It's hard to predict. But Mint, which builds on ubuntu, has some major flaws with Mint 15.
We see Ubuntu still as the distribution of choice for developer workstations.
Especially in the embedded linux space.
Ubuntu in the server still has the advantage of having a recent kernel and being build on.deb packages instead of the horrible slow and unstable, unupgradeable yum/RPM combination.
If Ubuntu declines, then the question is to what?
We see a lot of ubuntu users going to arch linux for example, but these are the people who started out ubuntu just a few years ago.
Distribution diversity is a good thing.
But we still wouldn't recommend newcomers anything else.
Lifting fingerprints of glasses is easy. Maybe even directly of the glass of the phone itself. Yet a glass in a bar might be even better... So now they are going to steal BOTH the phone AND the drink?
Instead of wasting time with 'converting' to new tech, I would prefer that they updated their course material and changed their method so it's more applicable in real life.
Real life in which everybody has internet access, almost always.
Sure, it's important that certain things are learned by heart, very sure.
But certain things simply are not.
Insight questions, those are the important ones.
But hey, who am I kidding, the school system will probably never change. Until our robot overlords do;)
There are some simple things that might improve things a lot!
But simple is not necessarily simple.
HOWEVER!
Just look at the 3 most used applications by us; the power users, and veterans:
Terminal, Firefox and LibreOffice.
Look at the shortcuts of COPY, PASTE. Yes. Copy/paste. In these main 3 applications they are different. For over a few decades it's like that!
WTF
The Linux Standard Base, can start out with a simple thing like this.
It would be nice if they could pull it off.
Start out small and humble, and improve things. That's what can make things better.
But neither Firefox nor LibreOffice nor terminal emulators will change this without proper motivation.
Yet it isn't difficult to realize the necessity to get these thing right...
Why not go to a FriendlyARM Mini2440?
For about $150 you can pick it up from http://www.aliexpress.com/ and you have a full fledged Linux board with plenty of i/o and touch screen...
Happy hacking!
Jasper
Who is over thinking things? A customer goes to an Apple store, or in-store Apple corner. And he sees in front of him:
The iPad 2 and The iPad.
What do you think he will prefer?
Not calling that a huge marketing mistake, seems silly to me.
When Steve went for the iPad 2 name, he asked for numbers.
But hey, don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful product. With super innovation with respect to screen and the required sw and hw to support that.
I'm happy for that as it will lead to better products in the Android tablet ecosystem as well.
Android made a few mistakes Apple made in the early nineties, and will gain the technological benefit from that. However, it is sad to see that the no-longer-underdog biggest IT company in the world, also wants to resort to monopolistic tactics to even further its grip on the market.
And then I'm talking about the closed nature of the iPhone and the iPad, not opening it up. Locking customers in.
Closing down installing applications except from the App Store, BY DEFAULT on the next version of MacOS.
Sad!
The underdog has to be careful to not become the bully!
You mean as in MacBook Pro? So it will be iPad Pro?;) The point is, the name is something Steve would never have forgotten... it's the heart of the marketing ploy... Steve would use it in many sentences. A linguistic analysis of the past Steve performances would have been a ood idea for Tim.
It just will not happen. Many embedded devices build today don't even enable the IPv6 stack while it's only a configurable option away in the Linux kernel. And these devices aren't even released yet. They will after release run for a decade in the infrastructure. Sure we tell people who make them to care. Yet mostly they have more important things to care about, as for example to get them working in the first place.
An extra screen in the config box to set a static IPv6 address on an embedded device? Not seen one yet... Why? Because these embedded boxes are typically run in a seperate VLAN in the company.
Corporate requirements for IPv6 are close to nonexistent, so nobody cares, nor will.
It's not that I'm against IPv6, but one has to be realistic about what to expect from the rest of the world - and a drastic change without a game-changing urgent need is not one of these things.
And I'm still waiting for an example of any organization _ANY_ organization who needs to have in the order of 16 million directly communicating devices on their private network. Just a million will do as well.
Probably Google is the only organization which comes close to that order.
And even for them, there is not really an important reason why their infrastructure could not be split up between the google search cloud as one 10.x.x.x range and the gmail infrastructure as another one, for example, as direct communication between the two is probably unnecessary and managed by separate teams anyway.
One could argue that the 'renumbering' is difficult. Yet the cluster which Google build handles server failover, swap-in and swap-out and data partitioning as one of the major features. Fail to see why they couldn't implement it on the 'private IPv4'-level either...
While I agree that on their scale, such an experiment might be valid, my guess is that it will remain as such;... an experiment with a lot of problems:
1) increased latency because of IPv6 tunneling - and Google is very latency conscious
2) less proven technology leading to exotic problems which show up even more at the Google scale - because nobody uses it
And for what?
To solve the 'we are too lazy to write a stupid IPv4 pool re-numbering/re-partitioning'-problem? While it can be done with a very small shell script(TM)?;)
The NAT traversal problem has been solved by a lot of services/applications. And instead of asking the entire world to change their home routers and throw away their embedded devices, NAT solves most issues more or less. IPv6 introduces a lot more problems than it solves. And privacy concerns is one of them.
IPv6 will be very important next year...... so we are told for 15 years now.
It will just never happen.
Running out of IPv4 addresses internally... give me a break - who believes that?
NAT is the answer delivered for a long time now. And it will remain there forever. Amen.
I have been professionally teaching IT people since 1998. That's a really long time. It's not exactly the same as freshmen. Though I learned some things over the years:
Don't forget to talk about the history and the philosophy; while it might seem less important than getting everything in their heads; motivation is key. Because it's hard. Really hard; for them in the beginning. Motivation is everything. Don't waste your time with complicated stuff which can be easier (such as trying to fill their head with vim as joe is there too - if they like Linux, later they'll come back to vim).
Talk about the hippy-like Richard Stallman who got everything started and what the Free Software Foundation is all about; freedom in a digital future and such.
And about the 'other side' within the community with the 'OpenSource' people who just think it's very convenient to be able to work together, but not morally wrong to write proprietary software. Whichever you prefer; 'welcome to the opensource community'.
Involve them.
If you can come up with something which can help them to accomplish something; go for it. Whether it's a LAMP box with Dyndns or something completely different. If they think something is 'stupid', point out that it's OpenSource, so they have the freedom to change it and fix it according to their wishes.
Just an improvement on a bad programming technique
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 1
Basically he starts out with doing the wrong thing and improves it:
Allocating too much memory in userspace so the system starts swapping.
And then he comes up with a more efficient way to use the often swapped in and out memory pages.
Better programming is: keep all the junk you need quick in real memory, leave enough space for filesystem caching as well and prevent the OS from most swap activity.
Old Linux guys like me remember the time when they introduced this in 'enterprise kernels'. At that time it made sence, because in the 2.4 series there were good and... well _bad_ kernels. Some may argue that that still was the case in the early 2.6 tree. But that has been a long time in the past...
The current situation is that the backporting policy basically sucks _bigtime_.
It means that new hardware isn't out of the box supported by the 'enterprise distros' and that installing ubuntu with a new kernel is a no-brainer.
It also means that - especially in the case of Red Hat, the kernel is so heavily patched, that it can lead to stability problems and introduces 'unusual problems' as opposed to the vanilla kernel.
Backporting things for an old kernel and overly patching the vanilla kernel is basically saying: 'we know it better than the kernel developers'. And, sorry, that simply isn't true!
As someone being heavily involved in Linux Enterprise support since 1998, and thus shaping it too, I can only hope that this is a sign of better things to come and an abandonment of the outdated, stupid and un-enterprise policy which only makes Linux look bad.
Slashdot Mirror
If Ubuntu declines, then the question is to what?
We see a lot of ubuntu users going to arch linux for example, but these are the people who started out ubuntu just a few years ago.
Distribution diversity is a good thing.
But we still wouldn't recommend newcomers anything else.
Grtz,
Jasper Internet
Lifting fingerprints of glasses is easy. Maybe even directly of the glass of the phone itself. Yet a glass in a bar might be even better... So now they are going to steal BOTH the phone AND the drink?
Real life in which everybody has internet access, almost always.
Sure, it's important that certain things are learned by heart, very sure.
But certain things simply are not.
Insight questions, those are the important ones.
But hey, who am I kidding, the school system will probably never change. Until our robot overlords do ;)
Damn, there goes my carefully generated karma...
Another bright idea to put solar panels in the 'permanently shadowed craters'? Way to go! Physics 101!
The G stands for Good Public License, and it will prohibit use of our software in weapons, weapon installations and military applications.
Go Richard Stallman, make me proud!
Google gets stuck in a 'do no evil'-mantra, but don't get that is understood differently by different people/cultures.
I think religion is stupid, but ignoring hundreds of million of people is even more so...
There are some simple things that might improve things a lot! But simple is not necessarily simple. HOWEVER! Just look at the 3 most used applications by us; the power users, and veterans: Terminal, Firefox and LibreOffice. Look at the shortcuts of COPY, PASTE. Yes. Copy/paste. In these main 3 applications they are different. For over a few decades it's like that! WTF The Linux Standard Base, can start out with a simple thing like this. It would be nice if they could pull it off. Start out small and humble, and improve things. That's what can make things better. But neither Firefox nor LibreOffice nor terminal emulators will change this without proper motivation. Yet it isn't difficult to realize the necessity to get these thing right...
Why not go to a FriendlyARM Mini2440? For about $150 you can pick it up from http://www.aliexpress.com/ and you have a full fledged Linux board with plenty of i/o and touch screen...
Happy hacking! Jasper
The iPad 2 and The iPad.
What do you think he will prefer?
Not calling that a huge marketing mistake, seems silly to me.
When Steve went for the iPad 2 name, he asked for numbers.
But hey, don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful product. With super innovation with respect to screen and the required sw and hw to support that. I'm happy for that as it will lead to better products in the Android tablet ecosystem as well.
Android made a few mistakes Apple made in the early nineties, and will gain the technological benefit from that. However, it is sad to see that the no-longer-underdog biggest IT company in the world, also wants to resort to monopolistic tactics to even further its grip on the market.
And then I'm talking about the closed nature of the iPhone and the iPad, not opening it up. Locking customers in. Closing down installing applications except from the App Store, BY DEFAULT on the next version of MacOS. Sad!
The underdog has to be careful to not become the bully!
You mean as in MacBook Pro? So it will be iPad Pro? ;) The point is, the name is something Steve would never have forgotten... it's the heart of the marketing ploy... Steve would use it in many sentences. A linguistic analysis of the past Steve performances would have been a ood idea for Tim.
... no he is no Steve Jobs, he even forgot to tell the public WHAT THE NEW IPAD IS CALLED! ... ipad 3, ipad HD? iPad Retina?
He could have done better!
Quantum computers... will probably work.
But I guess I'll stick with certainty...
An extra screen in the config box to set a static IPv6 address on an embedded device? Not seen one yet... Why? Because these embedded boxes are typically run in a seperate VLAN in the company.
Corporate requirements for IPv6 are close to nonexistent, so nobody cares, nor will. It's not that I'm against IPv6, but one has to be realistic about what to expect from the rest of the world - and a drastic change without a game-changing urgent need is not one of these things.
And I'm still waiting for an example of any organization _ANY_ organization who needs to have in the order of 16 million directly communicating devices on their private network. Just a million will do as well. Probably Google is the only organization which comes close to that order.
And even for them, there is not really an important reason why their infrastructure could not be split up between the google search cloud as one 10.x.x.x range and the gmail infrastructure as another one, for example, as direct communication between the two is probably unnecessary and managed by separate teams anyway.
One could argue that the 'renumbering' is difficult. Yet the cluster which Google build handles server failover, swap-in and swap-out and data partitioning as one of the major features. Fail to see why they couldn't implement it on the 'private IPv4'-level either...
While I agree that on their scale, such an experiment might be valid, my guess is that it will remain as such;... an experiment with a lot of problems:
1) increased latency because of IPv6 tunneling - and Google is very latency conscious 2) less proven technology leading to exotic problems which show up even more at the Google scale - because nobody uses it
And for what? ;)
To solve the 'we are too lazy to write a stupid IPv4 pool re-numbering/re-partitioning'-problem? While it can be done with a very small shell script(TM)?
I agree that it's a hassle. But the hassle of using IPv6 is a _lot_ bigger. It's plainly stupid to try and fix a problem by creating a bigger problem.
17 million devices? Nah! Bad subnet planning; yes!
The NAT traversal problem has been solved by a lot of services/applications. And instead of asking the entire world to change their home routers and throw away their embedded devices, NAT solves most issues more or less. IPv6 introduces a lot more problems than it solves. And privacy concerns is one of them.
No, I don't believe that...
IPv6 will be very important next year... ... so we are told for 15 years now.
It will just never happen.
Running out of IPv4 addresses internally... give me a break - who believes that?
NAT is the answer delivered for a long time now. And it will remain there forever. Amen.
Yeah, our spelling sucks, and our politicians even think language problems are worthwhile arguing about :-D
I have been professionally teaching IT people since 1998. That's a really long time. It's not exactly the same as freshmen. Though I learned some things over the years:
;-D
Don't forget to talk about the history and the philosophy; while it might seem less important than getting everything in their heads; motivation is key. Because it's hard. Really hard; for them in the beginning. Motivation is everything. Don't waste your time with complicated stuff which can be easier (such as trying to fill their head with vim as joe is there too - if they like Linux, later they'll come back to vim).
Talk about the hippy-like Richard Stallman who got everything started and what the Free Software Foundation is all about; freedom in a digital future and such. And about the 'other side' within the community with the 'OpenSource' people who just think it's very convenient to be able to work together, but not morally wrong to write proprietary software. Whichever you prefer; 'welcome to the opensource community'.
Involve them.
If you can come up with something which can help them to accomplish something; go for it. Whether it's a LAMP box with Dyndns or something completely different. If they think something is 'stupid', point out that it's OpenSource, so they have the freedom to change it and fix it according to their wishes.
And don't forget: 'Have Fun!'
Good luck!
Jasper
... and they discovered it's utterly uselessness?
Allocating too much memory in userspace so the system starts swapping.
And then he comes up with a more efficient way to use the often swapped in and out memory pages.
Better programming is: keep all the junk you need quick in real memory, leave enough space for filesystem caching as well and prevent the OS from most swap activity.
The current situation is that the backporting policy basically sucks _bigtime_.
It means that new hardware isn't out of the box supported by the 'enterprise distros' and that installing ubuntu with a new kernel is a no-brainer. It also means that - especially in the case of Red Hat, the kernel is so heavily patched, that it can lead to stability problems and introduces 'unusual problems' as opposed to the vanilla kernel.
Backporting things for an old kernel and overly patching the vanilla kernel is basically saying: 'we know it better than the kernel developers'. And, sorry, that simply isn't true!
As someone being heavily involved in Linux Enterprise support since 1998, and thus shaping it too, I can only hope that this is a sign of better things to come and an abandonment of the outdated, stupid and un-enterprise policy which only makes Linux look bad.
As if a monopoly can not excert excessive power on the market...