I picked up the 2nd Ed while on a trip to NYC. My initial reading of it suggest that the new author has worked pretty hard to closely emulate Stevens' style and keep as much of his original material intact as possible. The new section on threads for example reads as though it could have been written by the man himself.
(BTW what a useless review - quoting the blurb and the preface. Slashdot often does better... )
Yes. It's a known quantity and is extremely stable. 2.6 may be the latest and greatest, but it's still coming up with reports of some nasty performance problems under certain kinds of load.
Enterprise shops won't dare take risks with new OS releases. They'll sit until they have to move, either through obsolescence or (less likely) due to a new must-have feature.
I guess too you should also count every British national before considering who wants what.
The trouble is that the Northern Ireland Act 1998 specifies that it is the people of Northern Ireland who will decide "who wants what" in terms of NI's constitutional configuration. I'm afraid you're closing the door somewhat after the horse has bolted.
Indeed. Read the Old Testament; it is full of stories about God commanding people to invade towns, kill everyone in them (in the most horrible, sadistic way possible) and rob all their loot.
eg Samuel 15:3 : "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
Deuteronomy 20 goes : "When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it... And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it.. thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword.. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee.. "
The Bible sets plenty of precedent for God having killed people, sacked their lands and reallocated it to, er, well the people he liked. We're teaching this murderous crap in our schools.
I think it's a pretty natural human reaction to get scared about an act of terrorism and it's consequences.
In this case, I was mainly talking about what our delightful politicians will decide to do in response to this particular act. Almost certainly they will push through their ridiculous ID card legislation, but I can't bear to think of what other draconian measures they have in mind for our delight.
"Quite obviously, the anti-terrorist legislation was not put in place to prevent terrorism"
What complete rubbish. One of the principle articles of legislation in the UK was the Prevention of Terrorism Act which was subsequently renamed to the Terrorism Act; nonetheless it's stated purpose was preventing terrorism rather than merely catching those responsible.
The USA-PATRIOT act, also in it's name, is about prevention ("intercept and obstruct") of terrorism, rather than merely prosecution after the fact.
George Bush and Tony Blair are constantly telling us about how their measures are designed to protect people and homeland, so it could not be further from the truth to claim that they had no such stated interest.
We can be pretty well assured that there will be more than two deaths. The London Underground will have been jam-packed.
In London when there is a problem with the tube, connecting buses are brought in to substitute.It appears that the terrorist attack was carefully organized so that people being moved from the tube onto buses would also be moved into danger. If it is AQ, I'm scared that all of the heavy anti-terrorist legislation appears to have had no effect; if it's not AQ I'm even more scared.
Your analysis is wrong. The United States has several extremely large railway companies. Union Pacific does about $12bn in revenue each year. The trouble is that none of that comes from direct passenger revenue. The reason for that is that direct passenger revenue simply became unprofitable, as it did and still does in almost every single developed country in the world.
Apart from the obvious example in Japan (which is a lot to do with the size and economic profile of that country), passenger railway systems in the world are successful only when they are heavily subsidized by the state. There is no inter-city railway system anywhere which is run privately and for financial profit.
In the USA it simply become completely cost ineffective to run passenger rail, so the private railways ran down and began to stop their passenger rail services. The federal government moved in to stop this and replaced it with Amtrak, which trundles on today keeping the system barely alive. The reason why there is no serious passenger railway system outside the merely-satisfactory northeast corridor is because the regional and federal governments won't spend the money to create one.
The same pattern followed in Europe, ie in the UK where the government nationalized the entire system. In countries such as France, Germany and Switzerland, reliable and efficient railways which contribute to the national economies in many ways exist because the governments spend billions to create them. The impetus to do this simply does not exist at a federal or state level in the US.
If this was the true objective, then why didn't the USA drop the bomb somewhere desolate, such as a desert or other deserted area, and say to the Japanese "if you don't surrender then we'll drop this on your cities until you do" ?
"How many people have said, "We must believe in God, for if we do, and he does not exist, nothing happens. But if we do not believe in him, and he does exist, then we are doomed." But, it's fairly clear he does not exist."
It's beside the point. Which God do you believe in ? There's a big selection, and pretty much all of them say that if you believe in the wrong one you'll be in big trouble. So how do you choose ?
"Then, they could release brain-dead and damaged versions of RedHat Linux that failed under certain conditions; "
Bit of a silly contribution really. How easy is that going to be given that they also have to release the source ? Any tampering with the code has to be released under the GPL.
And if Red Hat was deemed rubbish, wouldn't people just switch to a competitor (eg SuSE) much as they might do today ?
"3. Dramatically confusing the market would work in Microsoft's favor. further, they would offer "upgrade paths" that start in Linux and go towards MS Server 2k3 in short order."
MS already do this, in the form of things like SFU.
Phone providers in the USA at the moment are back to engaging in monopolistic practices. Apparently the government didn't think of preventing the RBOCs from merging.
Providing a local loop is an inherently monopolistic business; the barriers to entry are extremely high. You can't just have someone dig up your driveway and install a new wire between their cabinet and your street each time you want to switch providers.
I disagree. The market for operating systems is completely different compared with the one for specific specialized categories of application. One such category is source control; there is no imminent sign of a revision control system even touching the capabilities offered by commercial systems simply because the OSS community and user base does not require the features that businesses are prepared to pay out for.
Another example of a category like this is the database segment. There isn't an OSS product that touches the capability of Oracle or DB2.
CVS has existed for even longer than the Linux kernel has been. So why is it so slow, crap and buggy ?
"Linus might not be able to get people to follow him next time. "
Please wind your neck in. Linus doesn't give a damn about people following him and he's quite right; he leads by his own convictions which is the right way to deal with a project like this, if you tried to please everyone you'd get nowhere. At any time following the adoption of BitKeeper anyone could have forked the kernel and built it their way. Can you speculate why that never actually took place ? Can you explain how you think it is remotely likely ?
"Larry while a good guy years ago is basically an asshole taking positions on software that would embarrass Bill Gates"
Hyperbole. Bill Gates hates OSS. You might not like the BK license or the way it was handled, but that doesn't alter the truth that McVoy and his company have contributed substantially to OSS. You can't accuse someone of acting like Microsoft just because they moved to protect their investment in intellectual property.
"The software used didn't make anyone's job easier with the possible exception of Linus's"
OK now we can safely establish your cluelessness; you simply don't know how bad the kernel development was going prior to BK coming on the scene. After the adaptation of BK the change throughput into the kernel increased massively, dropped patches stopped, and the quality of the kernel dramatically improved in the estimation of most people closely involved with the project. All of the lead kernel developers have attributed this success to BK, to one degree or another.
Your company's business logic, web services, email, word processing, version control? Free alternatives exist - proprietary is not OK.
Sorry but this is rubbish certainly on the version control front. Free alternatives do not exist, if you define "alternative" as "equivalent in functionality/scalability/reliability". Relying on CVS, Arch or Subversion in a business context at this stage is a massive, massive risk. That is why the source control business is so big and why there are so many proprietary source control systems out there competing like crazy. Any outage, corruption or other silly problem hits you directly in the pocket.
RMS isn't particularly consistent, though you have to admire him for trying.
Prior to the existence of a viable free kernel the GNU system was developed on systems which weren't at all free. Most of the time, the GNU system with a Linux kernel will still boot from a proprietary bios/bootloader. It is a simple reality that commercial non-free software is still essential to bootstrap - in any sense of the word - free operating systems and applications.
Anyone who vaguely follows LKML will know that the above is complete rubbish. Linus is not in the business of marketing, promotion or starting a revolution. He simply wants to write a great kernel, and accepts the help of people willing to contribute. End of story.
If you don't like that, please go away and use the Hurd.
Re:Anyone who uses my product must do as I say...
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 1
Regarding the productivity claim, Torvalds preferred the no-SCM system to CVS. My understanding - stop me if I'm being misleading - is that he seemed to believe that CVS or Subversion would have slowed him down compared to his own system of manually merging the patches; I can't remember the reasons why Arch was not acceptable at the time. On the basis the productivity claim seems valid to me.
UNIX wasn't a competitor for Windows; the two products do two different jobs. The unfortunate way of things now is that a decent sized business probably needs both Windows *and* Unix boxen.
What you have to understand is that Linus doesn't give a tuppenny f*ck about the morality of reverse engineering. Why does everyone on Slashdot think that he has to act as an open source messiah ?
Re:Anyone who uses my product must do as I say...
on
Linus Drops BitKeeper
·
· Score: 1
"Too bad Sun didn't think to forbid the use of Solaris to anyone who might be thinking about making a competing product, eh?"
Under the BK license this restriction only exists with the free version, which seems like a reasonable enough compromise unless you're one of those people who expects people to give up their life work for free. True, it's great when people do that, but not everyone is the same.
"But then, maybe it's too bad that BSD wasn't originally under a GPL license, then Solaris wouldn't have existed,"
But now you're talking crap, since Solaris is based on SVR4, not BSD (SunOS, retroactively known as Solaris 1, was BSD based).
"Microsoft Windows might have died a well deserved death before Windows NT was out... counter-factuals are fun"
They're not fun when they are misinformed in the way that yours are. The rise of MS Windows has little to do with the UNIX situation and it definitely owes very little to free software.
Slashdot Mirror
I picked up the 2nd Ed while on a trip to NYC. My initial reading of it suggest that the new author has worked pretty hard to closely emulate Stevens' style and keep as much of his original material intact as possible. The new section on threads for example reads as though it could have been written by the man himself.
(BTW what a useless review - quoting the blurb and the preface. Slashdot often does better... )
Are a lot of people still using the 2.4 series?
Yes. It's a known quantity and is extremely stable. 2.6 may be the latest and greatest, but it's still coming up with reports of some nasty performance problems under certain kinds of load.
Enterprise shops won't dare take risks with new OS releases. They'll sit until they have to move, either through obsolescence or (less likely) due to a new must-have feature.
I guess too you should also count every British national before considering who wants what.
The trouble is that the Northern Ireland Act 1998 specifies that it is the people of Northern Ireland who will decide "who wants what" in terms of NI's constitutional configuration. I'm afraid you're closing the door somewhat after the horse has bolted.
I find your characterisation of terrorism by religion rather disturbing.
Indeed. Read the Old Testament; it is full of stories about God commanding people to invade towns, kill everyone in them (in the most horrible, sadistic way possible) and rob all their loot.
.. thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword .. But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee .. "
eg Samuel 15:3 : "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
Deuteronomy 20 goes : "When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it... And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it
The Bible sets plenty of precedent for God having killed people, sacked their lands and reallocated it to, er, well the people he liked. We're teaching this murderous crap in our schools.
I think it's a pretty natural human reaction to get scared about an act of terrorism and it's consequences.
In this case, I was mainly talking about what our delightful politicians will decide to do in response to this particular act. Almost certainly they will push through their ridiculous ID card legislation, but I can't bear to think of what other draconian measures they have in mind for our delight.
"Quite obviously, the anti-terrorist legislation was not put in place to prevent terrorism"
What complete rubbish. One of the principle articles of legislation in the UK was the Prevention of Terrorism Act which was subsequently renamed to the Terrorism Act; nonetheless it's stated purpose was preventing terrorism rather than merely catching those responsible.
The USA-PATRIOT act, also in it's name, is about prevention ("intercept and obstruct") of terrorism, rather than merely prosecution after the fact.
George Bush and Tony Blair are constantly telling us about how their measures are designed to protect people and homeland, so it could not be further from the truth to claim that they had no such stated interest.
We can be pretty well assured that there will be more than two deaths. The London Underground will have been jam-packed.
In London when there is a problem with the tube, connecting buses are brought in to substitute.It appears that the terrorist attack was carefully organized so that people being moved from the tube onto buses would also be moved into danger. If it is AQ, I'm scared that all of the heavy anti-terrorist legislation appears to have had no effect; if it's not AQ I'm even more scared.
Your analysis is wrong. The United States has several extremely large railway companies. Union Pacific does about $12bn in revenue each year. The trouble is that none of that comes from direct passenger revenue. The reason for that is that direct passenger revenue simply became unprofitable, as it did and still does in almost every single developed country in the world.
Apart from the obvious example in Japan (which is a lot to do with the size and economic profile of that country), passenger railway systems in the world are successful only when they are heavily subsidized by the state. There is no inter-city railway system anywhere which is run privately and for financial profit.
In the USA it simply become completely cost ineffective to run passenger rail, so the private railways ran down and began to stop their passenger rail services. The federal government moved in to stop this and replaced it with Amtrak, which trundles on today keeping the system barely alive. The reason why there is no serious passenger railway system outside the merely-satisfactory northeast corridor is because the regional and federal governments won't spend the money to create one.
The same pattern followed in Europe, ie in the UK where the government nationalized the entire system. In countries such as France, Germany and Switzerland, reliable and efficient railways which contribute to the national economies in many ways exist because the governments spend billions to create them. The impetus to do this simply does not exist at a federal or state level in the US.
If this was the true objective, then why didn't the USA drop the bomb somewhere desolate, such as a desert or other deserted area, and say to the Japanese "if you don't surrender then we'll drop this on your cities until you do" ?
Dell will happily sell you a workstation, server or notebook which is 100% compatible with Windows XP.
What edge do Apple have other than OS X ?
Where can I get support for the Linux 2.2 kernel (which was current at the time Windows 2000 was released) ?
Has someone ported the O(1) scheduler back yet ?
"How many people have said, "We must believe in God, for if we do, and he does not exist, nothing happens. But if we do not believe in him, and he does exist, then we are doomed." But, it's fairly clear he does not exist."
It's beside the point. Which God do you believe in ? There's a big selection, and pretty much all of them say that if you believe in the wrong one you'll be in big trouble. So how do you choose ?
"Then, they could release brain-dead and damaged versions of RedHat Linux that failed under certain conditions; "
Bit of a silly contribution really. How easy is that going to be given that they also have to release the source ? Any tampering with the code has to be released under the GPL.
And if Red Hat was deemed rubbish, wouldn't people just switch to a competitor (eg SuSE) much as they might do today ?
"3. Dramatically confusing the market would work in Microsoft's favor. further, they would offer "upgrade paths" that start in Linux and go towards MS Server 2k3 in short order."
MS already do this, in the form of things like SFU.
Phone providers in the USA at the moment are back to engaging in monopolistic practices. Apparently the government didn't think of preventing the RBOCs from merging.
Providing a local loop is an inherently monopolistic business; the barriers to entry are extremely high. You can't just have someone dig up your driveway and install a new wire between their cabinet and your street each time you want to switch providers.
I disagree. The market for operating systems is completely different compared with the one for specific specialized categories of application. One such category is source control; there is no imminent sign of a revision control system even touching the capabilities offered by commercial systems simply because the OSS community and user base does not require the features that businesses are prepared to pay out for.
Another example of a category like this is the database segment. There isn't an OSS product that touches the capability of Oracle or DB2.
CVS has existed for even longer than the Linux kernel has been. So why is it so slow, crap and buggy ?
"Linus might not be able to get people to follow him next time. "
Please wind your neck in. Linus doesn't give a damn about people following him and he's quite right; he leads by his own convictions which is the right way to deal with a project like this, if you tried to please everyone you'd get nowhere. At any time following the adoption of BitKeeper anyone could have forked the kernel and built it their way. Can you speculate why that never actually took place ? Can you explain how you think it is remotely likely ?
"Larry while a good guy years ago is basically an asshole taking positions on software that would embarrass Bill Gates"
Hyperbole. Bill Gates hates OSS. You might not like the BK license or the way it was handled, but that doesn't alter the truth that McVoy and his company have contributed substantially to OSS. You can't accuse someone of acting like Microsoft just because they moved to protect their investment in intellectual property.
"The software used didn't make anyone's job easier with the possible exception of Linus's"
OK now we can safely establish your cluelessness; you simply don't know how bad the kernel development was going prior to BK coming on the scene. After the adaptation of BK the change throughput into the kernel increased massively, dropped patches stopped, and the quality of the kernel dramatically improved in the estimation of most people closely involved with the project. All of the lead kernel developers have attributed this success to BK, to one degree or another.
Your company's business logic, web services, email, word processing, version control? Free alternatives exist - proprietary is not OK.
Sorry but this is rubbish certainly on the version control front. Free alternatives do not exist, if you define "alternative" as "equivalent in functionality/scalability/reliability". Relying on CVS, Arch or Subversion in a business context at this stage is a massive, massive risk. That is why the source control business is so big and why there are so many proprietary source control systems out there competing like crazy. Any outage, corruption or other silly problem hits you directly in the pocket.
RMS isn't particularly consistent, though you have to admire him for trying.
Prior to the existence of a viable free kernel the GNU system was developed on systems which weren't at all free. Most of the time, the GNU system with a Linux kernel will still boot from a proprietary bios/bootloader. It is a simple reality that commercial non-free software is still essential to bootstrap - in any sense of the word - free operating systems and applications.
Does Tridge's tool extract the code from the metadata or does it merely download the metadata from the server ?
But there's already an open-source tool for pulling code out of BitKeeper. So what is the point in Tridge's release?
Anyone who vaguely follows LKML will know that the above is complete rubbish. Linus is not in the business of marketing, promotion or starting a revolution. He simply wants to write a great kernel, and accepts the help of people willing to contribute. End of story.
If you don't like that, please go away and use the Hurd.
Regarding the productivity claim, Torvalds preferred the no-SCM system to CVS. My understanding - stop me if I'm being misleading - is that he seemed to believe that CVS or Subversion would have slowed him down compared to his own system of manually merging the patches; I can't remember the reasons why Arch was not acceptable at the time. On the basis the productivity claim seems valid to me.
UNIX wasn't a competitor for Windows; the two products do two different jobs. The unfortunate way of things now is that a decent sized business probably needs both Windows *and* Unix boxen.
What you have to understand is that Linus doesn't give a tuppenny f*ck about the morality of reverse engineering. Why does everyone on Slashdot think that he has to act as an open source messiah ?
"Too bad Sun didn't think to forbid the use of Solaris to anyone who might be thinking about making a competing product, eh?"
Under the BK license this restriction only exists with the free version, which seems like a reasonable enough compromise unless you're one of those people who expects people to give up their life work for free. True, it's great when people do that, but not everyone is the same.
"But then, maybe it's too bad that BSD wasn't originally under a GPL license, then Solaris wouldn't have existed,"
But now you're talking crap, since Solaris is based on SVR4, not BSD (SunOS, retroactively known as Solaris 1, was BSD based).
"Microsoft Windows might have died a well deserved death before Windows NT was out... counter-factuals are fun"
They're not fun when they are misinformed in the way that yours are. The rise of MS Windows has little to do with the UNIX situation and it definitely owes very little to free software.