/abused/repurposed as a forum.
The article seemed to be more about passive information collection (TV model) vs. interactive (Internet model) of communication. Many of the arguments against email suported the idealistic notion that face to face contact is always better (Hint: email = paper trail.) Unforuntately, as applications on teh Intarweb, both the world wide web and the network of email relays are communication tools. You can put up a website and so can I. With our browsers and a lot of page reloading we can have a nearly realtime, if akward conversation. Likewise, I can subscribe to a mailing list which runs a bot to scrape webpages and deliver them to my HTML enabled mail client (insert rant about security here.) While not as interactive or freeform as casual surfing on the web, am I somehow missing something in that my HTML is being delivered via RFC 2821 (SMTP) in instead of RFC 2616 (HTTP?)
Both the web and email, with MySpace/Geocities/AOL and Viagra/Sandford Wallace/AOL included, are killer applications. Today I'd say they were seperate but cleaverly intertiwned where people need or want new views on the conversation that is the Internet.
From the article:
Then, perhaps the only way to win is to not play the game?
Bad design is giving a program an insufferablely cute name that does absolutely nothing to describe its function.
Actually, Tuffte talkes about this very phenomina using terms familiar to anyone in design: affordances. Affordances are learned aspects of a particular domain. Affordances, as Tufte has touched upon in his design for information clairty are to be used, not avoided. Everyone had to learn what MP3 meant. Everyone had to learn how to read a chart (or, if they weren't a jock on a fast road to CEO at Daddy's firm, fail High School geometry.)
For example, I am a big fan of functional naming. Instead of a variable named $CORNED_BEEF I would use $HASH_PIVOT. However, if you are an ESL like 95% of the world, it won't matter what you call your variables becuase the non-native aspect will always stand in the way. You will have to learn what those identifiers mean and then remember that.
The same holds for software. The 'lingua franca' of Computer Science, hence much programming and software marketing, is English. The language of musical notation is Italian. From study I know what agitato and determinato are. But it does not help me that they are Italian for agitated and determined, respectfully, because I had to learn their definitions in English. If I spoke Italian I could have pulled the names for those musical styles out of thin air just listening to music. However, they are just words attached to those concepts for me, abstract labels and nothing more. However, I do not see any difference between this hundreds of year old phenomina and sotware naming.
But TWike like OggVorbis, is a ridiculous name that actually hurts the program by alienating people from exploring what it does after they see or hear the Program name referred to in some random context.
I don't think we'd get a lot of benefit if TWiki had been called VersionGroupwareType003.
People hunting online for MP3s might dissagree. After all, MP3 just says 'music file' doesn't it? MP3 is a Motion-Picture Experts Group layer 3 file. Yes, I looked that up. I might think that has something to do with the movies, but music? Wiki means HTML TEXTAREA editor with special markup for you web browser. (Really the groupware aspect of Wikis is kinda of a dominating secondary effect.) Ogg Vorbis stands for Vorbis encoded audio inside an Ogg format container.
This is far from the point thougt. Tufte's expertise is to spot on eliminate distracting garbage in a design. Powerpoint is very good at packing in garbage, hence his critisim of it. Simple, silly names are appripirate when differentiating. When they are clutter, like bullets points that take up 40% of the slide, names won't serve this purpose. For evern search.com there is a competitor not wanting to lose mindshare (or trademark infringement lawsuits) by having a very similar name. But pardon me, I have more google'ing to do before I can flesh out that point.
The federal government classified them as vegetables along with ketchup.
Pffft. A tomato is a fruit, so is ketchup technically a watery, thin jam or jelly?
Either way, You won't catch me making ketchup and peanut-butter sandwitches anytime soon.
From the article:
Luncheon meats are particularly vulnerable to Listeria since once purchased they typically aren't cooked or reheated, which can kill harmful bacteria like Listeria, Zajac said.
The FDA is approving this baterial treatment for Poultry, ham, et cetera and note that it targets Listera pretty specifically. This means that every other thing growing on that food now has less competition. During high school biology lab we used to get a good culture of strep from old chinese takeout chicken. However, outside of botullism, I don't recall anything really nasty comming off of those old meat experiments.
Too bad we don't nuke food, it'd solve all these 'growing things on food' problems really quick. But, that involves them thar evil nuclear raditions that mutates ya' in stuff. But that is a rant for another day.
All software is complex. It is perhaps the most complex technology developed by mankind. (Almost) everybody that has walked on a bridge knows how bridges work at some simple level. You can't say the same for a web browser or video game. Completely virtual, arbitrarily defined and so abstract it takes years of study just to understand the basics.
With all ISV's it's a select your platform game:
Is this less complex than OSS? No. Just different.
And proprietary software is written to make a quick buck. There is software you can put in your datacenter in which 70% of the code is dedicated to license enformcement: copyright checks, license servers, date bombs, vendor backdoors and product key checkers. I installed a zip library on a system in the mid 90s that was about 2k in size, but the software to enforce product key cheking was over 50k. They did wonderful Q&A on the installer to make sure nobody cheated on the product key, but screwed up the library. Had to get a patch for the library from the vendor back in the day when you had to get CDs and disketts of patches shipped.
Please define 'good.' If you are using a graphical installer, you aren't in a large server envrionement[1]. In data centers and computer rooms, standardization is so important that jumpstarting Solaris and kickstarting RHEL is required. You define what is your platform for 100+ servers then enforce that through automted installation. No WIMP-iness here. These are text mode and command line tools: drop in a CD and let'er rip methods of standardizing your platform.
M$ gets away with using graphical installers on their desktop-OS-sitting-on-a-server becuase you get squat for software on the installation disks. There is nothing to verify when a complete bells-n-whistles install includes the base OS and Minesweeper. You have to get extra 'software X' to make Microsoft platforms usefull, so your configuration boils down to MS+software X when talking to a vendor. This is no less complex than the OSS model. For support puropses, it might be less complete with OSS since the software is all from (supported by) 1 company (the distro maker) and all on the same disk(s.)
Why do people focus on the installer anyway? With OSS you shouldn't be needing to reboot/reinstall to fix things. Working in a larger datacetners, you will focus on the disgnostics your can get out of a program to manage it. The quality of installers doesn't matter too much unless you are doing lots of turnover.
I aggree whole heartily that OSS solutions are at least as difficult as commercial. However, the point of the FUD in the article is that OSS is a babylon of platforms, not that the installers suck. From the article:
Photo editing is another big thing.. and no, the gimp does suck... not feature wise, function/UI wise.. GimpShop goes a bit towards making it better, would be nice to see those changes migrated into the main tree... I've always liked Paint Shop Pro..
Applications like the GIMP on Linux suffer from the crappy X11 protocol limitations on cursor resolution, too. Makes the pointer feel gooey compared with Windows on the same hardware.
I grew up with PSP on Windows PCs and can feel your anguish. My parents dutifully bought version after version so I got to see how Paint Shop Pro's UI (and price tag) evolved over time. I've also used the GIMP to produce icons and effects for friends in-college video game projects nad more than a few websites over a similar span of time.
The GIMP vs. the world flamewar boils down to style. The GIMP has a unique style, modal everything floating around, which contrasts with everything else, MDI with anchored UIs. Neither of these relates to the real world model of a painter with canvas and brush. Each paint program has a certain feel to the way the brushes work due to implementation details. In some kid's paint programs you can pick up the pencil tool and start creating quality artwork. Some other "art applications" require you to work around how your natural skills differ from the developers using things like path-selections and multi-layered filters. In the end, the style of art that results is almost tracable back to the original app: this was photoshopped, this other made in PSP and that's a GIMP painting.
But all this is exactly where Paint Shop Pro was about 1995. If you look at a cira '95 copy of PSP it is ugly, bland and the tools are rough. In 10 years, with an eye to good design an functionality, you get today's PSP - the cheaper Photoshop. In 10 years you might see 3rd party packages that completely transform the GIMP's UI into whatever (Photoshop, MS Paint, Paint Shop Pro) that you want. Or you could pick up a compiler and do it now. The GIMP unlike the others is Open Source.
All this discussion is moot because of that last point. If booring OSS is developed for the Linux desktop, what keeps some enterprising person from porting it to Microsoft or Apple platforms and selling it for $14.95 a pop[1]? Already we have a lot of office/legal (booring) OSS on Windows.
But, really, what do you buy a home PC for: internet/games or tax software?
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1. Yes, GPL lets everyone share it afterwards and they have to provide source code.)
All of them required you to update if you wanted to use the features. You can't run a DX9 app on DX3 hardware and get the advantages of DX. The necessary transistors aren't on the DX3 board.
In terms of DirectX, you are quite correct. When programming a DirectX game engine you have to query the given hardware capability (hwcaps) for the PC on which your game engine is being installed.
There's nothing different on the OpenGL side. To run OpenGL 1.x along with you *need* given board. If you don't have it the extension won't work.
No.
I don't know where you took your graphics CS classes, but OpenGL is very different from DirectX in this matter. OpenGL presents a consistent API to the programmer. If the hardware doesn't implement a required API there is a known software implementation which must be present. This may not be true for all extensions. But a game engine don't have to query some bitmap of known support and refuse to install or shut off funcationality. However, like with MMUs in the 386/486 era, the software version of the routines will be extremly slow.
So instead of saying "screw you and your non-DX10 card, you can't play my game" I can say "the more eye candy you want the slower my game will run, and you can leave the visual quality at low and still play fine."
I never thought the grammar and spelling quality of the 'average' person was declining due to AIM'ng, SMS, etc. What I have belived is that the smart people are already on the 'net. In a pervese variation of Metcalf's Law, each new person that gets on is much more likely to be an idiot that detracts from the 'net than benefit it. With nearly every US teenager on, everybody gets to see what mass produced education has done to your mass produced USA 'citizen.' It's not that the average product of the US public education system's skills declined, they just always sucked. Nobody knew it because those poor at writing either hid it well or stayed away from situations that required it.
Fortunately we have the Internet with places like slashdot, where everybody's bad grammar and spelling can shine.
(And when I starting talking in l33t3, just do what a guy I knew does: go to the mall. Being around all the Valley-speak tends to normalize the speech centers somewhat.)
What would really advance the state of the art is an "everything is an object" operating system.
Why is a file not an "object"?
I don't get this. We call them 'files' and try to think of them as pieces of paper and folders as boxes, but the things on out harddrives are very different from their real-world analogs. They are abstract collections of data.
There are well known methods for getting information about a file: name, contents, attributes. There are well known methods forming an orthogonal action set upon a file: move/rename, delete, make, get/set contents, enumerate attributes. Files (directories) can contain other files in a 'has a' relation. However, filesystems use workarounds for 'is-a' relationships: mime types (like object dictionaries,) filename extensions (like C++ name mangling,) extended ACLs. Filesystems are usually class to instatiation vs. mutli-level or mutli-sourced inheritance. But inheritance could be considered to occur only in the abstract as you instantiate a particualr class to make an object or create a specific file of a given type. What is the difference in managing 'is-a' relationships by maniplating a meta-information system such as language keywords in source code and editing patterns in the magic keyword database?
Filesystems are just databases managed by software in the operating system. Is it an issue with the heirarchial interface to filesystems? Other interfaces like relational (bunch of tables) or object (hide random pile behind a query manager) have been restricted to niches like application data and IPC, respectively. And if they suck so bad, why are hierarchial filesystems used to store those relational databases, object repositories and their logfiles? These hierarchial filesystems map so well to 'real-world" storage systems that a common class in an OOS is the 'file,' acting as a gateway out of the applcation's process space and into the external world.
The problem is they lack support for recent ATi hardware (lacking good 3D support for vaguely recent, e.g. R300 and up
Funny way to define recent. You don't happen to be a Debian developer, do you?
I just threw away a R300 series card (ATi 9800 XT) for an nVidia SLI. I bought the ATi back in mid '05 and it has sit on the store shelves for 1/2 a year before I picked it up for the "Free" Half-life 2 and then "stable" accelerated proprietary drivers.
I game under Linux. But with an ATi card, nothing worked well or for very long. Wine, the commercial Cedega, even native games would kill the driver. I had to install nVidia dependancies for my team's 3d software. Software which in the end wouldn't work without the nVidia drivers.
If you meant ATis' own drivers, yeah, they suck. But really, if ATi just made docs available, the much better X.org drivers would be able to support far more of their hardware..
I don't see that improving quickly unless somebody is a big itch to scratch builds a community like the one around nVidia. A lot of people doing games in Linux only develop and test with nVidia hardware. Not everyone can afford two $600-800 rigs with recent cards.
Once I switched to nVidia 3D a ton of games that only worked on Windows now install and play as well if not better than native on Windows. Older 3d games like Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Startopia fly at high frames-per-second (> 60-100._ Current generation games like Tron 2.0, Guildwars and Half-life 2 get respectible fps (~30) where the ATi drivers would struggle to get 2-3 fps and often crash if anything changed the drawing state.
I hope AMD care about open drivers..
This assumes that AMB comes out on top. Or that the ATi proprietary midset doesn't infect AMD. On one side you have two companies that are basic chip fabbers, spewing out GPUs, CPUs and chipset engineeing specs as fast and cheaply as possible. On the other you have ATi, buried deep in a race with nVidia, and AMD, who won the last round of CPU wars with x86_64. As has been mentioned by others, mergers are little more than one company eating another. I for one would not be surpised if after any such ATi/AMD merger that the next (last?) AMD nVidia motherboard chipsets are at least 6 months to a year behind the next ATi releases.
At the best, it would be intersting to see a dual-core CPU with one core a GPU and a metric ton of cache. I'd be almost like the old 468SX vs. 468DX days.
Problem: Why doesn't the driver work on 64-bit and bigendian systems?
./configure was clearly x86_64.
/usr/local/bin/ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /windows/C -o rw,user /windows/C
I can confirm that it compiles, installs and works on 64-bit SuSE Linux 10.1 (AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3000+.) It does require you to get the latest 2.5 fuse (http://fuse.sourceforge.net/). And I do have a complete 32-bit environment installed, but the
# arch
x86_64
# uname -r
2.6.16.13-4-default
#lsmod | grep fuse
fuse 39192 2
#
# cd
# ls
# touch autoexec.bat
# ls
autoexec.bat
And I am just one checkinstall away from an rpm. (Too lazy to write yet another custom SPEC file today.)
What programmer gets a royalty check?
I believe the OP misspelled reality check. As in the mid-project/life crisis that prompts people to go off to a commune to find themselves. Or to Fiji. And the only copy of the code to your projects sits on their triple-DES encrypted workstation's only (and flaky) hard drive. No CVS. No backup tapes/CD/hardcopy.
I will believe it when I see it, I just got told in no uncertain terms by our site IT security officer
Is the IP of his personal workstation publicly routable? I'm sure a few people would like to run Nessus...um, I mean a some unapproved software against it.
How much personal stock in your DOD-approved Vendor of the Month(tm) does your security officer own? Seriously, if there is a widely distributed 100% free tool used by people knocking at your doors Right Now, why is your (in)security officer too stupid...um, hesitant to realize that script kiddies can run warez or anything OSS? I garuntee you that a real attaker won't be restricted to approved software list published by a lifetime-job-security desk serfing pencil pusher.
I see a dark future. Bright hackers and dull-witted script kiddies loading up tons of Win98 exploits. Then someone write the Dewininator. And another person drops in Depenguinator into a worm based on an exploit in the Dewininator's distro of choice. Someone writes an Exorcist worm to purge the devil from a PC and let the Penguins run free.
A battle royal begins as Win98 machines, many previously infected with SPAM bots, are mysteriously rebooting. Every BSD and Linux mirror wilts as the hundreds (thousdands?) of left-over Win98 users come home to the horror. Netcraft implodes as new webservers pop in and out of existence: what was once an MS Personal Webserver one moment now bounces from Linux to BSD with each hourly reboot. Turely the endtimes will have begun.
The beast has 64MB which is not enough for any modern Linux KDE/Gnome system
Why? Are you planning on using this machine as your primary desktop? Are you going to try WoW on it?
Your 'average' Microsoft Windows 98 Desktop has as much ram as my Fedora Core 4 webserver, running blog and wiki, which doubles as my guild's teamspeak and CVS and Subversion server.
If you handed me that PC I would not see a Win98 desktop (suitable only for a young child's toy, IMHO.) I would see another webserver, firewall, IDS, samba domain controler (PDC or SDC,) mail server or low-end game server (Quake 3, Counterstrike, UT4K.)
The hard disc is too small (fixable, I have another unused one floating around)
Even the big, fat commercial distros fit in the 500 MB range with minimal install, no compiler tools and 1 or 2 full-blown server stacks. Heck, throwing 2-4 of my old IDE HDs in your old PC might not being the total space to 50GB, but that old PC would serve as a tftp, ftp, smbfs or nfs fileserver for 90% of the files I move.
Anther man's trash, as they say.
As for the Win98 license, I'd stick it into a VM image with qemu and grab all the patches I could before burning to CD. I do have apps that require Win98 to run, but they crashed the OS so badly that running in a Virtual Machine was needed just to get any work done anyway. You'd be surprised at how responsive Win98 in unaccelerated qemu is on an Amd 3000 with a 2.6 Linux kernel. Just don't network anything less than 98se unless you like reloading the image every 15 mintues or so.
The beast has 64MB which is not enough for any modern Linux KDE/Gnome system (my old Laptop has 96MB and is pretty turgid)
And you want to run a modern KDE/Gnome desktop on that why? That would be like running Half-Life 2 on the Win 98 box because Half-Life seemed to run okay. My current Linux laptop (IBM Thinkpad 380XD) has Xubuntu (was regular Ubuntu) with an xfce desktop. 96MB RAM and 2GB fs on a Pentuim 2 ain't zippy, but I can still run modern Gimp, modern ssh and modern firefox at the same time. When it had Windows ME, I'd have to close notepad to load http://updates.microsoft.com/ in IE.
Anyone who has a machine of that generation is going to leave it as it is. Linux is not an option.
If you are a geek or computer nerd or just looking to get into IT, dusting off an old PC or two can lead to making a nice basement test lab (as long as you overlook the heat, electric bill and the noise.) At the least, an afternoon with a beer and a network connection and you could have that old Win98 PC hosting the next Chip'n'Dips Site.
There is no overloading going on here. Overloading is to create a new function with the same name, but taking different parameters.
Ahem. The original function, sendfile(2), was rewritten to call splice() instead of doing something else.
Everybody that wrote code that used the old function now has to deal with splice() running instead of the old function's logic.
Just to hammer it home:
Old - app -> sendfile(2) -> some logic -> return to app
New - app -> sendfile(2) -> splice() -> splice's logic -> return to sendfile(2) -> return to app
With the Linux kernel, as this exepmlifies, you can improve the original code and get everyone (well, those to lazy to revert the changes) to use it. In this case you have a fixed API (sendfile(2) which is well known and published) so you don't just want to tell everybody to recompile with called to splice().
See the difference? Feel the difference.
The kernel is GPL and thus the actual source code used to compile the binary kernel you use is available to you. With a closed source kernel you might be able to purchase an SDK with linkable binaries and some (probably undocumetned) header files. Programmers in this situation need things like function overloading and class inheritence just to do anything. One way of looking at the history of languages like C++ is as a technical solution to the ethical problem of closed source programming. Those languages focus on extending on the outside. With OSS you can usually replace, fix and improve on the inside. BSD and GNU differ on a the point of GNU wanting everyone to share the source to those fixes if they share the resulting binaries. But I digress.
And I can't wait to see if this breaks something.
Like every other system administrator I have to write and read reports or run tests on hardware and software. To shortcut a lot of problems I start by critizising the (far too often flawed) methodology of any study I get before I base a decision upon it. This is not ment as a personal attack, but (maybe because of marketing mangling) I saw real flaws and a lot of bias in the case study that was originally used in Get The Facts. The biases I claim to have seen were subtle and very nasty, but of a completely different nature than the one in TFA[1].
...
I wrote a Microsoft-funded white paper last year with the assistance of two subject matter experts - a Microsoft expert and a linux expert, both certified veterans of their fields.
Case studies are an important part of understanding a wide variety of phenomena, however, in textbooks containing them there is often a disclaimer: those were particular people, with particular skillsets in a particular situation[2]. Neither I nor anyone else (say Microsoft's marketing department) is justified in generalizing that situation to anyone else. Hence the demand for surveys such as this one. You can translate the metrics used in the Get-the-facts paper into variables and then show that many others, with very different situations still show these results. Unfortunately, this article does no such thing. There is no specification of what kinds of servers, the platform configurations or even the application loads.
We compared many factors including user management, authentication, "ghosting" new machines remotely, remote application installs, file sharing, delegating authority to subordinate administrators, and much much more.
We wrote about all these factors and rated them on 10-point scales per lab, and condensed those into one comprehensive graph showing overall ease-of-use of each NOS.
I would hope that, given an expert on any topic that I'd get a good ease-of-use for that topic. At that level of operator skill and performance, which I have tried to mention is very atypical, I would surprised if the huge resources of Microsoft had put out a failure. Was there was something that the Microsoft product could do the Linux one could not[3]? What features were missing? Why was that feature missing? That was then, this is now, how do those compare today? The pace of change in Linux features is not determined by a single vendor[4].
Long story short, Windows came out on top by a huge margin in every field - ease, usability, intuitiveness, support, everything.
The reason systems administators exist is because of their skills at doing things that are not easy. Otherwise they don't keep their jobs very long (but this is the same for any job.) I really can't argue for or against ease as a metric.
I would hope that with the huge desktop penetration that Microsoft's OS leads in intuitiveness. Now if your Windows admin had grown up in a Macintosh home, used a Mac and home and on his workstation at work I'd be inclined to consider the intuitiveness argument. 20 years ago, that Linux admin would probably have come from a Unix desktop and Unix workstation and Unix or Mainframe server envrionment. How can we be sure that 20 years from now it will be Linux or OS XXX on the desktop? (On the other hand, the byzantine way OSS is developed does encourage only-developer-friendly interfaces.)
MS soon compiled our white paper into marketing materials and stuck them on http://www.microsoft.com/getthefacts (but it's been replaced by more recent studies).
I belive that Novell, one of those 'niche players' in the Linux world (11% Linux webserver share vs 49% RedHat Netcraft 2004,) released a much better take on those marketing materials with it's Get the Truth campaign.
I personally was funded by MS to spearhead an impartial study, and MS management had a genui
Do much camping or fishing? The campfire is your stove. You usually have to assemble those by hand each time. If you have ever gone camping, you really want someone that can start and put out a fire. (And not burn up the day's catch of fish and your nice steaks becuase they don't know that well-done does not mean 'make it charcoal.')
I will agree that the modern automobile is encasuplated enough that most people will never have the challenge -or joy- of building a car from parts. Additionallly, a whole economy exists to keep drivers out from under the hood.
Computers, like anything else, is a GIGO enterprise. The more you put in, the more you get out. PCs, Mac or Unix or Microsoft, have long been glorified typewriters. 10 years ago, you needed basic typing, mousing and -yes- printing skills. A Personal Computer was all about printing stuff.
The 21st century PC is a telephone + TV + arcade + soapbox. (Even if some people insist on printing out every webpage they see.) Basic skills for those uses include (the rarely taught in school) social ones: Bullsh*t filtering and howoto avoid common scams. Before you only needed to know what is a file, filesystem and how to use at least one document editor. Now you need to know what is a network, email/IM, webpages and basic security.
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Teaching basic skills is one thing, getting people to use them is another. The latter is far harder. I'd love to think people are smart enough to learn the basics, but experience has shown that people will screw up campfires, park their car's but leave the windows down and browse the web with IE. It should come as no surprise that forests burn, cars are stolen or ransacked and enough Microsoft PCs get owned each day to make zombie networks a sellable comodity.
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Have you tried Koders, Codebase or even the OSS Gonzui? Source-code specific search enginers are nothing new. (However, the ones I listed are limited to C and C type languages. And I'd hate to be a STFW troll, but if you spent < 5 minutes at Google looking for, say, "latex source code search engine" you might get lucky.)