I am running a DEC standard OS on my Vax, it's called Ultrix and was DEC's Unix before Tru64. I'd also be surprised if VMS was 64bit on a 32bit machine, as I thought VMS was only 64bit in it's Alpha "OpenVMS" incarnation. My Vax is now a "doorstep", but it was running NetBSD and performing sterling service as a webserver for much of 2003.
Not a troll, but something I'm genuinely wondering about - haven't things like J2EE,.Net and PHP made mod_perl obsolete? Back in the bad days of the web, the choice was C or Perl hooking directly into the Apache API to avoid spawning too many processes. Then along came Java servlets or ASP for those drawn to the dark side. Would anyone really consider mod_perl for a serious sized web application any more?
In a similar vein, Checkstyle is also very good. I especially like the checks for variables that mask those in a higher scope, unused variables and unused imports. I'll deinitely be checking out PMD as well, as the rest of my team are novice Java programmers and I don't have the time to audit all their code. These kind of analysis tools are great, because they allow me to pinpoint likely areas of particularily bad code.
Nice review, but if the book is not from O'Reilly, I probably won't buy it.
The O'Reilly book on MySQL is a piss poor rehash of the documentation available on the web, and a subset at that. If you apply your "O'Reilly only" attitude to all your computer book purchases then I hope I never waste my time interviewing you for a job at my company.
Instead of saying, "people run into X, well here's what they do when they run into that," it's just a diatribe about how lacking someone thinks MySQL is.
The trouble is that the MySQL documentation make some very contentious statements in an attempt to justify the lack of features. Saying things like "you don't need foreign keys because..." and then presenting some hideous hack that the developer has to do in code because MySQL has such a piss poor feature set. Yup, I know version 4 in some configurations supports foreign keys, but the rationale for not including foreign keys support for so long and the laughable workaround is still in the documentation.
When compared to the of disingenous bullshit in the MySQL documentation, the gotchas page looks very restrained in its criticism. A novice using MySQL is likely to be suckered into believing the MySQL mantra that Monty et. al. know better than the rest of the RDBMS industry. Somnething that's proved by the amount of comments in support of MySQL on forums like Slashdot.
On my gentoo I tried setting the language to Italian.. it was a mix of Italian and English, really weird.
If only every programmer programmed with MULTI-LANGUAGE in mind..
A lot of desktop software (GNOME, KDE, etc.) is programmed with multi-language support, but the translations often lag behind the latest releases. That's why you often see a mix of non-English and English when switching locales.
Which reminds me, does anyone know how to get Java to use a localised resource bundle rather than the default one? Setting LANG and LOCALE environment variables works for programs in languages like C/C++ that are using gettext, but my Java programs stubbornly refuse to use anything but the default resource bundles.
It's primarily going to help companies based in India to compete more effectively with their North American and European counterparts, but I can see another benefit. At my last company in the UK, we were asked to spec up a version of our software for a warehouse in Birmingham. The firm was a textiles and clothing company, part of an industry that's dominated by Asian entrpreneurs. Their staff are mostly first generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent with little or no grasp of English. We had to decline the offer of putting in a bid for the contract because at the time we couldn't find a Linux distro with decent support for Indian languages.
The number of opened bugs remaining in the pkgsrc tree.
Not just bugs. There are also PR's that include patches to update versions of the software in pkgsrc as well as new package submissions.
Is the pkgsrc tree the source tree for the entire distribution?
Nope. The pkgsrc is the source tree for the software that can be installed on a NetBSD system.
There's been an intermittent project to turn the base system into packages, but I don't have any references handy. For now, you can install Xorg from pkgsrc rather than XFree86 at install time, and this is what I've been doing lately.
Two-space tabs or three
It's up to you. Edit your ~/.vimrc file to change this. You are using vim, right?;-)
Mozilla is still the testbed for new functionality that may make its way into Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. A sort of Debian testing of the browser world.
Yup, but no database I've used has as many gotchas as MySQL. Recently I have been bitten by the following ones:
MySQL accepts invalid dates
MySQL doesn't support a BOOLEAN type
MySQL regularily corrupts tables if a JDBC connection dies during a write
The default table type (the one I'm stuck with thanks to company politics) doesn't support referential integrity or transactions
MySQL was chosen by my predecessors because it was the only free database they'd heard of. They did no research and no serious consideration of what they really required, otherwise they would have chosen a database that at least supported foreign keys (they chose MySQL before version 4 appeared).
Re:It is a problem because the market is dwindling
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 3, Informative
a) x86 servers are getting more powerful
But nowhere near the processing throughput of a high end Sun box. Even though the processors in an x86 machine may run at a higher clock rate than the fastest SPARC, they still have limited I/O bandwidth. You could buy one of the recent SGI systems, but then you lose the apparent price advantage of x86.
b) x86 server-class machines can be pretty damn stable too, given the right hardware
Which vendor? My last company used DEC, Compaq and then HP servers - switching as the companies got bought out. With DEC we had Alphas which were incerdibly reliable, but the x86 based successors from Compaq and HP were very unreliable. RAID failures and mysterious lockups were a weekly occurence.
c) clusters are eating away at high-end segments
But the clustering software that I've seen for x86 systems requires the software I write to be distributed in a much more complex way than if I write it threaded for a single Sun box.
You forgot [3], the refutation of the statement "If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"
That's because it's blindingly obvious to anyone who has a grounding in empirical science. No proof can be found that a god exists, therefore one probably doesn't.
And those plonkers running SETI@home or whatever it's called.
Re:Is Windowmaker dead? (No, I'm not a troll.)
on
10 Years of OpenStep
·
· Score: 1
The mailing list archives are a bit hard to find, but there is plenty of activity. Most of the past year has been spent reworking large chunks of WindowMaker to use freedesktop standard technology like Xft. This major reworking should make WindowMaker as upto date as any other snazzy window manager out there, but with the NeXT look and feel that many of us love.
Why is it that NetBSD users always try to criticise OpenBSD users?
Perhaps it's because it could be argued that OpenBSD developers are a little bit too strident in their claims to have the most secure freenix. If Theo hadn't been such an arsehole on the NetBSD mailing lists then he could have pursued a security audit of the NetBSD code without having to fork it. Instead he's given us another BSD that lacks features like clean upgrades between releases, decent Linux emulation or better than average performance. I tried OpenBSD several times during the later 2.x releases, having swallowed the "super secure" hype, and was so underwhelmed I went straight back to NetBSD.
Free and Net are the freenixes where interesting system level stuff is developed (SA, SMP, FFSv2, rcNG, etc.). Much of this gets ported between Free, Net and Open. Where Open has made the greatest contribution is in the userland with things like OpenSSH.
The reverse doesn't seem to be true...
Theo hasn't popped up on the NetBSD mailing lists in a while, but when he does it's to crow about some percieved superiority of Open versus Net. He has mellowed a bit over the years, but he's still quite happy to f*ck off users with acerbic remarks.
How often you needed to redistirbute all libraries due to incomaptible ABI changes in your C++ compiler?How often you needed to redistirbute all libraries due to incomaptible ABI changes in your C++ compiler?
Never. Mainly because the guts of most systems I've worked on have been written in C rather than C++. The only time that changes in the C++ libraries have bitten me (API rather than ABI) is when I upgraded gcc on Tru64 from 2.95.2 to 3.something. A few 'using namespace std;' liberally sprinkled in my source fixed things. Not as painful as switching from Java 1.0.2 to Java 1.1...
Ah, more marvellous FUD from the Slashdot "elite". Java was written with 64bit systems in mind (don't forget - oh sorry, this is probably news to you - that Sun were one of the first to market with 64bit systems in the mid 1990's).
I had a close look at Objective-C about a year ago. I started reading up on it and found that it missed operator overloading.
Operatror overloading? OPERATOR OVERLOADING??? One of th momst abused features of C++ and you miss it? You clearly haven't worked in the industry long enough to seen the abortions people produce with misconceived features like these.
If you have portable a)threading b)database connectivity c)GUI d)App servers working in you precious little C++ personal libraries setup you are either bullshitting us or smoking dope or do not know what you are talking about.
Well...
Threading - pthreads.
Database connectivity - libdbi and 101 variations thereof.
GUI - GTK+, Qt, WxWindows, etc.
App servers - CORBA, RPC, etc.
Most of these are admittedly C based, or available for C, but then real programmers don't bother with falsh in the pan stuff like.NET. Remember,.NET and C# is only relevant until MicorSoft find it's time to get you to upgrade (and deprecating your existing language or platform like VB or Fox is as good an incentive as they come).
What's funny is that Slashdotters criticize Microsoft constantly for not innovating and for ripping others off. Meanwhile, we're discussing C# and a.NET clone
>C# is a Java clone, while.NET is a JFC clone. Of course, Java and the JFC was inpsired by Objective C, NeXTstep and Smalltalk, but at least they weren't a blatant attempt to make an incompatible version of something just for monpololy preservation.
I hear a lot of people say that the user experience across architectures varies a lot with NetBSD. Even between popular archs like x86, macppc and sparc64.
That's peculiar, as one of NetBSD's strengths is the consistency across platforms. I use it on machines as diverse as a VaxStation VLC, SparcStation 5 and a Dell laptop - the installation, configuration and use of NetBSD on all of them is identical. Of course, I wont be running Mozilla on the Vax, but it makes a great little webserver.
Slashdot Mirror
I am running a DEC standard OS on my Vax, it's called Ultrix and was DEC's Unix before Tru64. I'd also be surprised if VMS was 64bit on a 32bit machine, as I thought VMS was only 64bit in it's Alpha "OpenVMS" incarnation. My Vax is now a "doorstep", but it was running NetBSD and performing sterling service as a webserver for much of 2003.
is your sgi indy 32bit? if it isn't, thats why. Vax shouldn't be affected because it isn't unix, or is it?
I'm pretty sure the Indy has a 32bit IP22 processor. My Vax runs Ultrix (Digital's own Unix based on 4.3BSD) and NetBSD.
Amazingly, my ancient SGI Indy running Irix 6.5 is year 2038 compliant. I wonder if the Vax at home is ...
Not a troll, but something I'm genuinely wondering about - haven't things like J2EE, .Net and PHP made mod_perl obsolete? Back in the bad days of the web, the choice was C or Perl hooking directly into the Apache API to avoid spawning too many processes. Then along came Java servlets or ASP for those drawn to the dark side. Would anyone really consider mod_perl for a serious sized web application any more?
In a similar vein, Checkstyle is also very good. I especially like the checks for variables that mask those in a higher scope, unused variables and unused imports. I'll deinitely be checking out PMD as well, as the rest of my team are novice Java programmers and I don't have the time to audit all their code. These kind of analysis tools are great, because they allow me to pinpoint likely areas of particularily bad code.
Nice review, but if the book is not from O'Reilly, I probably won't buy it.
The O'Reilly book on MySQL is a piss poor rehash of the documentation available on the web, and a subset at that. If you apply your "O'Reilly only" attitude to all your computer book purchases then I hope I never waste my time interviewing you for a job at my company.
Instead of saying, "people run into X, well here's what they do when they run into that," it's just a diatribe about how lacking someone thinks MySQL is.
The trouble is that the MySQL documentation make some very contentious statements in an attempt to justify the lack of features. Saying things like "you don't need foreign keys because ..." and then presenting some hideous hack that the developer has to do in code because MySQL has such a piss poor feature set. Yup, I know version 4 in some configurations supports foreign keys, but the rationale for not including foreign keys support for so long and the laughable workaround is still in the documentation.
When compared to the of disingenous bullshit in the MySQL documentation, the gotchas page looks very restrained in its criticism. A novice using MySQL is likely to be suckered into believing the MySQL mantra that Monty et. al. know better than the rest of the RDBMS industry. Somnething that's proved by the amount of comments in support of MySQL on forums like Slashdot.
On my gentoo I tried setting the language to Italian.. it was a mix of Italian and English, really weird.
If only every programmer programmed with MULTI-LANGUAGE in mind..
A lot of desktop software (GNOME, KDE, etc.) is programmed with multi-language support, but the translations often lag behind the latest releases. That's why you often see a mix of non-English and English when switching locales.
Which reminds me, does anyone know how to get Java to use a localised resource bundle rather than the default one? Setting LANG and LOCALE environment variables works for programs in languages like C/C++ that are using gettext, but my Java programs stubbornly refuse to use anything but the default resource bundles.
It's primarily going to help companies based in India to compete more effectively with their North American and European counterparts, but I can see another benefit. At my last company in the UK, we were asked to spec up a version of our software for a warehouse in Birmingham. The firm was a textiles and clothing company, part of an industry that's dominated by Asian entrpreneurs. Their staff are mostly first generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent with little or no grasp of English. We had to decline the offer of putting in a bid for the contract because at the time we couldn't find a Linux distro with decent support for Indian languages.
What does the PR count count?
The number of opened bugs remaining in the pkgsrc tree.
Not just bugs. There are also PR's that include patches to update versions of the software in pkgsrc as well as new package submissions.
Is the pkgsrc tree the source tree for the entire distribution?
Nope. The pkgsrc is the source tree for the software that can be installed on a NetBSD system.
There's been an intermittent project to turn the base system into packages, but I don't have any references handy. For now, you can install Xorg from pkgsrc rather than XFree86 at install time, and this is what I've been doing lately.
Two-space tabs or three
It's up to you. Edit your ~/.vimrc file to change this. You are using vim, right? ;-)
Four spaces like the Lord intended.
Mozilla is still the testbed for new functionality that may make its way into Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. A sort of Debian testing of the browser world.
Note that every RDBMS has gotcha's.
Yup, but no database I've used has as many gotchas as MySQL. Recently I have been bitten by the following ones:
MySQL was chosen by my predecessors because it was the only free database they'd heard of. They did no research and no serious consideration of what they really required, otherwise they would have chosen a database that at least supported foreign keys (they chose MySQL before version 4 appeared).
a) x86 servers are getting more powerful
But nowhere near the processing throughput of a high end Sun box. Even though the processors in an x86 machine may run at a higher clock rate than the fastest SPARC, they still have limited I/O bandwidth. You could buy one of the recent SGI systems, but then you lose the apparent price advantage of x86.
b) x86 server-class machines can be pretty damn stable too, given the right hardware
Which vendor? My last company used DEC, Compaq and then HP servers - switching as the companies got bought out. With DEC we had Alphas which were incerdibly reliable, but the x86 based successors from Compaq and HP were very unreliable. RAID failures and mysterious lockups were a weekly occurence.
c) clusters are eating away at high-end segments
But the clustering software that I've seen for x86 systems requires the software I write to be distributed in a much more complex way than if I write it threaded for a single Sun box.
Chris
You forgot [3], the refutation of the statement "If God didn't want us to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat?"
That's because it's blindingly obvious to anyone who has a grounding in empirical science. No proof can be found that a god exists, therefore one probably doesn't.
I blame Intel for global warming
And those plonkers running SETI@home or whatever it's called.
The mailing list archives are a bit hard to find, but there is plenty of activity. Most of the past year has been spent reworking large chunks of WindowMaker to use freedesktop standard technology like Xft. This major reworking should make WindowMaker as upto date as any other snazzy window manager out there, but with the NeXT look and feel that many of us love.
How about joining their mailing lists and adding your 5c?
I think you'll find that's three pence in real money.
Why is it that NetBSD users always try to criticise OpenBSD users?
Perhaps it's because it could be argued that OpenBSD developers are a little bit too strident in their claims to have the most secure freenix. If Theo hadn't been such an arsehole on the NetBSD mailing lists then he could have pursued a security audit of the NetBSD code without having to fork it. Instead he's given us another BSD that lacks features like clean upgrades between releases, decent Linux emulation or better than average performance. I tried OpenBSD several times during the later 2.x releases, having swallowed the "super secure" hype, and was so underwhelmed I went straight back to NetBSD.
Free and Net are the freenixes where interesting system level stuff is developed (SA, SMP, FFSv2, rcNG, etc.). Much of this gets ported between Free, Net and Open. Where Open has made the greatest contribution is in the userland with things like OpenSSH.
The reverse doesn't seem to be true...
Theo hasn't popped up on the NetBSD mailing lists in a while, but when he does it's to crow about some percieved superiority of Open versus Net. He has mellowed a bit over the years, but he's still quite happy to f*ck off users with acerbic remarks.
How often you needed to redistirbute all libraries due to incomaptible ABI changes in your C++ compiler?How often you needed to redistirbute all libraries due to incomaptible ABI changes in your C++ compiler?
Never. Mainly because the guts of most systems I've worked on have been written in C rather than C++. The only time that changes in the C++ libraries have bitten me (API rather than ABI) is when I upgraded gcc on Tru64 from 2.95.2 to 3.something. A few 'using namespace std;' liberally sprinkled in my source fixed things. Not as painful as switching from Java 1.0.2 to Java 1.1 ...
The 32 bit space & allocation limits of the JVM
Ah, more marvellous FUD from the Slashdot "elite". Java was written with 64bit systems in mind (don't forget - oh sorry, this is probably news to you - that Sun were one of the first to market with 64bit systems in the mid 1990's).
I had a close look at Objective-C about a year ago. I started reading up on it and found that it missed operator overloading.
Operatror overloading? OPERATOR OVERLOADING??? One of th momst abused features of C++ and you miss it? You clearly haven't worked in the industry long enough to seen the abortions people produce with misconceived features like these.
If you have portable a)threading b)database connectivity c)GUI d)App servers working in you precious little C++ personal libraries setup you are either bullshitting us or smoking dope or do not know what you are talking about.
Well ...
Most of these are admittedly C based, or available for C, but then real programmers don't bother with falsh in the pan stuff like .NET. Remember, .NET and C# is only relevant until MicorSoft find it's time to get you to upgrade (and deprecating your existing language or platform like VB or Fox is as good an incentive as they come).
What's funny is that Slashdotters criticize Microsoft constantly for not innovating and for ripping others off. Meanwhile, we're discussing C# and a .NET clone
>C# is a Java clone, while .NET is a JFC clone. Of course, Java and the JFC was inpsired by Objective C, NeXTstep and Smalltalk, but at least they weren't a blatant attempt to make an incompatible version of something just for monpololy preservation.
which language gets the dung beetle?
Cobol
I hear a lot of people say that the user experience across architectures varies a lot with NetBSD. Even between popular archs like x86, macppc and sparc64.
That's peculiar, as one of NetBSD's strengths is the consistency across platforms. I use it on machines as diverse as a VaxStation VLC, SparcStation 5 and a Dell laptop - the installation, configuration and use of NetBSD on all of them is identical. Of course, I wont be running Mozilla on the Vax, but it makes a great little webserver.