z/OS is the System360/System390 OS of today. System36 became OS/400 became System i for the Series i hardware. RS/6000 is now System p and runs AIX or Linux. (I might have mixed 'i' and 'p' up again. Those aren't very intuitive names.)
OS/2 was actually not killed. It's just not within IBM any longer. Serenity Systems sells eComStation which is a modernized OEM upgrade for OS/2. People who still need OS/2, DOS, and/or Windows 3 application support can run Rexx, Java, and many F/OSS apps (including Firefox and OpenOffice) side by side with them. At $259 per seat, it's a little pricier than Linux, FreeDOS, and one of the free virtual machines. Make sure you really need it before shelling out that much for it. I hear it's blazing fast on recent hardware, though.
IBM has been interested for years in combining Solaris and AIX. The deal with (the original, not Caldera) SCO and the acquisition of Sequent for Project Monterey were because the AIX/Solaris talks fell through.
Solaris and AIX have their own weak and strong points, so combining the strengths is the logical choice.
MySQL could become a low-end IBM DB with DB2 at the high end. They could both pick up each other's dialects of SQL so that eventually a database abstraction layer (or all those programmers silly enough not to use one) could treat either one the same. Only the DBA would have to care about the differences.
IBM wants to sell you different hardware that works better for your different software needs rather than shoehorning everything into Power, x86, or System z and trying to force those into your racks. They've made lots of press with this lately. Just search for "IBM hybrid server", as there are too many articles to link from here.
There are some workloads that the Niagara, Rock, and such are just phenomenal at running. These tend to be ones that Power, which is fewer faster cores, aren't so great at running.
IBM and Sun both have different strengths in their closed Unixes, too. They both have their own connections to Linux. They both have their own strengths developing software for Linux.
MySQL could complement DB2 as the entry-level DB. IBM has lots of middleware software written in Java. They have Lotus stuff and Sun has OpenOffice.
They both have blade products, and Sun's x86 ones are IMHO better than IBM's. They oth have torage products, and they are each one stronger in different parts of that market. Sun steps all over most other server companies in the telephone and telecoms market with their Fire and related servers.
I think there's a good match to be made here if IBM doesn't kill the engineering culture of Sun. The two are rumored to have very different product development styles, and it'd suck to see IBM chase off all the good employees who are more comfortable with how Sun does things.
Sun likes to put an inordinate amount according to IBM's figures into R&D. Maybe they can become an IBM Research subsidiary or something, sort of like AT&T had Bell Labs. That could be awesome for the IT industry.
Java, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Solaris, xVM, VirtualBox, NetBEans, Sun Studio (their development suite for both Solaris and Linux on both Sparc and x86), Sun Grid Engine, their storage business, their hardware vendor relationship with telecom companies, the Sparc engineers, and their goodwill are part of the package, too.
IBM and Sun had talked previously a number of time about Solaris on Power, AIX on Sparc, and in swapping source back and forth to make both products stronger. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a major portion of the deal from IBM's point of view.
IF you think installing a distro makes you elite, then perhaps you shouldn't be trying to judge such things.
Have you ever actually used a Unix for major production work? Ever rendered a movie on Irix? Ever run an ISP or a hosting company? Ever run the server room for a school, a factory, or a commercial office?
How about people who package apps for the distro? The distro creators? The kernel and libc programmers? The X.org folk? You can call yourself Unix elite if you want. There's elite and then there's elite. Installing Gentoo doesn't make you Dennis Ritchie or Rob Pike.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
I didn't miss any point. The fact that there's a chicken and egg problem is not unique to Linux. Let's use a few car analogies, since you brought us around to that staple of Slashdot discussion.
Many people would like to have all-electric cars. The cars currently can't recharge very fast. That means your range is limited by an overnight charge. If we had fast-charging cars, then we could have rapid recharging stations alongside the road like we have gas stations. Nobody will build these until there is a fast-charging car. Nobody is building a fast-charging car because there's no rapid recharging infrastructure. there is also the issue of technology, but it is largely a logistics issue.
Likewise, it's difficult to sell people in the US bio diesel because they drive gasoline cars. It's difficult to sell people diesel cars on the understanding that they'll use bio diesel, because there's not that much bio diesel available. Petroleum diesel has a reputation for being smelly, dirty, and expensive. This is largely because it can be and in the past was smelly, dirty, and expensive and currently can be expensive still. Nobody wants to use a smelly, dirty, expensive fuel so they'll have a vehicle ready for a cleaner, less expensive fuel some random time in the future. Many of the advancements made in Europe with conventional diesel aren't even recognized widely in the US because the volume of these cleaner diesels is so small on US roads.
It's difficult to sell people small cars because they like the safety of big cars. We'd all be safer in auto accidents (and probably have fewer of them, since it's easier to steer and stop a smaller car) if we were all in smaller cars. Yet the people in smaller cars are in more danger if they get hit by someone in a larger car.
It's more fuel efficient to travel by rail than by individual cars, but rail doesn't run everywhere. To get rail running everywhere, we'll have to roll out hundreds of thousands of trucks and construction machines. In the meantime, people have to drive sometimes quite a distance to a train station, then go far out of their way making many extra stops in order to save energy, thereby wasting much of their time and using some energy to get to the depot.
Yes, BTW, one issue really is that a lot of the hardware out there is specced to Windows. It is designed to work with Windows. The drivers are written for Windows. The hardware is tested under Windows. Microsoft certifies the driver to work with Windows. Microsoft has been known to pay marketing fees for companies to advertise that hardware is designed for a particular version of Windows. The drivers are a necessary part of many hardware peripherals, because it's cheaper to put a DSP or a microcontroller on a board and provide it with programming than to develop the hardware from scratch. Yet those drivers are often closed-source and available only for Windows.
If it's a logical followup question and wasn't addressed directly, that usually means they're asking the same question and haven't designed and implemented the experiments to determine those answers yet.
Choosing one package over another, recommending one over another, submitting a bug report, bitching about thin docs, writing a "missing manual" article or book, or using phrases like "RPM dependency hell" or "Ubuntu means 'too stupid to use Debian'" are criticisms. IF this guy can't find criticisms of Linux distros and software packages for Linux, then he's not looking very damn hard.
Here are a few criticims:
Ubuntu makes the easy things deceptively easy but makes the hard things damn near impossible
Gentoo lets you tweak your system exactly the way you want it. It allows you this by forcing you to tweak your system exactly the way you want it.
Suse is Novell's new platform for Netware services. It might also prove promising some day as its own Linux distro.
Firefox 3 is a crash-happy mess, but at least it doesn't absorb memory like a sponge as its predecessor did.
Open Office does what 95% of office suite users need 95% of the time, but if you need that other 5%, you're screwed.
The GIMP is a nice toy, but until I get Pantone color matching and a proper EPS importer I'll need to stick to Adobe for some of my work.
The audio component of Gnash should be called Wail, because depending on it as a proper Flash VM is hell.
Puppy Linux does not yet work under VirtualBox. Neither project currently has time allocated to fix this issue.
I like Debian, but all the damn third-party software seems to be for Fedora.
There are so many distros, I don't know which ones to warn people against. All I can do is recommend this handful: Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Mint, Puppy, and maybe Suse.
I don't want a scheduler that's completely fair. I want one that prioritizes what I want it to over everything else.
ext4 makes assumptions about applications those applications aren't ready to live up to. Meanwhile, the applications make assumptions about filesystems that ext4 shits all over for the sake of performance. Until one side blinks, people tempted by performance enough to use ext4 are losing data.
Which of these statements have you not seen some instance of, or an instance of something nearly like it?
Re:Critics, real and imaginary, and Priorities
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
Isn't writing a competing package, submitting a patch, or even submitting a bug report an act of criticism? So if those things happen too often, how can we have a paucity of critics in the community? Perhaps we have too many.
Re:Nope, it's the putative new users problem
on
Linux Needs Critics
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Part of the issue is that you're talking about two completely different groups of people with two completely different views of computers and you're equating them directly as if they were interchangeable parts.
The developer doesn't have a problem from the user not using his software due to idiosyncratic hardware unless the developer actually cares that the user uses his software. If the developer makes the software for those who want it and user X doesn't want it, then user X may not be of any concern to the developer.
Another difference is that many people think of software as "something to use on my computer". That's understandable since the physical computer is what usually gets marketed at them, but it is a totally naive notion. That's not how software people think. To a software person, and properly I might add, the software is what people really want. The computer is the means to run the software.
It makes no sense to want the computer except for the software it can run. So why not specify the hardware for the software? Sure, that's difficult when you specify high-end specialized IBM, HP, SGI or Sun hardware for your software. Specifying commodity PC hardware that costs a few dollars more shouldn't be an issue if the user really wants the software to work with it.
In the stated anecdotal example of Windows vs. Linux for this guy's media center, he's using hardware specced to the software already. The hardware is specced to Windows almost exclusively. That's why it works decently there. If he wants his hardware to work with Linux, he needs to buy hardware that works with Linux. It's not as if there's a paucity of affordable hardware that works well enough with it. Most of what works for Linux is also better quality hardware that will offer better service under Windows, too. The manufacturers who make things work under Linux are the kind who think about their customers enough to make it work for more people, after all.
You could use links (yes, that's "links", not "lynx") with or without the -g command-line option to make it graphical. You could also use Dillo, which is an all-graphical yet quite minimal web browser.
You could rip a bunch out of Firefox, but you'd still be stuck with the huge Gecko rendering engine that is built for far more than just rendering a web page. The application itself is also rendered using it, and the XUL stuff for other applications uses it, too. You'd be better off starting from a leaner base if you were looking to strip out functionality and still have a working browser. Perhaps Chromium (the basis for Google Chrome), Galeon, or Konqueror would be a better fit.
Download Puppy and run the live CD for a day sometime. You'll think KDE 4 is a half-dead slug. KDE 3 is a spritely, healthy slug compared to JWM, but still a slug.
So, no, I am not a victim of the marketing. I bought a quality monitor from a respected name and I get good performance from it. Go figure. I just wish I'd had the price quoted for that now when I bought it a couple of years ago.
Somebody is paying less for their monitors or is more worried about excessive brightness (my monitor has been panned for being dim, but I don't even run it at full brightness) than about quality, and they're getting screwed.
I've never noticed such a long lag. Surely there's a range involved here, and some LCD monitors are better than others about it. Do you have some references for which are the biggest problem? I'm hoping my ViewSonic isn't one of them, not just because that'd mean I spent a whole lot of money on a faulty product, but also because my mind must have a 50ms lag behind my controls, too, if the monitor is delaying the display that much.
I know you said no vi editors, but there are visual fully GUI editors based around vi. Some of them start in edit mode and you never have to use command mode if you don't want to, because nearly everything is in the menus.
One such editor is Cream which doesn't even enable vi/vim's command mode unless you set a preference to use it. Everything is available via the drop-down menu and/or keyboard shortcuts (which follow IBM's Common User Access guidelines).
Cream includes tabbed file editing, optional function folding, handles different line endings on any host platform, unlimited undo/redo, syntax highlighting for 250 languages and variants, optional automatic text indention based on language, macros with recording capability, block comment and uncomment selected text, diff mode, separate configurations for separate users from a single system-wide installation, column (as opposed to line/row) selections, multiple color themes for syntax highlighting, go to line number or percentage through file, and a whole bunch of other features.
There are also plugins to do everything from GPG encryption at the selection block or the file level to automatic email address munging to keep spammers from easily harvesting addresses in the text.
It's built around Vim, but it's also built to allow you to completely ignore that fact.
Personally, I use gVim as much or more than Cream when on Windows, and I also use regular console vim on Win on my office Windows box. On Linux I just use regular old console Vim in a better console than what Windows has standard. I'm a Vim aficionado, though, and several people I know who don't like Vim do like Cream.
Scott McNealy? Get back to the merger talks with IBM! The network still isn't the computer. The computer is the computer, and the network still lets it talk to other computers. The bus is still faster than the telco.
If you're using a 50ms LCD to play games, you're doing it wrong. LCD monitors for a few years now have been offered in 8ms and lower response times, down to 2ms. Right now, a 5ms LCD PC monitor can be had for well under $200 in 19" 4:3 or 22" widescreen formats on Newegg.
You might want to note my 10:51 AM response to the AC before your response at 11:26 AM. I pointed out that you, specifically, are probably using something that's not a a typical "desktop" configuration.
I mistakenly used the general "you" referring to the random reader when it could be read as meaning specifically you, Pentium100. Most dual-socket machines intended for general desktop use are Xeons with an SMP front side bus rather than Opterons with ccNUMA integrated memory controllers, after all.
See post #27299117 where I said pretty much the same thing.
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z/OS is the System360/System390 OS of today. System36 became OS/400 became System i for the Series i hardware. RS/6000 is now System p and runs AIX or Linux. (I might have mixed 'i' and 'p' up again. Those aren't very intuitive names.)
OS/2 was actually not killed. It's just not within IBM any longer. Serenity Systems sells eComStation which is a modernized OEM upgrade for OS/2. People who still need OS/2, DOS, and/or Windows 3 application support can run Rexx, Java, and many F/OSS apps (including Firefox and OpenOffice) side by side with them. At $259 per seat, it's a little pricier than Linux, FreeDOS, and one of the free virtual machines. Make sure you really need it before shelling out that much for it. I hear it's blazing fast on recent hardware, though.
IBM has been interested for years in combining Solaris and AIX. The deal with (the original, not Caldera) SCO and the acquisition of Sequent for Project Monterey were because the AIX/Solaris talks fell through.
I doubt there will be much "vs" to it.
Solaris and AIX have their own weak and strong points, so combining the strengths is the logical choice.
MySQL could become a low-end IBM DB with DB2 at the high end. They could both pick up each other's dialects of SQL so that eventually a database abstraction layer (or all those programmers silly enough not to use one) could treat either one the same. Only the DBA would have to care about the differences.
Lotus Symphony already uses OpenOffice code along with Eclipse code, so that's not much of a versus situation.
IBM wants to sell you different hardware that works better for your different software needs rather than shoehorning everything into Power, x86, or System z and trying to force those into your racks. They've made lots of press with this lately. Just search for "IBM hybrid server", as there are too many articles to link from here.
There are some workloads that the Niagara, Rock, and such are just phenomenal at running. These tend to be ones that Power, which is fewer faster cores, aren't so great at running.
IBM and Sun both have different strengths in their closed Unixes, too. They both have their own connections to Linux. They both have their own strengths developing software for Linux.
MySQL could complement DB2 as the entry-level DB. IBM has lots of middleware software written in Java. They have Lotus stuff and Sun has OpenOffice.
They both have blade products, and Sun's x86 ones are IMHO better than IBM's. They oth have torage products, and they are each one stronger in different parts of that market. Sun steps all over most other server companies in the telephone and telecoms market with their Fire and related servers.
I think there's a good match to be made here if IBM doesn't kill the engineering culture of Sun. The two are rumored to have very different product development styles, and it'd suck to see IBM chase off all the good employees who are more comfortable with how Sun does things.
Sun likes to put an inordinate amount according to IBM's figures into R&D. Maybe they can become an IBM Research subsidiary or something, sort of like AT&T had Bell Labs. That could be awesome for the IT industry.
Java, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Solaris, xVM, VirtualBox, NetBEans, Sun Studio (their development suite for both Solaris and Linux on both Sparc and x86), Sun Grid Engine, their storage business, their hardware vendor relationship with telecom companies, the Sparc engineers, and their goodwill are part of the package, too.
IBM and Sun had talked previously a number of time about Solaris on Power, AIX on Sparc, and in swapping source back and forth to make both products stronger. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if that's a major portion of the deal from IBM's point of view.
And z/OS, which shares no code with SVR4 or BSD 4.2 at all.
IF you think installing a distro makes you elite, then perhaps you shouldn't be trying to judge such things.
Have you ever actually used a Unix for major production work? Ever rendered a movie on Irix? Ever run an ISP or a hosting company? Ever run the server room for a school, a factory, or a commercial office?
How about people who package apps for the distro? The distro creators? The kernel and libc programmers? The X.org folk? You can call yourself Unix elite if you want. There's elite and then there's elite. Installing Gentoo doesn't make you Dennis Ritchie or Rob Pike.
I didn't miss any point. The fact that there's a chicken and egg problem is not unique to Linux. Let's use a few car analogies, since you brought us around to that staple of Slashdot discussion.
Many people would like to have all-electric cars. The cars currently can't recharge very fast. That means your range is limited by an overnight charge. If we had fast-charging cars, then we could have rapid recharging stations alongside the road like we have gas stations. Nobody will build these until there is a fast-charging car. Nobody is building a fast-charging car because there's no rapid recharging infrastructure. there is also the issue of technology, but it is largely a logistics issue.
Likewise, it's difficult to sell people in the US bio diesel because they drive gasoline cars. It's difficult to sell people diesel cars on the understanding that they'll use bio diesel, because there's not that much bio diesel available. Petroleum diesel has a reputation for being smelly, dirty, and expensive. This is largely because it can be and in the past was smelly, dirty, and expensive and currently can be expensive still. Nobody wants to use a smelly, dirty, expensive fuel so they'll have a vehicle ready for a cleaner, less expensive fuel some random time in the future. Many of the advancements made in Europe with conventional diesel aren't even recognized widely in the US because the volume of these cleaner diesels is so small on US roads.
It's difficult to sell people small cars because they like the safety of big cars. We'd all be safer in auto accidents (and probably have fewer of them, since it's easier to steer and stop a smaller car) if we were all in smaller cars. Yet the people in smaller cars are in more danger if they get hit by someone in a larger car.
It's more fuel efficient to travel by rail than by individual cars, but rail doesn't run everywhere. To get rail running everywhere, we'll have to roll out hundreds of thousands of trucks and construction machines. In the meantime, people have to drive sometimes quite a distance to a train station, then go far out of their way making many extra stops in order to save energy, thereby wasting much of their time and using some energy to get to the depot.
Yes, BTW, one issue really is that a lot of the hardware out there is specced to Windows. It is designed to work with Windows. The drivers are written for Windows. The hardware is tested under Windows. Microsoft certifies the driver to work with Windows. Microsoft has been known to pay marketing fees for companies to advertise that hardware is designed for a particular version of Windows. The drivers are a necessary part of many hardware peripherals, because it's cheaper to put a DSP or a microcontroller on a board and provide it with programming than to develop the hardware from scratch. Yet those drivers are often closed-source and available only for Windows.
If it's a logical followup question and wasn't addressed directly, that usually means they're asking the same question and haven't designed and implemented the experiments to determine those answers yet.
Choosing one package over another, recommending one over another, submitting a bug report, bitching about thin docs, writing a "missing manual" article or book, or using phrases like "RPM dependency hell" or "Ubuntu means 'too stupid to use Debian'" are criticisms. IF this guy can't find criticisms of Linux distros and software packages for Linux, then he's not looking very damn hard.
Here are a few criticims:
Which of these statements have you not seen some instance of, or an instance of something nearly like it?
Isn't writing a competing package, submitting a patch, or even submitting a bug report an act of criticism? So if those things happen too often, how can we have a paucity of critics in the community? Perhaps we have too many.
Part of the issue is that you're talking about two completely different groups of people with two completely different views of computers and you're equating them directly as if they were interchangeable parts.
The developer doesn't have a problem from the user not using his software due to idiosyncratic hardware unless the developer actually cares that the user uses his software. If the developer makes the software for those who want it and user X doesn't want it, then user X may not be of any concern to the developer.
Another difference is that many people think of software as "something to use on my computer". That's understandable since the physical computer is what usually gets marketed at them, but it is a totally naive notion. That's not how software people think. To a software person, and properly I might add, the software is what people really want. The computer is the means to run the software.
It makes no sense to want the computer except for the software it can run. So why not specify the hardware for the software? Sure, that's difficult when you specify high-end specialized IBM, HP, SGI or Sun hardware for your software. Specifying commodity PC hardware that costs a few dollars more shouldn't be an issue if the user really wants the software to work with it.
In the stated anecdotal example of Windows vs. Linux for this guy's media center, he's using hardware specced to the software already. The hardware is specced to Windows almost exclusively. That's why it works decently there. If he wants his hardware to work with Linux, he needs to buy hardware that works with Linux. It's not as if there's a paucity of affordable hardware that works well enough with it. Most of what works for Linux is also better quality hardware that will offer better service under Windows, too. The manufacturers who make things work under Linux are the kind who think about their customers enough to make it work for more people, after all.
Don't forget AbiWord.
You could use links (yes, that's "links", not "lynx") with or without the -g command-line option to make it graphical. You could also use Dillo, which is an all-graphical yet quite minimal web browser.
You could rip a bunch out of Firefox, but you'd still be stuck with the huge Gecko rendering engine that is built for far more than just rendering a web page. The application itself is also rendered using it, and the XUL stuff for other applications uses it, too. You'd be better off starting from a leaner base if you were looking to strip out functionality and still have a working browser. Perhaps Chromium (the basis for Google Chrome), Galeon, or Konqueror would be a better fit.
Let's benchmark Puppy for boot times and Seamonkey times vs. Vista. ;-)
The next generation of what, KHTML? WebKit did not spring from the forehead of Steve Jobs fully formed, you might want to know.
Download Puppy and run the live CD for a day sometime. You'll think KDE 4 is a half-dead slug. KDE 3 is a spritely, healthy slug compared to JWM, but still a slug.
Replying to myself because I looked it up:
ViewSonic VG2230wm
best lag behind CRT: 0ms
worst: 10ms
average: 1ms
The source is Digital Versus.
So, no, I am not a victim of the marketing. I bought a quality monitor from a respected name and I get good performance from it. Go figure. I just wish I'd had the price quoted for that now when I bought it a couple of years ago.
Somebody is paying less for their monitors or is more worried about excessive brightness (my monitor has been panned for being dim, but I don't even run it at full brightness) than about quality, and they're getting screwed.
I've never noticed such a long lag. Surely there's a range involved here, and some LCD monitors are better than others about it. Do you have some references for which are the biggest problem? I'm hoping my ViewSonic isn't one of them, not just because that'd mean I spent a whole lot of money on a faulty product, but also because my mind must have a 50ms lag behind my controls, too, if the monitor is delaying the display that much.
What? Vegans always leave the animal whole.
I know you said no vi editors, but there are visual fully GUI editors based around vi. Some of them start in edit mode and you never have to use command mode if you don't want to, because nearly everything is in the menus.
One such editor is Cream which doesn't even enable vi/vim's command mode unless you set a preference to use it. Everything is available via the drop-down menu and/or keyboard shortcuts (which follow IBM's Common User Access guidelines).
Cream includes tabbed file editing, optional function folding, handles different line endings on any host platform, unlimited undo/redo, syntax highlighting for 250 languages and variants, optional automatic text indention based on language, macros with recording capability, block comment and uncomment selected text, diff mode, separate configurations for separate users from a single system-wide installation, column (as opposed to line/row) selections, multiple color themes for syntax highlighting, go to line number or percentage through file, and a whole bunch of other features.
There are also plugins to do everything from GPG encryption at the selection block or the file level to automatic email address munging to keep spammers from easily harvesting addresses in the text.
It's built around Vim, but it's also built to allow you to completely ignore that fact.
Personally, I use gVim as much or more than Cream when on Windows, and I also use regular console vim on Win on my office Windows box. On Linux I just use regular old console Vim in a better console than what Windows has standard. I'm a Vim aficionado, though, and several people I know who don't like Vim do like Cream.
Scott McNealy? Get back to the merger talks with IBM! The network still isn't the computer. The computer is the computer, and the network still lets it talk to other computers. The bus is still faster than the telco.
Which politicians have failed reelection for handing out money?
If you're using a 50ms LCD to play games, you're doing it wrong. LCD monitors for a few years now have been offered in 8ms and lower response times, down to 2ms. Right now, a 5ms LCD PC monitor can be had for well under $200 in 19" 4:3 or 22" widescreen formats on Newegg.
You might want to note my 10:51 AM response to the AC before your response at 11:26 AM. I pointed out that you, specifically, are probably using something that's not a a typical "desktop" configuration.
I mistakenly used the general "you" referring to the random reader when it could be read as meaning specifically you, Pentium100. Most dual-socket machines intended for general desktop use are Xeons with an SMP front side bus rather than Opterons with ccNUMA integrated memory controllers, after all.
See post #27299117 where I said pretty much the same thing.