With random version numbers, and -STABLE and -CURRENT also known as -STALE and -BROKEN.
Rock solid.
Especially -RELEASE versions.
Unpredictable dependencies between everything and everything -- you don't upgrade applications and libraries, you upgrade the system.
Wild claims about network performance being significantly better than one of Linux (last tested against version 1.2.13)
A lot of noise about pain of Linux changes while FreeBSD just went through extermely painful, not usable with standard upgrade procedure (simultaneous conversion to ELF, OpenBoot, CAM, etc.), change between versions at the rate, known by Linux users only in 1994.
No efforts to develop anything desktop-user-oriented that will install out of the box.
The solution to your problems is right under your nose.
Don't get me wrong, I use FreeBSD and like it, but most of FreeBSD "advocacy" is as much arrogant as most of Linux "advocacy" is immature.
That illustrates what tends to be the problem with the Open Source community, they'll produce the stuff that they personally want, but other things tend to be ignored.
And this is not going to change. You buy hardware to run Windows? Then run your Windows and shut up. You buy hardware to run Linux? Check the compatibility list or buy from company that builds boxes for Linux. If hardware vendors care, they will write drivers. If someone other than vendors care, they will write drivers. If noone cares, devices will be unsupported. Among all criticism directed toward Solaris I never heard anything about its inability to run on HP-PA -- if you want HP-PA, you buy HP-UX, and if you want Solaris, you buy Sparc.
To put the finest possible point on the matter, what would happen if the company that did this was not any of Linux's new, kindly rich uncles, but Microsoft? What if it tried to do to Linux what it did to Java: introduce a free version that was missing some important components, and had some other, custom parts, added?
If thousands packages will have in their Makefiles and RPMs something that will detect sabotaged version of system and refuse to compile or install, that version will be dead in a week -- as opposed to Windows, users rely on software, downloaded from authors' sites, and with or without distribution companies, it isn't going to change, unless someone at offending company will "fix" every piece of open source software.
With all controversy around distributors' preferences developers tolerate it and make their programs compatible with new versions because they realize that there is a reason behind system changes. But any definitely hostile move by distributor will immediately cause "retaliation" in independently distributed software, and no one likes to see something like:
"Warning: the system that you are running is modified by <offender> against the will of its developers. This program refuses to work on sabotaged system, get the fix kit at <URL>".
Anyway, never forget that there is a chance to find just a bunch of complete "Me Tarzan, you Jane" idiots out there. Gee, that would be something 8))
Alternative version of "Urusei Yatsura" beginning -- Ataru sent email (in his usual style) into space, Oni-aliens liked it and decided that the Earth is a nice place to conquer?
For Pete's sake, the screenshot comment was a JOKE. A screenshot of a program that's supposed to be anything but a screensaver is idiotic. You'd optimize for glitz, not functionality.
At least it may give an idea, what percentage of screen space is wasted on large buttons and space between them.
NOTE: Right click and select Save Link As... to download OenMail server software. Make sure the file type selected in the Save as type field is All Files (*.*). Left click to download OpenMail client software.
First, this is wrong -- they imply that clicking by different mouse buttons will cause their script to download different things, what is rather strange thing in itself. But second, recommendation to use "file type All files (*.*)" is nothing short of insulting -- especially for a file that in no possible way can be used on a box where "file type" and "*.*" both exist and are somehow related.
I have tried to get the form from there, but it didn't work for some reason (it was few days ago), so I called them and applied over the phone. Denied nevertheless.
Re:Unfortunately its a "thanks for nothing"...
on
Red Hat IPO Surprise
·
· Score: 1
It's possible to modify the code to increase the resolution, however this kind of camera has twice higher resolution for green component than for red and blue ones, so even though picture will be 640x480 it won't be the same thing as real 640x480.
(glibc2, I guess), and add more fonts to your system. This will take care of most of "deficiencies", you see.
Re:A thing about these Java programmers...
on
On Perl 5.6
·
· Score: 1
Driving them out of town won't bring your project in on time, but helping them out and giving them a chance will.
I completely disagree. Whatever they do, harm is greater than whatever useful they might produce, and the damage, caused by hidden bugs and unmanageable code can haunt projects for years. Most of those people are impossible to "fix" -- they are in the industry for money only and will never miss a chance to get enough credit for others' work to remain getting their money while producing nothing. If there will be a way to weed them out efficiently, companies that will be able to do that will benefit from it even if all those people will end up paid by those companies for the rest of their lives -- because in that case those people won't be able to screw up things like they do now.
...the needs of Windows-specific programming are slowly taking over the development of perl. Not good in my book.
Re:Show that Linux users don't play favourites..
on
PCI Modems and Linux?
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· Score: 1
Linux developers do play favorites, and always will -- after all they have no obligation to do stuff that they are not interested in. This is open source -- if there is no reason for adding the stuff, visible to people who can do the development, it won't be added. So far no one with abilities to do to hardware reverse engineering of those devices, or extremely efficient manufacturer nagging for specs, found it justifiable to dedicate those resources to making general-purpose winmodem drivers (someone started the development of soundcard-like driver for some winmodem, AFAIK for non-modem use). If manufacturers will make drivers, linux users will be able to look at them and decide if the performance loss tolerable for using those.
"cheap" != "low-quality". One can make cheap and perfectly usable PC with supported modem, cheap or expensive, PCI or ISA. Vendors who use turd on the PCI board instead of a modem can go screw themselves.
HTTP is a transfer protocol, it's mostly ortogonal to HTML or any other document format. Comapre the difference in results from number of ways, one can use to retrieve email (unix mail files, mh mailboxes, every possible mailbox format up to Hudson and Squish, POP, IMAP, M$ Exchange) and the result of differences in standards in email message format (RFC822 with plain text, MIME in all of its incarnations, widely accepted deviations and possible encodings, HTML in email, windoze-specific file formats in email attachments, etc.).
HTTP 1.1 persistent connections allow "pipelining", so new request can be sent while previous ones aren't answered yet. HTTP 1.0 Keep-Alive extension doesn't allow that, and this is why it doesn't allow nasty DoS attack that is possible with HTTP 1.1 -- sending request that definitely will take a lot of time to be processed, then sending large number of requests for large responses (possible large ones by themselves) expecting HTTP server to overgrow its either input or output buffers to ridiculous size.
Since there is no flow control in HTTP 1.1 other than one in TCP, and TCP one can't be used because requests should be received without blocking the client, and server can't send responses to later requests before the response to earlier one, server can either buffer everything in the input and delay processing, or process them simultaneously and buffer the output -- in either way buffers will grow. The alternative is to discard the requests, however just like with other DoS cases there are no "definitely safe" conditions for this.
HTTP 1.0 with Keep-Alive requires as many TCP connections as the number of requests that are in progress simultaneously (so the routers along the way and kernel buffers in the sender may not like it), but the end result is healthier for the server -- while server didn't say anything, client won't try to reuse the same TCP connection and leave server wondering, what to do with the new request.
I don't know, which servers actually support "pipelining" in HTTP 1.1, but this DoS was the main reason why I was unable to add HTTP 1.1 support to my fhttpd -- while I have found what I consider to be reasonable solutions to other DoS in HTTP, for this one every cure that comes to my mind looks worse than the disease.
HTTP 1.1 could solve this by introduction of higher-level flow control or by multiplexing simultaneous replies (first one will create reasonable safeguards against overloading, second one will eliminate the source of the problem), however HTTP 1.1 developers in their infinite wisdom did neither.
Didn't the word anti-American die out in the late 50's. Part of being American is being anti-American. There can be no evolution without revolution.
Well, some people in other countries are very anti-American, and this can be explained rather easily. Large amound of international umm... wrongdoing, prominent crooks and assholes come from US and "third world" countries. However while in "third world" they have some excuse (poor political system, poverty, underdeveloped education), US is supposed to be democratic, rich and refined. Yet for some reason for an outsider's eye Americans' activity abroad is as much civilized as one of dictator next door (or palace). What naturally makes people angry.
Since I live in US, I can observe that _within_ the country it's not as bad as in some others (if it was I wouldn't be here in the first place). Still Americans' claim of being so much developed that the only thing they have to do is to maintain status quo inside and subjugate everything outside, is extremely overstated. And of many things that people abroad don't like in US, is exactly the existence of certain software racket that affects their lives almost as much as it affects ours here.
Great... Now Bob compares Linux users' reaction to "inferior" nations responding to some tacky ethnic insult, and feels that he still somehow has any other option than to shut up? I completely agree with him that his insults were at exactly the same level as insults, some uncivilized people direct toward nations that they consider "worse" than their own one. And that he displays approximately the same level of immaturity, arrogance and stupidity as in any case when individuals that belong to some self-proclaimed "superior" race throw derogatory comments about the ethnicity of their opponents.
Being Russian/Jewish I think, I am qualified to make this comparison, and I don't see any way to respond to such manners other than by reminding him that they are rejected and hated by civilized people. In other words, fuck you, Bob.
This is because old Quickcams can't use IRQ, so polling is inevitable, even though it causes huge increase of wasted processor time (I know -- I wrote qcread). Quickcam VC (parallel ones) use ECP, so this is no longer the case.
If Sun needs a failure to learn from, Java development is far better candidate than Mozilla -- there is STILL no usable (not crashing like mad) release, standards STILL are in flux, and licensing is STILL ridiculous.
Mozilla is too large to become usable in such a short time -- development can't be done at the pace, Netscape hoped for, and they need much more patience than they show. Initial release had a lot of messy code, and a lot of stuff had to be cleaned up. The relatively small number of outside developers is perfectly normal when cleanup/redesign is being performed, so I don't see it as a failure technically -- it's still at the early stage of development, and if Netscape/AOL will have more patience, inevitable will happen, and high-quality product will be developed.
Example: http://www.ferrycam.com/livepush.html or anythign else the requires plugins which makes up a huge sector of the WWW. This is not acceptable at all.
Gotcha -- MS Windoze user "criticized" Linux with "facts" entirely from his wild imagination.
The page uses netscape-specific server push that happens to be implemented in exactly the same manner on all platforms. Simple attempt to load that page from any Linux box will show that, and our smart Anonymous Coward obviously never tried to do that.
And if sir Anonymous Coward cares, no one uses nonstandard plugins (ones that don't correspond to known and supported everywhere MIME type) anymore -- even on Windows they impose more security risk than what they worth.
Me? Probably none -- most likely the closest thing I will do in the next two years to what this box is designed for, is some simple work in mechanical CAD, and I'm afraid, it will be an overkill.
And unless I am terribly wrong, this box is not supposed to be a competitor for x86/alpha/sparc/ppc servers that are already present at the market. This leaves its original target -- high-performance graphics workstations, just not with NT. But to get any advantage over a thing, I can build in an hour from parts, bought in the nearest store for pennies (compared to VW cost) it better should be Really Good with graphics. Otherwise all its expensive hardware will be useless without NT, and the whole effort of porting Linux to it will give no result -- people who need a Linux box with lousy graphics (server, not-really-graphics-oriented desktop -- I am in this category) will get something else because it's cheaper, and people who need high-end graphics, at best (for you) will get VW with NT and at worst will get anything else with more standard or better supported by vendor hardware.
OTOH if it will be something outstanding as graphics desktop with Linux, people who want high-performance graphics and unixlike OS, will have a choice other than IRIX on MIPS box, yet still produced by SGI, and with all software there.
Slashdot Mirror
One distro.
With sysinstall as the installer.
Sane release schedule.
With random version numbers, and -STABLE and -CURRENT also known as -STALE and -BROKEN.
Rock solid.
Especially -RELEASE versions.
Unpredictable dependencies between everything and everything -- you don't upgrade applications and libraries, you upgrade the system.
Wild claims about network performance being significantly better than one of Linux (last tested against version 1.2.13)
A lot of noise about pain of Linux changes while FreeBSD just went through extermely painful, not usable with standard upgrade procedure (simultaneous conversion to ELF, OpenBoot, CAM, etc.), change between versions at the rate, known by Linux users only in 1994.
No efforts to develop anything desktop-user-oriented that will install out of the box.
The solution to your problems is right under your nose.
Don't get me wrong, I use FreeBSD and like it, but most of FreeBSD "advocacy" is as much arrogant as most of Linux "advocacy" is immature.
That illustrates what tends to be the problem with the Open Source community, they'll produce the stuff that they personally want, but other things tend to be ignored.
And this is not going to change. You buy hardware to run Windows? Then run your Windows and shut up. You buy hardware to run Linux? Check the compatibility list or buy from company that builds boxes for Linux. If hardware vendors care, they will write drivers. If someone other than vendors care, they will write drivers. If noone cares, devices will be unsupported. Among all criticism directed toward Solaris I never heard anything about its inability to run on HP-PA -- if you want HP-PA, you buy HP-UX, and if you want Solaris, you buy Sparc.
To put the finest possible point on the matter, what would happen if the company that did this was not any of Linux's new, kindly rich uncles, but Microsoft? What if it tried to do to Linux what it did to Java: introduce a free version that was missing some important components, and had some other, custom parts, added?
If thousands packages will have in their Makefiles and RPMs something that will detect sabotaged version of system and refuse to compile or install, that version will be dead in a week -- as opposed to Windows, users rely on software, downloaded from authors' sites, and with or without distribution companies, it isn't going to change, unless someone at offending company will "fix" every piece of open source software.
With all controversy around distributors' preferences developers tolerate it and make their programs compatible with new versions because they realize that there is a reason behind system changes. But any definitely hostile move by distributor will immediately cause "retaliation" in independently distributed software, and no one likes to see something like:
"Warning: the system that you are running is modified by <offender> against the will of its developers. This program refuses to work on sabotaged system, get the fix kit at <URL>".
I am US Citizen computer engineer, and feel this has hampered my gameful employment.
Maybe it's all because we, foreigners, can write the word "gainful" in your language without some weird and ironic misspelling?
Anyway, never forget that there is a chance to find just a bunch of complete "Me Tarzan, you Jane" idiots out there. Gee, that would be something 8))
Alternative version of "Urusei Yatsura" beginning -- Ataru sent email (in his usual style) into space, Oni-aliens liked it and decided that the Earth is a nice place to conquer?
Nah, makes too much sense.
For Pete's sake, the screenshot comment was a JOKE. A screenshot of a program that's supposed to be anything but a screensaver is idiotic. You'd optimize for glitz, not functionality.
At least it may give an idea, what percentage of screen space is wasted on large buttons and space between them.
NOTE: Right click and select Save Link As... to download OenMail server software. Make sure the file type selected in the Save as type field is All Files (*.*). Left click to download OpenMail client software.
First, this is wrong -- they imply that clicking by different mouse buttons will cause their script to download different things, what is rather strange thing in itself. But second, recommendation to use "file type All files (*.*)" is nothing short of insulting -- especially for a file that in no possible way can be used on a box where "file type" and "*.*" both exist and are somehow related.
I use:
Section "Pointer"
Protocol "MouseManPlusPS/2"
ZAxisMapping 4 5
Device "/dev/mouse"
EndSection
I have tried to get the form from there, but it didn't work for some reason (it was few days ago), so I called them and applied over the phone. Denied nevertheless.
Me, too. ((C) Unknown AOL User.)
It takes about up to 1 fps at 320x240, 24-bit color or up to 4 fps 6-bit B&W of the same size, has parallel interface (I was able to use up to 3 per box with additional parallel interfaces on the card), and it works with Linux and FreeBSD. See http://www.fhttpd.org/pub/qcwebcam/R EADME.html, http://phobos.illtel.denv er.co.us/~abelits/apartment.php3 for an example and http://phobos.illtel.denver.co.us/qca m-config for controls page.
It's possible to modify the code to increase the resolution, however this kind of camera has twice higher resolution for green component than for red and blue ones, so even though picture will be 640x480 it won't be the same thing as real 640x480.
(glibc2, I guess), and add more fonts to your system. This will take care of most of "deficiencies", you see.
Driving them out of town won't bring your project in on time, but helping them out and giving them a chance will.
I completely disagree. Whatever they do, harm is greater than whatever useful they might produce, and the damage, caused by hidden bugs and unmanageable code can haunt projects for years. Most of those people are impossible to "fix" -- they are in the industry for money only and will never miss a chance to get enough credit for others' work to remain getting their money while producing nothing. If there will be a way to weed them out efficiently, companies that will be able to do that will benefit from it even if all those people will end up paid by those companies for the rest of their lives -- because in that case those people won't be able to screw up things like they do now.
...the needs of Windows-specific programming are slowly taking over the development of perl. Not good in my book.
...to my HTTPX10 thing that was recently slashdotted... Or maybe I should setup CVS and put all the stuff there?
HTTP is a transfer protocol, it's mostly ortogonal to HTML or any other document format. Comapre the difference in results from number of ways, one can use to retrieve email (unix mail files, mh mailboxes, every possible mailbox format up to Hudson and Squish, POP, IMAP, M$ Exchange) and the result of differences in standards in email message format (RFC822 with plain text, MIME in all of its incarnations, widely accepted deviations and possible encodings, HTML in email, windoze-specific file formats in email attachments, etc.).
HTTP 1.1 persistent connections allow "pipelining", so new request can be sent while previous ones aren't answered yet. HTTP 1.0 Keep-Alive extension doesn't allow that, and this is why it doesn't allow nasty DoS attack that is possible with HTTP 1.1 -- sending request that definitely will take a lot of time to be processed, then sending large number of requests for large responses (possible large ones by themselves) expecting HTTP server to overgrow its either input or output buffers to ridiculous size.
Since there is no flow control in HTTP 1.1 other than one in TCP, and TCP one can't be used because requests should be received without blocking the client, and server can't send responses to later requests before the response to earlier one, server can either buffer everything in the input and delay processing, or process them simultaneously and buffer the output -- in either way buffers will grow. The alternative is to discard the requests, however just like with other DoS cases there are no "definitely safe" conditions for this.
HTTP 1.0 with Keep-Alive requires as many TCP connections as the number of requests that are in progress simultaneously (so the routers along the way and kernel buffers in the sender may not like it), but the end result is healthier for the server -- while server didn't say anything, client won't try to reuse the same TCP connection and leave server wondering, what to do with the new request.
I don't know, which servers actually support "pipelining" in HTTP 1.1, but this DoS was the main reason why I was unable to add HTTP 1.1 support to my fhttpd -- while I have found what I consider to be reasonable solutions to other DoS in HTTP, for this one every cure that comes to my mind looks worse than the disease.
HTTP 1.1 could solve this by introduction of higher-level flow control or by multiplexing simultaneous replies (first one will create reasonable safeguards against overloading, second one will eliminate the source of the problem), however HTTP 1.1 developers in their infinite wisdom did neither.
And this is not the only flaw in HTTP 1.1.
Didn't the word anti-American die out in the late 50's. Part of being American is being anti-American. There can be no evolution without revolution.
Well, some people in other countries are very anti-American, and this can be explained rather easily. Large amound of international umm... wrongdoing, prominent crooks and assholes come from US and "third world" countries. However while in "third world" they have some excuse (poor political system, poverty, underdeveloped education), US is supposed to be democratic, rich and refined. Yet for some reason for an outsider's eye Americans' activity abroad is as much civilized as one of dictator next door (or palace). What naturally makes people angry.
Since I live in US, I can observe that _within_ the country it's not as bad as in some others (if it was I wouldn't be here in the first place). Still Americans' claim of being so much developed that the only thing they have to do is to maintain status quo inside and subjugate everything outside, is extremely overstated. And of many things that people abroad don't like in US, is exactly the existence of certain software racket that affects their lives almost as much as it affects ours here.
Great... Now Bob compares Linux users' reaction to "inferior" nations responding to some tacky ethnic insult, and feels that he still somehow has any other option than to shut up? I completely agree with him that his insults were at exactly the same level as insults, some uncivilized people direct toward nations that they consider "worse" than their own one. And that he displays approximately the same level of immaturity, arrogance and stupidity as in any case when individuals that belong to some self-proclaimed "superior" race throw derogatory comments about the ethnicity of their opponents.
Being Russian/Jewish I think, I am qualified to make this comparison, and I don't see any way to respond to such manners other than by reminding him that they are rejected and hated by civilized people. In other words, fuck you, Bob.
This is because old Quickcams can't use IRQ, so polling is inevitable, even though it causes huge increase of wasted processor time (I know -- I wrote qcread). Quickcam VC (parallel ones) use ECP, so this is no longer the case.
Example: http://www.ferrycam.com/livepush.html or anythign else the requires plugins which makes up a huge sector of the WWW. This is not acceptable at all.
Gotcha -- MS Windoze user "criticized" Linux with "facts" entirely from his wild imagination.
The page uses netscape-specific server push that happens to be implemented in exactly the same manner on all platforms. Simple attempt to load that page from any Linux box will show that, and our smart Anonymous Coward obviously never tried to do that.
And if sir Anonymous Coward cares, no one uses nonstandard plugins (ones that don't correspond to known and supported everywhere MIME type) anymore -- even on Windows they impose more security risk than what they worth.
In your not so humble opinion, of course.
Actually in almost everyone's opinion here. And yes, I work for a software company and know EXACTLY what it is and what software worth.
How many will you buy if they do? :-)
Me? Probably none -- most likely the closest thing I will do in the next two years to what this box is designed for, is some simple work in mechanical CAD, and I'm afraid, it will be an overkill.
And unless I am terribly wrong, this box is not supposed to be a competitor for x86/alpha/sparc/ppc servers that are already present at the market. This leaves its original target -- high-performance graphics workstations, just not with NT. But to get any advantage over a thing, I can build in an hour from parts, bought in the nearest store for pennies (compared to VW cost) it better should be Really Good with graphics. Otherwise all its expensive hardware will be useless without NT, and the whole effort of porting Linux to it will give no result -- people who need a Linux box with lousy graphics (server, not-really-graphics-oriented desktop -- I am in this category) will get something else because it's cheaper, and people who need high-end graphics, at best (for you) will get VW with NT and at worst will get anything else with more standard or better supported by vendor hardware.
OTOH if it will be something outstanding as graphics desktop with Linux, people who want high-performance graphics and unixlike OS, will have a choice other than IRIX on MIPS box, yet still produced by SGI, and with all software there.