Mach shows why often enough it isn't any good to do a microkernel approach.
Either you implement most OS services as separate servers (as QNX or Hurd), AND run them in a different execution context, or simply have a MONOLITHIC BSD KERNEL!!!! Having some call indirection doesn't improve design in any way really useful.
If you knew _anything_ about real OS kernel design, you would know and acknowledge that the Linux kernel is superior, due to its mature fine-grained locking, kernel preemption, multiple efficient CPU and IO schedulers, multi-arch support, and layered subsystems.
Of course, superficially, Mach/BSD looks nice. It' not much different from FreeBSD, though, which reintegrated the Mach memory system. And FreeBSD has not yet a _mature_ fine-grained locking, does not have a stable, efficient scheduler (SCHED_ULE has "issues", you know), etc.
On a purely technical standpoint, even the rather mature codebase of the FreeBSD kernel is inferior to the current Linux kernels (at least since Linux 2.6.x). Mach/BSD as used on Darwin does little to leviate this shortcomings, while doing some superficial design cleanups which do not benefit the user except in the latency of sound playback, a problem long gone in Linux.
While Linux people work on hard realtime, Darwin people have achieved soft realtime for sound only. I'm not impressed in the least. Quit touting it as the end of history as it either needs to evolve or will become more and more outdated in terms of Unix evolution.
It isn't superior to Solaris as well, which has much of the same going for it technically as Linux, plus some very Sun-specific extensions.
Mach is touted to be the future since when? The 80s? Perhaps we get to see Christopher LLoyd as Steve Jobs and Michael J. Fox as you when you try to fulfill that prophecy?
Average Joe couldn't care less what software, but MS isn't targetting Johnny Sixpack. The smartphones fish in the PDA's pond, they're unnecessarily complex and add no functionality the users need.
We even see a rise for phones for senior citizens: No display, no characters on the keys, no SMS, bigger digits, bigger buttons, bigger design. They sell more than just well. Some people prefer simplicity, while hardware and software companies hope for complexity, because the spiral of complexity drives sales.
You may agree that a PC with a high-end 3D card is a good thing to play Doom3 and CounterStrike: Source with. But people don't really accept multimedia messaging, digital photography is a gag that quickly wears off and can get the phone banned from the workplace. SMS, ringtones, games and phoning. A little calender. This is much less than what you expect from a PDA.
I don't see a spiral of complexity driving sales here. And I see nothing that MS can do better, except designing better tools for the engineers developing the actual product.
And MS is one of the few companies with a reputation. A REALLY bad one. In Europe MS is more and more viewed as a necessary evil, and nobody is keen on getting into bed with them, especially since we all know their strategy of extend and embrace. The mobile producers have a great interest in not repeating IBM's mistake and will not simply bend over for MS. They know, that MS' products and commodization will mean MS makes money and the hardware vendors do not in the long run. That's plain to see.
Nokia may have failed on you. A product I wouldn't buy again, but I would not judge the firm by it. The series of blunders MS is calling its products, that really scare the shit out of me, because that doesn't seem to hinder people from buying and using it.
Oh, and Linux' chances are even better on mobiles. The most dreaded things about Linux are installation and administration, which are handled for you by the vendors and telcos here. It can fully shine because the user doesn't get its hands dirty at all. It's a reliable platform with strong scalability, can be customized, comes with no strings attached, and is a much more tested and reviewed codebase than the one MS can offer for this segment or maybe even the hardware vendors.
Telcos and networkers are keen on Linux. In runs in their server rooms, racks, switches, etc. It's overtaking the infrastructure. That may drive the push onto the mobile as well, even more if the hardware gets more powerful and the availability of dedicated DSPs frees capacity on the processor of the mobile formerly needed for standard protocol tasks.
I neither see a guaranteed future nor a necessarily dominating future for Linux, but its free-for-all nature, its vendor-neutrality and its rise throughout the communications world may make it a much more sane choice for the actual mobile producers. I'd bet in every market without a strong Microsoft entrenchment that Linux will outgrow MS. It even does in servers, and is slowing MS' growth, something not really evident 2 years ago, when Linux was taking bites out of Unix.
Now we see bites at Solaris, vxWorks and Windows, embedded Linux, Carrier Grade Linux and server Linux are especially strongly growing segments. You cannot count MS out, but they seriously start to trail behind, especially since they didn't use their timing advantage in the mobile market. Linux products become more, but MS announcements seem to become less, and don't seem to produce much press.
Since years we've been reading the PDA is dying, and unlike all the "BSD is dying" crap this actually means the market is shrinking. As long as Windows isn't a big player in the mobile phone market, that's nothing to boast about. And their mobile phone products suck - they've even crashed. That is something mobile users aren't to accept, because other key players seem to have it worked out better.
Linux gets slowly but steadily adopted into more and more mobiles, same with carrier grade Linux with the telcos.
Add this to robotics, which is associated with the biggest increases in productivity, there seems to be a bright future for embedded Linux, which is really contending with stuff like vxWorks or Symbian, not so much Windows.
Basically the big game companies try to mimic Hollywood here, as seems not the worst move for an entertainment industry.
A few big hits finance all the other flops or average-doing movies - you hang 10 lines in the water to catch the big fish that's somewhere out there.
Rehashing hits with sequels is a cash cow, and since software is always buggy and incomplete, version 2 often is a big step forward even for creative games, like Fallout - Fallout 2 was even greater (Fallout Tactics was pure moneymaking).
Some vendors seem even to live of "version 2"s - like Paradox Software: Europa Universalis 2 (Europe from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars) and Hearts of Iron 2 (WWII) are both excellent upgrades to the original titles - much more deep and interesting. 1st part demonstrates a great concept, players like it, criticize and comment on the forums, and part 2 is guaranteed to be a revised game, incorporating a lot of the constructive criticism they were exposed to, even much better than the original - part 1: the original idea, part 2: its perfection. It could be a lot worse, and is quite a thing for a small publisher to keep up with players' demands (and they are demanding!)! Or The Creative Assembly - Shogun: Total War debuted an exciting real-time 3D battlefield engine, Medieval: Total War combined it with an excellent campaign game with hundreds of units, and Rome: Total War with a much more detailed battle and 3-D engine that starts to rival movies (and is used for portraying ancient battles on TV) with intricate tactical decisions to be made, combined with a terrain-realistic map for planning your campaigns. It gets more exciting with every sequel, and they all have been worth their money!
I hope that we will see some nice independent contributions (from small firms and maybe even open source collaboration), and some of the big firms sinking money on games that are great but not selling well (like games that require you to think instead of pulling triggers or to hack enemies like in a slasher movie).
Even in the world of big movie studios there are some small patches of extraordinary filmcraft flowering among all that trash. Yet even trash is sometimes entertaining: Go Hellboy!;)
On a far less "technical" note, many people may not yet have noticed anything wrong with "The Simpons". Only those "Futurama" toons have a strange color...;)
I didn't say X doesn't come with FreeBSD. I said: It's not part of the base system. So all the attributes you would associate with the base system are simply not implied for other software coming with FreeBSD, like X. The base system is tightly integrated, granted. But X and the whole desktop stuff is not.
Yeah, you can get everything with Ports, but you have to compile it! That's a serious investment in time, even with a multi-GHz P4, if you long for a recent - say - KDE? (You sure want _THAT_ or a full Gnome on a desktop machine, in recent versions).
I actually have a pal sitting in the lab next to me, doing Ports compiles and configuring since days because he wants to "truely evaluate" the system (he has a P4 with good horse power and HT).
Accepted: The base system is a perfect match for the kernel, lean and mean, but that won't give you you most stuff considered to be part of a full desktop. And X, Gnome and KDE are not as neatly adapted to FreeBSD as the base system, not by far. Recent versions need to be compiled. You aren't suggesting a base system is enough, aren't you? Command line is fine, but X would be nice. And Slackware isn't a very popular distro by today's standards...
5.x is very performant system that is in its strengths a true match for Linux 2.6.x. It replaced a lot of code though, and as 2.6.x, needs time to mature - it's beta for a reason and not yet fully stable. 4.x is the tried and true proven solution. I bet 4.x and the base system are one of the most stable and reliable foundations for a server out there, but not the most performant and scalable one. 5.x is not stable yet, it still has teething troubles: Even it's new and powerful SCHED_ULE (O(1)-Scheduler) is not fully stable yet. It's a good and commendable design, though (the whole kernel), as always.
A beginner is for sure in for more fun than he expected with the Ports tree. It's a solution that works, but does not really increase usability a lot for BSD beginners.
When the book came out in Germany, I got my pre-ordered copy. It's a great book, not for its choice of OS, but for its writing style.
I have no problem with FreeBSD, or anti-BSD bias, I'm just trying to say that this is surely the best-written book about a recent operating system kernel available, and I'm enjoying reading it.
It certainly beats "Understanding the Linux kernel", again not for its choice of OS, but for its style. It explains more, and doesn't hassle you with platform dependent assembler code. After all, most of the OSs are written C, why bother in an "introductory" book?
Given how much fun I have reading this book, I'm not pleased with this quick, incomplete review I cannot make anything of. Do I learn anything about the book? I guess not. There are great reviews out there, like for "Embedding Linux", where you get a detailed list of things the reviewer notes about the book, and where he found issues with it, and what he liked. Man, this is for sure shorter than the Amazon sales pitch, and sadly enough, not very relevant as well. Sampling a few facts from a book is not a review!
Oh, buy this book! It's worth every penny! Since I'm not a reviewer I do not bother adding any evidence to this statement, as this are only my 2 cents.;)
Well, Iraq is a little bit better off, since it is not one of the craddles of humanity (Mesopotamia) for nothing. Unlike most of the Arabian peninsula it is able to produce crops and to sustain fishermen on Euphrat and Tigris.
Of course, when you are sitting on top of world's 2nd biggest and world's easiest reachable (1$/Barrel production cost - less than the Saudis) oil reserve that doesn't count much.
So, of course, you're right: Cleptocraty with some "panem et circenses" for the masses is the likeliest outcome.
Yeah, and remember, I wrote: "that anyone can remember there." That's dozens of years away, several wars in between, and not a very hopeful incentive anyway. Between the Republic of Weimar and the founding of the new German states were 16 years, but with Iraq's democracy this is already generations.
Iraq is not as safe as, say, downtown Singapore, but it's a whole lot safer than downtown Washington D.C. or Mexico City.
This shows what a cynic you are. I don't hear of regular autobomb explosions, and jets bombing urban centers in both that cities. You are an apologist.
For the free media: There are newspapers, but most of them are organs of policy of a political force (see here, in German ).
People signing up for police and army have deserted on a lot of various occasions. A need for jobs triggered by mass poverty should not be equated to actual support.
Iraq's economy stronger? If you take away business going from US government that goes into the hands of US corporations and similar stuff, I guess that drops a lot. There are billions moved, but to no benefit of the Iraqis. How many of the rest of the economy is subsidized and not actually sustainable on its own?
The interim government is targetted because it is viewed as a US puppet regime. So every strike against the puppet regime is hoped to get "good PR", because the populace in general resents the Americans and their allies.
Oh yeah, and there is actually little or no progress in rebuilding Iraq: here, a study .
Remember Germany, after WWII? An utterly undemocratic country, downbeaten, occupied and with a legacy of a failed democraty (the so-called Republic of Weimar). It took four years to allow for German half-independent states again, with their own constitution, and free elections. And 45 years till occupation was formally ended!
Now let's compare with Iraq: Unlike the Germans, the Iraqis have no cultural ties or common traditions with the Americans/British occupying them. They have absolutely no democratic legacy, not even a failed one, that anyone can remember there. There is a strong resentment against the occupying forces, and any ideas stemming from them.
Unlike occupied Germany there is absolutely no safety guaranteed by the occcupying forces. The land has spun out of control, several cities are out of control, and military action is still taking place. No economic recovery is taking place, and doing business is now again nearly impossible for foreign investors, abductions of foreigners is commonplace.
There are no well-known political movements beyond ties to ethnic group and maybe clan. The interim government is resented by many Iraqis as a puppet of the occupying forces, and the only media trusted or at least respected by most Iraqis are American-critic Al-Dschasira. Media installed by the USA like Al-Hurra are perceived as propaganda instruments, and this is most likely a correct assumption.
So there are no political movements to have enough confidence in that they worth casting a vote for, a big problem about independent media and therefore freedom of speech, a population resenting the US and Western ideas, sometimes including democracy, and an unstable situation in general.
In a country where it is even problematic to get one's children into a school, and safely home and fed, is there really that much a chance for democracy? I guess not.
This is just an illusion made up to content American voters for this fall, not really help the Iraqis with anything.
Recently neurological studies revealed, that a kid's behaviour was strongly influenced by hormone levels in the mother's womb.
Normally the baby's own hormone levels influence its (future) personality, and tend to bring boys closer to male stereotypes, and girls to female stereotypes.
Sometimes strong anomalies of hormones in the mother's bloodstream (like through medication, sickness, or an inborn disease/anomaly) influence babies. This may be one of the reasons for autism.
It may further be "responsible" for the percentage of males and females, that don't "fit" their gender stereotype. And this explains the strong variation in behaviour within one gender as well.
Far from explaining away autism, transsexuality and un-stereotypical behaviour only with this, it is one of many influences in forming a person's behvaiour.
The study, that measured those levels, and later on observed the children, noted that those children that were exposed to abnormal doses of hormones switched away from their gender stereotype (boys playing with dolls, girls playing with cars).
While this may sound sexist, gender-stereotypical behaviour is even found in apes. Female apes like "girly" toys most, and male apes "manly" toys. So I hope this is taken as the sincerely objective comment I tried to make it.
Whether shutting a computer down will save electricity is not very clear.
Some guy I know went half a year with the same computer running continuously and half a year with shutting it down when not needed. Had power management properly configured for computer and CRT and had a kWh meter mounted on the wall socket it was all connected to.
Running continuously saved more electricity. If you shut down once a day, and start up once a day, I guess this will reverse, and new processors with higher leakage will take their toll (this was in the end-90s!). But when running all the time your components will live longer (except you have a bad thermal design for your box and they get too hot), and that is a lot better for the planet, because with current recycling tech computer components are mostly toxic or near-toxic waste!
Sooner or later people and businesses simply will have to switch to some version of XP, because of MS licensing and/or new technology.
Just like with a any HyperThreading (only SMP support, no HT support => nearly no gains in performance) processor, or 64-bit (no support for x86-64 at all) processors, Win2k won't be much of a sensible choice soon (or you simply throw the advantages of modern chip technology away).
So, when enough people have Win XP, even in business environments, we'll see how true or not true your claims have or have not been.
Shutting down your machine down after work is not a good test of Windows stability, anyway. Older Windows systems did get into a lot of problems if running "too long" (defined as: what I expect my Linux box minimally to do, like running at least 60 days trouble-free (and then I take them down for maintenance: new kernel!)). It would be interesting, how XP compared to older Windowses in long-time "stability" (in being stable, as older consumer versions weren't).
There could be other stuff that could actually causing more problems with XP, like DirectX "now" piercing the HAL in XP. Same bad design of a Graphics driver can now do more harm than before, I guess.
But honestly, if XP is failing more often than Win 2000 and Win NT, the problem is in the drivers for sure. Most of the stuff taking Windows down is drivers, so maybe the good ole WinNT/Win 2000 drivers for OSs mostly intended for business environments and not for home use were simply better?
Email, web, application and database servers: Immense growth. A niche market? Then why's MS worried and cites this in their 10-K filing to the SEC? (Linux according to MS with the same _absolute_ growth even with MS greater absolute market share).
High-Performance computing: How many clusters/mainframes etc. are running Linux? How many Top 500 super computers are Linux-based? Sadly we cannot extract that information yet, because they are working on adding this feature (what OS runs on the SuperComputer). This is really niche, but it shows technological (efficiency, performance, scalability) and scientific (openness) merit...
On the desktop its getting harder, as I mentioned. Nobody knows how many installs there are of commercial Linux, and don't start with non-commercial Linux. How many Debian/Gentoo downloads lead to installs? How often is a downloaded ISO installed? If your firm has one RedHat license, how many installs will it do with it?
Where are the total Linux numbers of ALL the statistics coming from? Data-mining connection data of web clients? (Well what about NAT? Is this one Linux computer? Or a set of Linux computers? Or a Linux computer acting as a NAT gateway for Windows boxes?) Surveys? Estimates from commercial vendor sales? How is a box rated, that ships with Windows, and gets Linux installed? How dual-boot configurations? If a box is shipped without an OS, does it count at all?
I'd be intrigued to see any method to correctly estimate even the order of magnitude of the Linux total installation number! It's all guessing and no hard numbers, and I'd bet it's all on the conservative side.
So I'm repeating my argument: What we see in MacOS numbers is the maximum, the cap, the grand total, because we know the sales. Since MacOS is useless without the proper Apple hardware we don't need to take piracy into account. With Linux this can only be gross estimates and conservative ones (you'd expect an analyst to derive new estimation methodologies from old ones, which are inherently flawed when applied to Linux installation count because of the reasons above).
Oh, and Apple going mainstream again? Hmm. Is there any application I need to buy an Apple for? No. The once-successful niche is gone. Where is your evidence? How fast are Apple's MacOS X sales growing in percents and in total numbers? Can Apple outgrow their original consumer base? (With these prices I guess not)
Will Apple steal share from Windows? Same arguments as for Linux: Windows apps are not there (but Linux gets more new ports now, MacOS only ports for already-present software), Windows games are not there (at least in 3D more and more publishers sell a Linux version and servers for their games)...
So all that stays is ease-of-use and security.
Security doesn't sell computers or OpenBSD preinstalled boxes would sell by the truck load.
So it's ease-of-use. The remaining selling point, when you're stuck with Apple's hardware, Apple's overpriced addon gimmicks, and a niche market of commercial desktop apps.
If MacOS X doesn't attract a new user base, Apple's computer business is actually finally going down the drain, because for commercial shops it's more cost-effective to go with Windows on cheap hardware. The apps are there, the people are educated to use it, nobody gets fired for buying Windows and it's cheaper. The non-commercial user is all what's left. Talking about niches!
MacOS X lacks developer base: http://www.drunkenbatman.com/drunkenblog-ar chives/ 000257.html IDC numbers are conservative estimates: http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/03/1 2/too_late_f or_macos_x/
The most funny comment was from some Mac-friendly analysts, when they guessed most Linux-preinstalled boxes sold in China (which would make it #2 definitely) have Linux replaced with pirated Windows. So we count every Windows-shipped box as Windows and a percentage of the Linux-shipped boxes, too. This was in
People are referring here pejoratively to patriotism, which misses the point.
Patriotism is the love for one's home country, which is expressed by taking part in the community, aiding in national disasters and standing together against a common enemy. Patriotism is a positive thing, because it does not cloud the mind.
The term most people are actually seeking is nationalism. Nationalism is the belief that one's own nation is better than others, or maybe even "God's own chosen land". Nationalism is a right-wing political agenda, closely related to totalitarianism and police states. Because one's own nation is the best in the world, and the government acts in interest of that nation, you should not question the actions of that government (or the terrorists win - or whatever this is the current scapegoat).
You can now argue, very much more as an outsider, that there is a considerable amount of both present in the USA today. You can further argue, that nationalists are exploiting the patriotism of their fellow Americans by marking things "un-American" or parading scapegoats to distract from their own failures. (Yes, I'm referring to the Republicans here).
As an American, if you happen to be one (whoever reads this post), you should always be doubtful of the image transported by the media, or by the government. Not because there is any kind of conspiracy. Simply because greedy, self-righteous people are manipulating and pushing the public opinion for their own ends, and always have.
This does include the educational system, but does not stop there.
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Mach shows why often enough it isn't any good to do a microkernel approach.
Either you implement most OS services as separate servers (as QNX or Hurd), AND run them in a different execution context, or simply have a MONOLITHIC BSD KERNEL!!!! Having some call indirection doesn't improve design in any way really useful.
If you knew _anything_ about real OS kernel design, you would know and acknowledge that the Linux kernel is superior, due to its mature fine-grained locking, kernel preemption, multiple efficient CPU and IO schedulers, multi-arch support, and layered subsystems.
Of course, superficially, Mach/BSD looks nice. It' not much different from FreeBSD, though, which reintegrated the Mach memory system. And FreeBSD has not yet a _mature_ fine-grained locking, does not have a stable, efficient scheduler (SCHED_ULE has "issues", you know), etc.
On a purely technical standpoint, even the rather mature codebase of the FreeBSD kernel is inferior to the current Linux kernels (at least since Linux 2.6.x). Mach/BSD as used on Darwin does little to leviate this shortcomings, while doing some superficial design cleanups which do not benefit the user except in the latency of sound playback, a problem long gone in Linux.
While Linux people work on hard realtime, Darwin people have achieved soft realtime for sound only. I'm not impressed in the least. Quit touting it as the end of history as it either needs to evolve or will become more and more outdated in terms of Unix evolution.
It isn't superior to Solaris as well, which has much of the same going for it technically as Linux, plus some very Sun-specific extensions.
Mach is touted to be the future since when? The 80s? Perhaps we get to see Christopher LLoyd as Steve Jobs and Michael J. Fox as you when you try to fulfill that prophecy?
Average Joe couldn't care less what software, but MS isn't targetting Johnny Sixpack. The smartphones fish in the PDA's pond, they're unnecessarily complex and add no functionality the users need.
We even see a rise for phones for senior citizens: No display, no characters on the keys, no SMS, bigger digits, bigger buttons, bigger design. They sell more than just well. Some people prefer simplicity, while hardware and software companies hope for complexity, because the spiral of complexity drives sales.
You may agree that a PC with a high-end 3D card is a good thing to play Doom3 and CounterStrike: Source with. But people don't really accept multimedia messaging, digital photography is a gag that quickly wears off and can get the phone banned from the workplace. SMS, ringtones, games and phoning. A little calender. This is much less than what you expect from a PDA.
I don't see a spiral of complexity driving sales here. And I see nothing that MS can do better, except designing better tools for the engineers developing the actual product.
And MS is one of the few companies with a reputation. A REALLY bad one. In Europe MS is more and more viewed as a necessary evil, and nobody is keen on getting into bed with them, especially since we all know their strategy of extend and embrace. The mobile producers have a great interest in not repeating IBM's mistake and will not simply bend over for MS. They know, that MS' products and commodization will mean MS makes money and the hardware vendors do not in the long run. That's plain to see.
Nokia may have failed on you. A product I wouldn't buy again, but I would not judge the firm by it. The series of blunders MS is calling its products, that really scare the shit out of me, because that doesn't seem to hinder people from buying and using it.
Oh, and Linux' chances are even better on mobiles. The most dreaded things about Linux are installation and administration, which are handled for you by the vendors and telcos here. It can fully shine because the user doesn't get its hands dirty at all. It's a reliable platform with strong scalability, can be customized, comes with no strings attached, and is a much more tested and reviewed codebase than the one MS can offer for this segment or maybe even the hardware vendors.
Telcos and networkers are keen on Linux. In runs in their server rooms, racks, switches, etc. It's overtaking the infrastructure. That may drive the push onto the mobile as well, even more if the hardware gets more powerful and the availability of dedicated DSPs frees capacity on the processor of the mobile formerly needed for standard protocol tasks.
I neither see a guaranteed future nor a necessarily dominating future for Linux, but its free-for-all nature, its vendor-neutrality and its rise throughout the communications world may make it a much more sane choice for the actual mobile producers. I'd bet in every market without a strong Microsoft entrenchment that Linux will outgrow MS. It even does in servers, and is slowing MS' growth, something not really evident 2 years ago, when Linux was taking bites out of Unix.
Now we see bites at Solaris, vxWorks and Windows, embedded Linux, Carrier Grade Linux and server Linux are especially strongly growing segments. You cannot count MS out, but they seriously start to trail behind, especially since they didn't use their timing advantage in the mobile market. Linux products become more, but MS announcements seem to become less, and don't seem to produce much press.
Since years we've been reading the PDA is dying, and unlike all the "BSD is dying" crap this actually means the market is shrinking. As long as Windows isn't a big player in the mobile phone market, that's nothing to boast about. And their mobile phone products suck - they've even crashed. That is something mobile users aren't to accept, because other key players seem to have it worked out better.
Linux gets slowly but steadily adopted into more and more mobiles, same with carrier grade Linux with the telcos.
Add this to robotics, which is associated with the biggest increases in productivity, there seems to be a bright future for embedded Linux, which is really contending with stuff like vxWorks or Symbian, not so much Windows.
Basically the big game companies try to mimic Hollywood here, as seems not the worst move for an entertainment industry.
;)
A few big hits finance all the other flops or average-doing movies - you hang 10 lines in the water to catch the big fish that's somewhere out there.
Rehashing hits with sequels is a cash cow, and since software is always buggy and incomplete, version 2 often is a big step forward even for creative games, like Fallout - Fallout 2 was even greater (Fallout Tactics was pure moneymaking).
Some vendors seem even to live of "version 2"s - like Paradox Software: Europa Universalis 2 (Europe from the Renaissance to the Napoleonic Wars) and Hearts of Iron 2 (WWII) are both excellent upgrades to the original titles - much more deep and interesting. 1st part demonstrates a great concept, players like it, criticize and comment on the forums, and part 2 is guaranteed to be a revised game, incorporating a lot of the constructive criticism they were exposed to, even much better than the original - part 1: the original idea, part 2: its perfection. It could be a lot worse, and is quite a thing for a small publisher to keep up with players' demands (and they are demanding!)! Or The Creative Assembly - Shogun: Total War debuted an exciting real-time 3D battlefield engine, Medieval: Total War combined it with an excellent campaign game with hundreds of units, and Rome: Total War with a much more detailed battle and 3-D engine that starts to rival movies (and is used for portraying ancient battles on TV) with intricate tactical decisions to be made, combined with a terrain-realistic map for planning your campaigns. It gets more exciting with every sequel, and they all have been worth their money!
I hope that we will see some nice independent contributions (from small firms and maybe even open source collaboration), and some of the big firms sinking money on games that are great but not selling well (like games that require you to think instead of pulling triggers or to hack enemies like in a slasher movie).
Even in the world of big movie studios there are some small patches of extraordinary filmcraft flowering among all that trash. Yet even trash is sometimes entertaining: Go Hellboy!
devfs is crap, and has edge cases that were not cleared. udev is better for sure. FreeBSD may have many strongpoints, but devfs isn't one of them.
Well, I don't understand your last paragraph fully: A doctorate is actually required to know his field in a lot of detail - depth, not breadth.
But I guess, you were referring to: PhD - many disciplines (and specialize in one), CCIE - already specific to one discipline?
On a far less "technical" note, many people may not yet have noticed anything wrong with "The Simpons". Only those "Futurama" toons have a strange color... ;)
Isn't the opposite true?
POSIX in WinNT doesn't sit on Win32, and vice versa, they are two execution engines on top the kernel.
Of course, MS POSIX is just a facade to get DARPA approval, and is not maintained very much. And it is slow compared to Win32.
If Windows had a real POSIX implementation, why would you need Services for UNIX from MS to turn it in a more UNIX-like box (with lots of BSD code)?
At least, IIRC.
I don't whether the quality of NTSC broadcasting increased a lot or not - I cannot observe whether it's that way or not (I am a PAL user).
But wasn't quality of a lot of NTSC brodcasts so bad it was dubbed "Never The Same Color"?
Was this resolved by better broadcasting equipment?
At least in the days when this little nickname rang true, PAL was surely the better solution.
I didn't say X doesn't come with FreeBSD. I said: It's not part of the base system. So all the attributes you would associate with the base system are simply not implied for other software coming with FreeBSD, like X. The base system is tightly integrated, granted. But X and the whole desktop stuff is not.
Um, because _not_ _all_ ports have packages?
Besides, there are broken ports...
Yeah, you can get everything with Ports, but you have to compile it! That's a serious investment in time, even with a multi-GHz P4, if you long for a recent - say - KDE? (You sure want _THAT_ or a full Gnome on a desktop machine, in recent versions).
I actually have a pal sitting in the lab next to me, doing Ports compiles and configuring since days because he wants to "truely evaluate" the system (he has a P4 with good horse power and HT).
Accepted: The base system is a perfect match for the kernel, lean and mean, but that won't give you you most stuff considered to be part of a full desktop. And X, Gnome and KDE are not as neatly adapted to FreeBSD as the base system, not by far. Recent versions need to be compiled. You aren't suggesting a base system is enough, aren't you? Command line is fine, but X would be nice. And Slackware isn't a very popular distro by today's standards...
5.x is very performant system that is in its strengths a true match for Linux 2.6.x. It replaced a lot of code though, and as 2.6.x, needs time to mature - it's beta for a reason and not yet fully stable. 4.x is the tried and true proven solution. I bet 4.x and the base system are one of the most stable and reliable foundations for a server out there, but not the most performant and scalable one. 5.x is not stable yet, it still has teething troubles: Even it's new and powerful SCHED_ULE (O(1)-Scheduler) is not fully stable yet. It's a good and commendable design, though (the whole kernel), as always.
A beginner is for sure in for more fun than he expected with the Ports tree. It's a solution that works, but does not really increase usability a lot for BSD beginners.
You need to run NT4 hardware?
What about: Linux, FreeBSD or NetBSD? What apps do require you to run Windows on those machines, that could do so well as *nix boxes?
This is serious crap anyway.
There is no technical obstacle to upgrading the browser independently of the OS. WE ALL KNOW THAT.
So IE is crap. Shoddily designed, showing its age, crammed into the OS. Don't use it...
But wait: It's an OS component you CAN'T deinstall. It stays there to open potential holes even if you don't use it.
MS owes its customers an IE-free Windows and maybe a Windows-less IE as well!
Xserves the biggest competitor? Ha! There are a lot of Xeon and PowerPC blades with more bang-per-buck than the Xserve.
Itanic is stuffed, sure. But Xserve? I don't think so.
When the book came out in Germany, I got my pre-ordered copy. It's a great book, not for its choice of OS, but for its writing style.
;)
I have no problem with FreeBSD, or anti-BSD bias, I'm just trying to say that this is surely the best-written book about a recent operating system kernel available, and I'm enjoying reading it.
It certainly beats "Understanding the Linux kernel", again not for its choice of OS, but for its style. It explains more, and doesn't hassle you with platform dependent assembler code. After all, most of the OSs are written C, why bother in an "introductory" book?
Given how much fun I have reading this book, I'm not pleased with this quick, incomplete review I cannot make anything of. Do I learn anything about the book? I guess not. There are great reviews out there, like for "Embedding Linux", where you get a detailed list of things the reviewer notes about the book, and where he found issues with it, and what he liked. Man, this is for sure shorter than the Amazon sales pitch, and sadly enough, not very relevant as well. Sampling a few facts from a book is not a review!
Oh, buy this book! It's worth every penny! Since I'm not a reviewer I do not bother adding any evidence to this statement, as this are only my 2 cents.
Well, Iraq is a little bit better off, since it is not one of the craddles of humanity (Mesopotamia) for nothing. Unlike most of the Arabian peninsula it is able to produce crops and to sustain fishermen on Euphrat and Tigris.
Of course, when you are sitting on top of world's 2nd biggest and world's easiest reachable (1$/Barrel production cost - less than the Saudis) oil reserve that doesn't count much.
So, of course, you're right: Cleptocraty with some "panem et circenses" for the masses is the likeliest outcome.
Yeah, and remember, I wrote: "that anyone can remember there." That's dozens of years away, several wars in between, and not a very hopeful incentive anyway. Between the Republic of Weimar and the founding of the new German states were 16 years, but with Iraq's democracy this is already generations.
This shows what a cynic you are. I don't hear of regular autobomb explosions, and jets bombing urban centers in both that cities. You are an apologist.
For the free media: There are newspapers, but most of them are organs of policy of a political force (see here, in German ).
People signing up for police and army have deserted on a lot of various occasions. A need for jobs triggered by mass poverty should not be equated to actual support.
Iraq's economy stronger? If you take away business going from US government that goes into the hands of US corporations and similar stuff, I guess that drops a lot. There are billions moved, but to no benefit of the Iraqis. How many of the rest of the economy is subsidized and not actually sustainable on its own?
The interim government is targetted because it is viewed as a US puppet regime. So every strike against the puppet regime is hoped to get "good PR", because the populace in general resents the Americans and their allies.
Oh yeah, and there is actually little or no progress in rebuilding Iraq: here, a study .
Remember Germany, after WWII? An utterly undemocratic country, downbeaten, occupied and with a legacy of a failed democraty (the so-called Republic of Weimar). It took four years to allow for German half-independent states again, with their own constitution, and free elections. And 45 years till occupation was formally ended!
Now let's compare with Iraq: Unlike the Germans, the Iraqis have no cultural ties or common traditions with the Americans/British occupying them. They have absolutely no democratic legacy, not even a failed one, that anyone can remember there. There is a strong resentment against the occupying forces, and any ideas stemming from them.
Unlike occupied Germany there is absolutely no safety guaranteed by the occcupying forces. The land has spun out of control, several cities are out of control, and military action is still taking place. No economic recovery is taking place, and doing business is now again nearly impossible for foreign investors, abductions of foreigners is commonplace.
There are no well-known political movements beyond ties to ethnic group and maybe clan. The interim government is resented by many Iraqis as a puppet of the occupying forces, and the only media trusted or at least respected by most Iraqis are American-critic Al-Dschasira. Media installed by the USA like Al-Hurra are perceived as propaganda instruments, and this is most likely a correct assumption.
So there are no political movements to have enough confidence in that they worth casting a vote for, a big problem about independent media and therefore freedom of speech, a population resenting the US and Western ideas, sometimes including democracy, and an unstable situation in general.
In a country where it is even problematic to get one's children into a school, and safely home and fed, is there really that much a chance for democracy? I guess not.
This is just an illusion made up to content American voters for this fall, not really help the Iraqis with anything.
Recently neurological studies revealed, that a kid's behaviour was strongly influenced by hormone levels in the mother's womb.
Normally the baby's own hormone levels influence its (future) personality, and tend to bring boys closer to male stereotypes, and girls to female stereotypes.
Sometimes strong anomalies of hormones in the mother's bloodstream (like through medication, sickness, or an inborn disease/anomaly) influence babies. This may be one of the reasons for autism.
It may further be "responsible" for the percentage of males and females, that don't "fit" their gender stereotype. And this explains the strong variation in behaviour within one gender as well.
Far from explaining away autism, transsexuality and un-stereotypical behaviour only with this, it is one of many influences in forming a person's behvaiour.
The study, that measured those levels, and later on observed the children, noted that those children that were exposed to abnormal doses of hormones switched away from their gender stereotype (boys playing with dolls, girls playing with cars).
While this may sound sexist, gender-stereotypical behaviour is even found in apes. Female apes like "girly" toys most, and male apes "manly" toys. So I hope this is taken as the sincerely objective comment I tried to make it.
Whether shutting a computer down will save electricity is not very clear.
Some guy I know went half a year with the same computer running continuously and half a year with shutting it down when not needed. Had power management properly configured for computer and CRT and had a kWh meter mounted on the wall socket it was all connected to.
Running continuously saved more electricity. If you shut down once a day, and start up once a day, I guess this will reverse, and new processors with higher leakage will take their toll (this was in the end-90s!). But when running all the time your components will live longer (except you have a bad thermal design for your box and they get too hot), and that is a lot better for the planet, because with current recycling tech computer components are mostly toxic or near-toxic waste!
Sooner or later people and businesses simply will have to switch to some version of XP, because of MS licensing and/or new technology.
Just like with a any HyperThreading (only SMP support, no HT support => nearly no gains in performance) processor, or 64-bit (no support for x86-64 at all) processors, Win2k won't be much of a sensible choice soon (or you simply throw the advantages of modern chip technology away).
So, when enough people have Win XP, even in business environments, we'll see how true or not true your claims have or have not been.
Shutting down your machine down after work is not a good test of Windows stability, anyway. Older Windows systems did get into a lot of problems if running "too long" (defined as: what I expect my Linux box minimally to do, like running at least 60 days trouble-free (and then I take them down for maintenance: new kernel!)). It would be interesting, how XP compared to older Windowses in long-time "stability" (in being stable, as older consumer versions weren't).
There could be other stuff that could actually causing more problems with XP, like DirectX "now" piercing the HAL in XP. Same bad design of a Graphics driver can now do more harm than before, I guess.
But honestly, if XP is failing more often than Win 2000 and Win NT, the problem is in the drivers for sure. Most of the stuff taking Windows down is drivers, so maybe the good ole WinNT/Win 2000 drivers for OSs mostly intended for business environments and not for home use were simply better?
Niche markets, hmm.
Email, web, application and database servers: Immense growth. A niche market? Then why's MS worried and cites this in their 10-K filing to the SEC? (Linux according to MS with the same _absolute_ growth even with MS greater absolute market share).
High-Performance computing: How many clusters/mainframes etc. are running Linux? How many Top 500 super computers are Linux-based? Sadly we cannot extract that information yet, because they are working on adding this feature (what OS runs on the SuperComputer). This is really niche, but it shows technological (efficiency, performance, scalability) and scientific (openness) merit...
On the desktop its getting harder, as I mentioned. Nobody knows how many installs there are of commercial Linux, and don't start with non-commercial Linux. How many Debian/Gentoo downloads lead to installs? How often is a downloaded ISO installed? If your firm has one RedHat license, how many installs will it do with it?
Where are the total Linux numbers of ALL the statistics coming from? Data-mining connection data of web clients? (Well what about NAT? Is this one Linux computer? Or a set of Linux computers? Or a Linux computer acting as a NAT gateway for Windows boxes?) Surveys? Estimates from commercial vendor sales? How is a box rated, that ships with Windows, and gets Linux installed? How dual-boot configurations? If a box is shipped without an OS, does it count at all?
I'd be intrigued to see any method to correctly estimate even the order of magnitude of the Linux total installation number! It's all guessing and no hard numbers, and I'd bet it's all on the conservative side.
So I'm repeating my argument: What we see in MacOS numbers is the maximum, the cap, the grand total, because we know the sales. Since MacOS is useless without the proper Apple hardware we don't need to take piracy into account. With Linux this can only be gross estimates and conservative ones (you'd expect an analyst to derive new estimation methodologies from old ones, which are inherently flawed when applied to Linux installation count because of the reasons above).
Oh, and Apple going mainstream again? Hmm. Is there any application I need to buy an Apple for? No. The once-successful niche is gone. Where is your evidence? How fast are Apple's MacOS X sales growing in percents and in total numbers? Can Apple outgrow their original consumer base? (With these prices I guess not)
Will Apple steal share from Windows? Same arguments as for Linux: Windows apps are not there (but Linux gets more new ports now, MacOS only ports for already-present software), Windows games are not there (at least in 3D more and more publishers sell a Linux version and servers for their games)...
So all that stays is ease-of-use and security.
Security doesn't sell computers or OpenBSD preinstalled boxes would sell by the truck load.
So it's ease-of-use. The remaining selling point, when you're stuck with Apple's hardware, Apple's overpriced addon gimmicks, and a niche market of commercial desktop apps.
If MacOS X doesn't attract a new user base, Apple's computer business is actually finally going down the drain, because for commercial shops it's more cost-effective to go with Windows on cheap hardware. The apps are there, the people are educated to use it, nobody gets fired for buying Windows and it's cheaper. The non-commercial user is all what's left. Talking about niches!
MacOS X lacks developer base:
http://www.drunkenbatman.com/drunkenblog-ar chives/ 000257.html
IDC numbers are conservative estimates:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/03/1 2/too_late_f or_macos_x/
The most funny comment was from some Mac-friendly analysts, when they guessed most Linux-preinstalled boxes sold in China (which would make it #2 definitely) have Linux replaced with pirated Windows. So we count every Windows-shipped box as Windows and a percentage of the Linux-shipped boxes, too. This was in
People are referring here pejoratively to patriotism, which misses the point.
Patriotism is the love for one's home country, which is expressed by taking part in the community, aiding in national disasters and standing together against a common enemy. Patriotism is a positive thing, because it does not cloud the mind.
The term most people are actually seeking is nationalism. Nationalism is the belief that one's own nation is better than others, or maybe even "God's own chosen land". Nationalism is a right-wing political agenda, closely related to totalitarianism and police states. Because one's own nation is the best in the world, and the government acts in interest of that nation, you should not question the actions of that government (or the terrorists win - or whatever this is the current scapegoat).
You can now argue, very much more as an outsider, that there is a considerable amount of both present in the USA today. You can further argue, that nationalists are exploiting the patriotism of their fellow Americans by marking things "un-American" or parading scapegoats to distract from their own failures. (Yes, I'm referring to the Republicans here).
As an American, if you happen to be one (whoever reads this post), you should always be doubtful of the image transported by the media, or by the government. Not because there is any kind of conspiracy. Simply because greedy, self-righteous people are manipulating and pushing the public opinion for their own ends, and always have.
This does include the educational system, but does not stop there.