SCO claims that the SMP jumped from 4 processors to 64, something that the linux community could not do on their own, mostly because none of us could afford a 64 proc machine
I remember someone porting SMP Linux to a Sun ES10000 machine and posting the dmesg output to the kernel mailing list. That particular ES10000 sported 64 processors if memory serves, and this feat was accomplished long before IBM became a big Linux player.
From what I remember of Linux SMP capabilities circa 2.2.x, it could scale to a large number of processors, but PC's mobos were only available with a maximum of four processor slots. I'm pretty sure that's where the "only four processors" thing comes from.
I found it interesting that they have dropped some claims about linux like the comment that it was like a bicycle compared to UNIX being a luxury car.
Perhaps someone pointed out that the only "luxury" car that Unixware equates to is a Maserati. As anyone who has had the misfortune to own a Maserati knows, a bicycle is a damned sight cheaper and more reliable.
If I want to install it on 10 system, I have to log into 10 systems and interactively run the installer
Or adopt a more sophisticated approach. Have a reasonably well specced machine which has all the extra toys installed under/usr/local. Then get all your other machines to NFS mount that directory as their on/usr/local. This means upgrades only occur on one machine, and the others can be locked down as your users don't need to install anything locally.
whouldn't FBSD have a better chance of wide adoption if there was at least one other distro that was based on efficiency rather than politics?
Perl wasn't removed from the base system for political reasons, but for technical ones. Keeping the included Perl in sync with the official releases was a pain in the arse, and few things if anythiing depended on it. Frankly, there is already a good scripting tool in FreeBSD, and that's the Bourne shell.
Chris
Re:Why bother?
on
Palmtop NetBSD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop?
For similar reasons that my company installs it on haldheld devices I guess. We run a minimal installation, including X, and write apps using the fltk toolkit. OK, you're not going to run OpenOffice or Mozilla on the things, but for specialised applications (warehouse management in our case), they work well. And it's a damned sight nicer programming a NetBSD app than a Windows CE one (the handhelds come preloaded with WinCE).
NetBSD's pkgsrc collection can be used on MacOS X from what I understand. It's a "compile from source" system much like Gentoos, and has about 3700 packages available.
Depends. Many studios still use magnetic tape, although others use Pro-Tools and their ilk for everything. Once the multi track recordings are done, then the mastering might be to magnetic tape, DAT or Exabyte (amongst others). Then comes the mastering at the pressing plant, which is where any recording will go digital (if it's being pressed onto CD) at the glass mastering stage. Vinyl mastering produces a die, and this is still an "analog" process.
And yes, bass frequencies are limited on vinyl, I remember an early acid house track called "Oochy Koochy" which had such a massive kick sound that it trashed the mastering studios cutting head, something they weren't insured for. That reminds me - I'll have to extract that record from my brothers grubby mitts next time I see him...
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S.
Not strictly true. There are a large number of old computer fans in the US, the kind of people who'll hire a truck and drive out of state just to pick up a crated up VAX. Check out the number of US based people on the NetBSD/VAX mailing list for example.
Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech
Perhaps that's true in parts of Eastern Europe, but in general countries like Finland and Germany compare very favourably to the US. The standard of living is much higher in Scandinavian countries than in the US, although the high taxation that funds this means people live on enormous amounts of credit. The standard of living is more "even" as well - large parts of the US suffer from astonishing levels of poverty (Detroit and some of the rural Southern states from personal experience).
Well, OK, the AWT thing was a cheap shot. Still, you have to admit that Sun cut a lot of corners in early versions of the JDK
Very true, some of the original classes were a bit inconsistent in their naming of accessors and AWT was fundamentally flawed thanks to the way it propagates events. The "standard" SDK could do with slimming down, as noted by a recent internal report from Sun, so it would be nice if 1.5 did away with the redundant, deprecated or downright useless stuff... while still adding enums:-)
That's like saying "can anyone consider Xlib programming without nausea" and then implying that therefore all X Window programming is a nightmare. AWT hasn't been the preferred GUI API since the days of JDK 1.1. Look up a book on Swing some time, and discover how easy GUI programming can be.
You've obviously never done cross-language RMI. One of the running Jokes about Java is that Java is great at communicating with other languages: so long as the other langauge is Java.
A running joke that I've not encountered in six years of professional Java programming. CORBA make cross platform, language independent programming a breeze. My current employers hand crafted database (written in C and running on various Unix flavours), communicates very elegantly with a Java frontend via CORBA. For embedded systems too small to run Java, it's the same IDL files but a C based frontend using curses.
Microsoft has taken cross-language support to a new level...
Really? Could my company do what I described above with.NET? Of course not, as we wouldn't be able to interface with our database. Our one attempt to get it running on Redmonds poor excuse for a server OS made us realise that we'd need considerably more powerful hardware, and more redundancy to cope with Windows little "foibles". So.NET's cross-language, but only if want to put up with Windows.
it must have seemed quite prudent to prevent the Soviets from learning about Britain's code-breaking experience and expertise
A good hypothesis, but one that assumes that Colossus continued to be important to the British intelligence services. However, at the end of World War Two, Colossus was simply scrapped and its creators moved to unrelated projects. So Britain did pay a price as the valuable experience gathered during the Colossus project was wasted - its creators banned from furthering their acheivements in the commercial world thanks to the Official Secrets Act.
You'll find quite a bit of GNU software on a default FreeBSD install
Yes, but not so much in a NetBSD install. To take your example of tar(1) for instance, that's now handled by NetBSD's pax(1). The way things are going, the toolchain will be the only GNU software on Net eventually.
you're right about finland, but sweden was neither attacked nor invaded
No, Sweden wasn't occupied by the British, but the government gave serious consideration to the idea. Aiding Finland in the Winter War would have meant moving troops by sea through the Baltic or over land through Norway and Sweden. The Baltic would have been a dangerous proposition given the presence of Soviet submarines, but the land option presented a good pre-empt any German occupation. Any furore about occupying Sweden would have been countered with an argument that the troops were only securing transit routes to Finland. This would of happened after a cursory request for transit rights which Britain expected to be denied - Sweden was very keen to remain neutral, despite sending small numbers of aircraft and volunteers to fight in the Winter War. The idea was ultimately canned when the Finns couldn't hold out against the renewed Soviet offensive, but would have been risky anyway given Swedens rugged terrain.
Yeah, there's no way you read the Gulag Archipelago in one sitting.
I'm one hell of a fast reader, but no, the book I'm thinking of is one hefty hardback number. Could have been the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, and it took me about ten to twelve hours to read. Despite it being over ten years ago, I still remember starting it in the late afternoon and still being sat there with at the crack of dawn the next day. Student life... sigh.
Thanks for the clarification. I read most of Solzhenitsyn's books at univeristy, but that was quite a few years ago. I guess "Gulag Archipelago" could be the one that collected various accounts of arrest, torture, trial and imprisonment. If so, then it's the one I read in little more than a single sitting, only pausing to punch the wall in frustration at the injustice it described. Christ knows what the guy in the next room thought I was doing!
... killing off the officer corps which almost led to the defeat of the Russian Army in the Winter War against Finland...
The loss of a good proportion of the officer corps contributed to the Red Army's lousy performance throughout the Winter War, but there were other reasons why an invasion was going to be difficult. It was the coldest winter in living memory, and the Soviet troops were poorly clothed for it. Tanks proved ineffectual in the forest conditions above Lake Ladoga. Along with the small number of roads, this meant a lack of mobility that prevented any "fanning" out of Soviet forces to form a broad front. Long columns hemmed in by forest made perfect conditions for Finnish hit and run tactics.
Another fundamental flaw in the Soviet invasion plan was that it occured under a banner of "liberation". Many ordinary folk in the Soviet Union actually believed this propaganda, and the leadership didn't want the same kind of bad press abroad that the Fascists got after Guernica. Therefore, bombing of Finnish towns and cities was sporadic, despite the likelihood that intensive bombing would have broken the Finnish resolve to fight. There again, the utter ineptitude of the Soviet air force didn't help.
Ultimately though, the Finns were doomed to lose the Winter War. Britain was too slow in deciding whether to assist the Finns, dithering over what advantages could be gained (such as a good excuse to put Swedish iron ore beyond Hitler's reach). The US was still wrapped up in its isolationaism, and an international brigade like that which gave the Spanish Civil War such a high profile weren't going to be of much use. Even if the war had dragged on until Spring, a massive offensive along a snow free Karelian Isthmus would have overcome the Finns in the same way it did the Axis several years later. The sheer weight of numbers, and Stalins willingness to sacrifice them would have seen to that.
We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, they lost, end of story.
It must be so nice to live in such a black and white world as yours. Look up the history of the McCarthy years in the United States for a start. It's finally getting some real historical analysis, having been brushed under the carpet for a long time. The Hoover-era FBI could give the Soviet secret police a few lessons in ethics-free techniques as well. Yes, your local Socialist Worker seller is undoutedly deluded by a bankrupt political creed, but there wasn't much honour amongst the Cold War warriors of either side.
This isn't really even a communist thing. Geek persecution on both sides of the wall was rough. I mean, where's Alan Turing?
While the establishment's treatment of Turing was a disgrace, I think it pales into insignificance compared to Stalin's terror. For an excellent introduction to life at the time of the purges, I can highly recommend Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich", closely followed by his "Gulag Archipelago". It's a while since I read the latter, but I'm pretty sure it's the one that fictionalised Russian scientists working in an "intelligentsia prison".
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII
Correct, Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech after World War II. However, a "cold war" did exist between the Soviet Union and leading western states ever since the October Revolution. Until the Axis invasion of 1941, the Soviet Union was seen as much of a bogeyman as Hitler's Germany. In fact, Britain had toyed with the idea of declaring war on the USSR in the Winter of 1939 - under the pretext of aiding Finland which was being invaded by Stalin at the time, but really as an excuse to occupy ore-rich Sweden.
I wouldn't go as far as saying that Objective-C is "derived" from SmallTalk, but it was heavily influenced by it. The additional syntax that was added to C in order that it could become an OO language is very similar to SmallTalk. As to whether efforts to bring SmallTalk to the.NET platform could benefit Objective-C, I doubt it. The Objective-C runtime is completely different from a SmallTalk implementation.
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SCO claims that the SMP jumped from 4 processors to 64, something that the linux community could not do on their own, mostly because none of us could afford a 64 proc machine
I remember someone porting SMP Linux to a Sun ES10000 machine and posting the dmesg output to the kernel mailing list. That particular ES10000 sported 64 processors if memory serves, and this feat was accomplished long before IBM became a big Linux player.
From what I remember of Linux SMP capabilities circa 2.2.x, it could scale to a large number of processors, but PC's mobos were only available with a maximum of four processor slots. I'm pretty sure that's where the "only four processors" thing comes from.
Chris
I found it interesting that they have dropped some claims about linux like the comment that it was like a bicycle compared to UNIX being a luxury car.
Perhaps someone pointed out that the only "luxury" car that Unixware equates to is a Maserati. As anyone who has had the misfortune to own a Maserati knows, a bicycle is a damned sight cheaper and more reliable.
Chris
If I want to install it on 10 system, I have to log into 10 systems and interactively run the installer
Or adopt a more sophisticated approach. Have a reasonably well specced machine which has all the extra toys installed under /usr/local. Then get all your other machines to NFS mount that directory as their on /usr/local. This means upgrades only occur on one machine, and the others can be locked down as your users don't need to install anything locally.
Chris
whouldn't FBSD have a better chance of wide adoption if there was at least one other distro that was based on efficiency rather than politics?
Perl wasn't removed from the base system for political reasons, but for technical ones. Keeping the included Perl in sync with the official releases was a pain in the arse, and few things if anythiing depended on it. Frankly, there is already a good scripting tool in FreeBSD, and that's the Bourne shell.
Chris
why would you install *nix/BSD on a palmtop?
For similar reasons that my company installs it on haldheld devices I guess. We run a minimal installation, including X, and write apps using the fltk toolkit. OK, you're not going to run OpenOffice or Mozilla on the things, but for specialised applications (warehouse management in our case), they work well. And it's a damned sight nicer programming a NetBSD app than a Windows CE one (the handhelds come preloaded with WinCE).
Chris
NetBSD's pkgsrc collection can be used on MacOS X from what I understand. It's a "compile from source" system much like Gentoos, and has about 3700 packages available.
Chris
Aren't records made from digital sources?
Depends. Many studios still use magnetic tape, although others use Pro-Tools and their ilk for everything. Once the multi track recordings are done, then the mastering might be to magnetic tape, DAT or Exabyte (amongst others). Then comes the mastering at the pressing plant, which is where any recording will go digital (if it's being pressed onto CD) at the glass mastering stage. Vinyl mastering produces a die, and this is still an "analog" process.
And yes, bass frequencies are limited on vinyl, I remember an early acid house track called "Oochy Koochy" which had such a massive kick sound that it trashed the mastering studios cutting head, something they weren't insured for. That reminds me - I'll have to extract that record from my brothers grubby mitts next time I see him ...
Chris
Europeans seem to make much better use of their machines than people in the U.S.
Not strictly true. There are a large number of old computer fans in the US, the kind of people who'll hire a truck and drive out of state just to pick up a crated up VAX. Check out the number of US based people on the NetBSD/VAX mailing list for example.
Many people in the rest of the world don't have the budgets at work or home to have "current" tech
Perhaps that's true in parts of Eastern Europe, but in general countries like Finland and Germany compare very favourably to the US. The standard of living is much higher in Scandinavian countries than in the US, although the high taxation that funds this means people live on enormous amounts of credit. The standard of living is more "even" as well - large parts of the US suffer from astonishing levels of poverty (Detroit and some of the rural Southern states from personal experience).
Chris
In which case you might like Stalin - http://www.ece.purdue.edu/~qobi/software.html - as that's what Marxism/Leninism inevitably leads to.
Well, OK, the AWT thing was a cheap shot. Still, you have to admit that Sun cut a lot of corners in early versions of the JDK
Very true, some of the original classes were a bit inconsistent in their naming of accessors and AWT was fundamentally flawed thanks to the way it propagates events. The "standard" SDK could do with slimming down, as noted by a recent internal report from Sun, so it would be nice if 1.5 did away with the redundant, deprecated or downright useless stuff ... while still adding enums :-)
Chris
Can anyone consider AWT without nausea?
That's like saying "can anyone consider Xlib programming without nausea" and then implying that therefore all X Window programming is a nightmare. AWT hasn't been the preferred GUI API since the days of JDK 1.1. Look up a book on Swing some time, and discover how easy GUI programming can be.
Chris
You've obviously never done cross-language RMI. One of the running Jokes about Java is that Java is great at communicating with other languages: so long as the other langauge is Java.
A running joke that I've not encountered in six years of professional Java programming. CORBA make cross platform, language independent programming a breeze. My current employers hand crafted database (written in C and running on various Unix flavours), communicates very elegantly with a Java frontend via CORBA. For embedded systems too small to run Java, it's the same IDL files but a C based frontend using curses.
Microsoft has taken cross-language support to a new level ...
Really? Could my company do what I described above with .NET? Of course not, as we wouldn't be able to interface with our database. Our one attempt to get it running on Redmonds poor excuse for a server OS made us realise that we'd need considerably more powerful hardware, and more redundancy to cope with Windows little "foibles". So .NET's cross-language, but only if want to put up with Windows.
Chris
it must have seemed quite prudent to prevent the Soviets from learning about Britain's code-breaking experience and expertise
A good hypothesis, but one that assumes that Colossus continued to be important to the British intelligence services. However, at the end of World War Two, Colossus was simply scrapped and its creators moved to unrelated projects. So Britain did pay a price as the valuable experience gathered during the Colossus project was wasted - its creators banned from furthering their acheivements in the commercial world thanks to the Official Secrets Act.
Chris
You'll find quite a bit of GNU software on a default FreeBSD install
Yes, but not so much in a NetBSD install. To take your example of tar(1) for instance, that's now handled by NetBSD's pax(1). The way things are going, the toolchain will be the only GNU software on Net eventually.
Chris
you're right about finland, but sweden was neither attacked nor invaded
No, Sweden wasn't occupied by the British, but the government gave serious consideration to the idea. Aiding Finland in the Winter War would have meant moving troops by sea through the Baltic or over land through Norway and Sweden. The Baltic would have been a dangerous proposition given the presence of Soviet submarines, but the land option presented a good pre-empt any German occupation. Any furore about occupying Sweden would have been countered with an argument that the troops were only securing transit routes to Finland. This would of happened after a cursory request for transit rights which Britain expected to be denied - Sweden was very keen to remain neutral, despite sending small numbers of aircraft and volunteers to fight in the Winter War. The idea was ultimately canned when the Finns couldn't hold out against the renewed Soviet offensive, but would have been risky anyway given Swedens rugged terrain.
Chris
Yeah, there's no way you read the Gulag Archipelago in one sitting.
I'm one hell of a fast reader, but no, the book I'm thinking of is one hefty hardback number. Could have been the first volume of the Gulag Archipelago, and it took me about ten to twelve hours to read. Despite it being over ten years ago, I still remember starting it in the late afternoon and still being sat there with at the crack of dawn the next day. Student life ... sigh.
Chris
That one is "First Circle".
Thanks for the clarification. I read most of Solzhenitsyn's books at univeristy, but that was quite a few years ago. I guess "Gulag Archipelago" could be the one that collected various accounts of arrest, torture, trial and imprisonment. If so, then it's the one I read in little more than a single sitting, only pausing to punch the wall in frustration at the injustice it described. Christ knows what the guy in the next room thought I was doing!
Chris
The loss of a good proportion of the officer corps contributed to the Red Army's lousy performance throughout the Winter War, but there were other reasons why an invasion was going to be difficult. It was the coldest winter in living memory, and the Soviet troops were poorly clothed for it. Tanks proved ineffectual in the forest conditions above Lake Ladoga. Along with the small number of roads, this meant a lack of mobility that prevented any "fanning" out of Soviet forces to form a broad front. Long columns hemmed in by forest made perfect conditions for Finnish hit and run tactics.
Another fundamental flaw in the Soviet invasion plan was that it occured under a banner of "liberation". Many ordinary folk in the Soviet Union actually believed this propaganda, and the leadership didn't want the same kind of bad press abroad that the Fascists got after Guernica. Therefore, bombing of Finnish towns and cities was sporadic, despite the likelihood that intensive bombing would have broken the Finnish resolve to fight. There again, the utter ineptitude of the Soviet air force didn't help.
Ultimately though, the Finns were doomed to lose the Winter War. Britain was too slow in deciding whether to assist the Finns, dithering over what advantages could be gained (such as a good excuse to put Swedish iron ore beyond Hitler's reach). The US was still wrapped up in its isolationaism, and an international brigade like that which gave the Spanish Civil War such a high profile weren't going to be of much use. Even if the war had dragged on until Spring, a massive offensive along a snow free Karelian Isthmus would have overcome the Finns in the same way it did the Axis several years later. The sheer weight of numbers, and Stalins willingness to sacrifice them would have seen to that.
Chris
We were the good guys, they were the bad guys, they lost, end of story.
It must be so nice to live in such a black and white world as yours. Look up the history of the McCarthy years in the United States for a start. It's finally getting some real historical analysis, having been brushed under the carpet for a long time. The Hoover-era FBI could give the Soviet secret police a few lessons in ethics-free techniques as well. Yes, your local Socialist Worker seller is undoutedly deluded by a bankrupt political creed, but there wasn't much honour amongst the Cold War warriors of either side.
Chris
This isn't really even a communist thing. Geek persecution on both sides of the wall was rough. I mean, where's Alan Turing?
While the establishment's treatment of Turing was a disgrace, I think it pales into insignificance compared to Stalin's terror. For an excellent introduction to life at the time of the purges, I can highly recommend Solzhenitsyn's "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich", closely followed by his "Gulag Archipelago". It's a while since I read the latter, but I'm pretty sure it's the one that fictionalised Russian scientists working in an "intelligentsia prison".
Chris
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Cold War and the Iron Curtain didn't begin until after WWII
Correct, Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech after World War II. However, a "cold war" did exist between the Soviet Union and leading western states ever since the October Revolution. Until the Axis invasion of 1941, the Soviet Union was seen as much of a bogeyman as Hitler's Germany. In fact, Britain had toyed with the idea of declaring war on the USSR in the Winter of 1939 - under the pretext of aiding Finland which was being invaded by Stalin at the time, but really as an excuse to occupy ore-rich Sweden.
Chris
So that's how those pictures of mating llamas got on my hard drive!
That would be the Jeff Minter virus ...
Chris
I know that Objective-C is derived from SmallTalk
I wouldn't go as far as saying that Objective-C is "derived" from SmallTalk, but it was heavily influenced by it. The additional syntax that was added to C in order that it could become an OO language is very similar to SmallTalk. As to whether efforts to bring SmallTalk to the .NET platform could benefit Objective-C, I doubt it. The Objective-C runtime is completely different from a SmallTalk implementation.
Chris
Translucency adds the ability to read something in the background and type it in the foreground.
Or you could cut and paste, saving yourself all that typing
Sheesh.
Chris
Spoken like a fan-boy with an ax to grind. Let me guess, your hobby is BSD?
Nope. My job is *programming* on several BSD's, occasionally Linux and even more occasionally Tru64. My hobbys are much more interesting.
Chris