Yeah. I used my Apple IIe to play games on America Online in 1984. I'm positive I did not start a revolution.
Back on topic, I think it is excellent that Linux now has an official bug database. Normal humans with no understanding of the internals of a TCP/IP stack or a VM system can now submit/confirm/monitor bugs. I tried to subscribe to the LKML once, just to lurk, but found even that impossible. The sheer amount of traffic on that list just blows my mind. I mean, c'mon, some of us only have 1.5Mbps of downstream bandwidth!
I must admit that it's impressive how the kernel developers can write such long, well-thought-out e-mails and still get any work done.
I've only seen it mention once, even though it is in the woody release notes...Aptitude! Quite simply the best package manager I've ever used. I don't hate Dselect, persay, but Aptitude is worlds prettier, easier, more customizable, and more convenient. I haven't tried Synaptic, which I here is also very good, but it's a gui app, where as Aptitude is console-based.
As I said in my original post: "It was high time I got my poor server off of potato with home-brewed debs and little bits and pieces of SID."
dist-upgrade works great, but not when there are combinations of newer, older, and totally unknown packages installed, some of which I most certainly built wrong. She needed a fresh start.
I don't know about all these Debian installer complaints. Of course I might be using a different installer than the rest of you. I went over to http://debian-imac.sf.net/ and grabbed the woody installer. It was high time I got my poor server off of potato with home-brewed debs and little bits and pieces of SID. The server is a Power Mac 6500/225 603e, with a paltry 64MB/4GB.
Guess how long it took me to yank it out of the closet, hook up a monitor and keyboard, install Debian, and get it back in the closet? 7 minutes and 47 seconds! Granted this was just the base system, but all in all it took me less than 5 minutes to install this bad boy, as opposed to about an hour for YDL, RedHat, Mandrake, OS X, OS 9, etc. I love the text-based installer, and wouldn't ask for it any other way.
People complaining about the X install process should realize that they can basically ignore debconf and use xviddetect or any other number of video card detection utilities afterwards.
I would never recommend Debian to anyone who doesn't have at least intermediate Linux knowledge, but then again I would never recommend Linux to anyone who doesn't have at least basic *NIX knowledge (or really wants to learn). People who just want word processing and e-mail can do that fine on there old operating systems and hardware.
Finally, it strikes me as somewhat disturbing that Linux newbies are so numerous now that they are now posting negative reviews of "expert" Linux distros. It's not so much that they get posted that annoys me, as everyone has the right to opinion and free speech. What really bugs me is that they are being taken so seriously. The crowd here at/. has got to see how ironic it is that Lycoris and Lindows are seen as too dumbed down for us to use, but Debian is too hard for new users. I think it's great that Linux is finally gaining more casual users, but they must realize that this is what free as in speech is all about. They also must realize that THERE IS NO FREE BEER!
Ooh! Ooh! I really want you guys to teach me how to build a high performance webserver! What's that? You can't, because your webserver is down? Curses!
(Obligatory disclaimer for humor-impaired: yes I understand that the slashdot effect is generally caused by lack of bandwidth rather than lack of webserver performance.)
Damn I wished I had saved my mod points! This is one of the best explanations of common internet theft that I've ever read; can I please quote you? Someone mod this guy up!
Presumably, their next step will be to change text output, so that text is displayed at a rate of a few characters per second, again accompanied by suitable sound-effects.
They have this already. It's called Microsoft Office X. I swear to God it is on by default.
You obviously haven't read much about the HFS+ Volume Format [apple.com]. It's very interesting and even extensible, the problem is none of the advanced features of it are being used by Apple.
Actually I am quite aware of the capabilities of HFS+, but at the same time I am very disappointed in the use those capabilities are getting. It would be a small feat (for a filesystem engineer, not me) to add completely extensible metadata support and basic journalling to HFS+. Instead, Apple (at the moment) seems to be foresaking every good aspect of the filesystem except for long file names. Perhaps because they realize the performance/reliability they would gain by moving all the metadata out of the filesystem into a RDBMS.
In reponse to "what's wrong with file extensions?": nothing, unless they are used as the sole method of identifiying files. While this isn't quite the case in OS X, the guidelines seem to state (once again, at the moment) that it will be.
There is nothing wrong with file extensions, just the same as there is nothing wrong with the creator/type system. However, when you use one and not the other, you are losing capabilities.
File extensions allow any system, regardless of file system, to tell what a file is supposed to be. Creators and types allow the user's computer to know what application the user wants the file to open in. Magic-number checks tell the computer definitively what the file contains.
I'm not biased towards or against any of these systems. I want the best consumer-oriented UNIX in the world to have them all!
...while Dominic, we are delighted to learn, has subsequently joined Apple as a file system engineer. (He started last week)...
Does this mean that Apple is finally going to put some kind of reasonably modern filesystem under OS X?
Have they finally seen the true genius behind their own iTunes interface?
Have they finally realized that they will shortly be THE ONLY operating system that still relies on file extensions as the primary way of identifying files?
I truly hope that this snippet is as wonderful as it sounds, as it may finally restore my faith in Apple, as well as cure me of my unhealthy Debian and XFS addiction.
Re:Linux versus Mac OS X is not a valid comparison
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
Uhh...Same setup here, only with 384 MB of RAM, and I question your definition of "great". Also, you seemed to miss my point about _supporting_ the subject, which is that you can't make a valid comparison. Now to address your definition of the word "great":
Great too me means never having to wait for the interface to catch up to the speed at which I think, and I'm not even close to the fastest thinker in the world. I'll even go as far as to say that OS X is actually "snappy" in most respects on my machine. Unless I want to, say, listen to an MP3. Or minimize a terminal window while there is text scrolling in it. Or use XDarwin rootless. Or resize a window with more than 5 controls in it.
As far as running Linux on a Palm, what do you expect? A full fledged office suite or photo-editing program? You can't get that with the _native_ OS! Well, you can, but using it with a stylus and Grafiti is painful at best. At least with Linux it can become more than an overpriced organizer/gameboy.
Re:Linux versus Mac OS X is not a valid comparison
on
Penguin2Apple
·
· Score: 1
I completely agree. OS X runs well only on the Mac hardware less than a year old. Anything other than that feels like you bought the machine at the beginning of the cold war. It has an interface that is easy enough for a 4 year old or a 90 year old to use. You can get a wide variety of _mainstream_ games and productivity packages to run on it, as well as decent approximations of the world's greatest development tools.
Linux on the other hand, runs _well_ on anything from a Palm to a DreamCast to an iMac to an iSeries. It has an interface that is easy enough for any competent developer to use. Pretty much anything that allows you to develop code is available for Linux. You can get some great productivity applications as well, but once again these are always rough approximations, not the real thing.
Both are rock-solid in terms of _system_ stability, but leave application stability (the important part) in the hands of the developer (anyone found a way around that yet?) This is about the only similarity, other than the fact that both are trying to fill the niches that Windows already occupies. This is never a good idea. First create your own niche, then use that niche to make other niches obsolete. Or hire someone to silence the competition
I've been upgrading to the latest 2.4.18 kernel pretty much every time a release comes out. Now my architecture isn't the wierdest, it's a beige G3 with a USB/FireWire card, Rage Orion, serial camera, USB scanner, FireWire CD-RW, and a serial Palm V with a Keyspan USB adapter.
Guess what? Through every kernel upgrade, all this hardware just works...better than under OS X (some of it doesn't wok at all under OS X). And I've never had a problem with the VM, or anything else. I don't see how a little mistake like this amounts to a hill of beans. At least they told everyone.
Remember how MS was telling security experts not to talk about or even disclose security exploits until _after_ a patch was released? And how long do that take? Well, if MS gets their way, you have know way of knowing until your NT box gets hacked. And when will the patch come out? Better check that Windows Update every 6 hours! What's that? You have better things to do with your time? Then why did you update your kernel the moment it was released???
Slashdotters are really beginning to sound a lot like Mac users.
I am actually shocked whenever I here a noisy, clicking hard drive, even though I know it is the norm. I never buy anything but the cheapest Maxtor I can find, and they don't make any noise I can discern over the computer's fan. Why PC manufacturers use anything else when Maxtor is usually the cheapest is beyond me.
I've tried every Apple mouse, two Logitech (one regular non-optical and one wireless optical), and a slew of others.
Nothing had impressed me more than the Optical Intellimouse Explorer until I tried the Wireless Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It tracks even smoother than the wired version, looks great, and doesn't light up the bathe room in a red glow when I turn off the light. The driver software (on Mac) is well designed, unobtrusive, and even tells you when the battery is low.
Then there is support: when my original Intellimouse died (after 2 years, not under warranty), I read them the serial number off the bottom, gave them my address, and they shipped me a replacement _overnight_, at no cost. When I say overnight, I mean I called at 9 PM and got it before noon the next day. I mail order lots of stuff, and have only seen this kind of performance from Outpost.com.
I am anti-microsoft-pro-little-guy whenever I can be, but Microsoft has my money when it comes to mice.
This is what you get when you build an operating system with "platform sanity" as the underlying principle as opposed to raking in as much cash as you can.
I'm not sure where I read this, but I'm sure slashdot linked to it: Linus built his monolithic kernel to deal with the lowest common denominator of processors (despite developing only for x86), while everyone else was optimizing microkernels for a specific architecture, making their work very hard to port. The goal, as I understand it, was not to support as much hardware as possible, but to design the operating system _well_.
What we wound up with as a result is an operating system that scales incredibly well and runs on anything that has a "sane" cpu and 4 mb of ram. The result for me is that I can't throw any hardware away. Sure, my Power Mac 6500 can run Mac OS 8 fine, but it's not terribly useful. Now it is my "high end" server, complete with the _latest_ GNOME 1.4 running over VNC. Sure my Pentium 133 can run Windows 3.1 well, but, well, that was _never_ very useful. Now it's a DNS, mail, and file server. The performance on my G3 running next to my G4 running OS X is just ridiculous, and even my DreamCast can do more!
This results in me saving an enormous amount of money. Forget the fact that Linux is free, even if it cost me $100/seat, I would still save _thousands_ in new hardware. The only problem is that I can't donate my old hardware to people who need it, and my room keeps getting smaller.
When I set up my mailserver, I was a total newbie, but evey piece of documentation I read warned of the evils of open relays, and that all my friends would hate me if I had one.
This was only for my home cable network, so worst case scenario I can expire my DHCP lease and change my dynamic domain name, but I still never had an open relay.
Unless you are on these blacklist because of something you did before spam was a problem (what, 10 years ago???), I think you deserve it, especially if this is a business network you are administering. If it is someone else's fault, feel free to forward my comment to them.
Slashdot Mirror
"The first online gaming system in the world"
Yeah. I used my Apple IIe to play games on America Online in 1984. I'm positive I did not start a revolution.
Back on topic, I think it is excellent that Linux now has an official bug database. Normal humans with no understanding of the internals of a TCP/IP stack or a VM system can now submit/confirm/monitor bugs. I tried to subscribe to the LKML once, just to lurk, but found even that impossible. The sheer amount of traffic on that list just blows my mind. I mean, c'mon, some of us only have 1.5Mbps of downstream bandwidth!
I must admit that it's impressive how the kernel developers can write such long, well-thought-out e-mails and still get any work done.
Actually I think that no one mentioned this since it has nothing to do with programmer error. (At least not according to what you linked to.)
If my mod points lasted until the 24th, like those bastards told me, I would mod you up as funny, cuz that was.
I've only seen it mention once, even though it is in the woody release notes...Aptitude! Quite simply the best package manager I've ever used. I don't hate Dselect, persay, but Aptitude is worlds prettier, easier, more customizable, and more convenient. I haven't tried Synaptic, which I here is also very good, but it's a gui app, where as Aptitude is console-based.
As I said in my original post: "It was high time I got my poor server off of potato with home-brewed debs and little bits and pieces of SID."
dist-upgrade works great, but not when there are combinations of newer, older, and totally unknown packages installed, some of which I most certainly built wrong. She needed a fresh start.
LOL! I knew I shouldn't have posted so I could mod you up. Mod parent up, please!
I don't know about all these Debian installer complaints. Of course I might be using a different installer than the rest of you. I went over to http://debian-imac.sf.net/ and grabbed the woody installer. It was high time I got my poor server off of potato with home-brewed debs and little bits and pieces of SID. The server is a Power Mac 6500/225 603e, with a paltry 64MB/4GB.
/. has got to see how ironic it is that Lycoris and Lindows are seen as too dumbed down for us to use, but Debian is too hard for new users. I think it's great that Linux is finally gaining more casual users, but they must realize that this is what free as in speech is all about. They also must realize that THERE IS NO FREE BEER!
Guess how long it took me to yank it out of the closet, hook up a monitor and keyboard, install Debian, and get it back in the closet? 7 minutes and 47 seconds! Granted this was just the base system, but all in all it took me less than 5 minutes to install this bad boy, as opposed to about an hour for YDL, RedHat, Mandrake, OS X, OS 9, etc. I love the text-based installer, and wouldn't ask for it any other way.
People complaining about the X install process should realize that they can basically ignore debconf and use xviddetect or any other number of video card detection utilities afterwards.
I would never recommend Debian to anyone who doesn't have at least intermediate Linux knowledge, but then again I would never recommend Linux to anyone who doesn't have at least basic *NIX knowledge (or really wants to learn). People who just want word processing and e-mail can do that fine on there old operating systems and hardware.
Finally, it strikes me as somewhat disturbing that Linux newbies are so numerous now that they are now posting negative reviews of "expert" Linux distros. It's not so much that they get posted that annoys me, as everyone has the right to opinion and free speech. What really bugs me is that they are being taken so seriously. The crowd here at
Ooh! Ooh! I really want you guys to teach me how to build a high performance webserver! What's that? You can't, because your webserver is down? Curses!
(Obligatory disclaimer for humor-impaired: yes I understand that the slashdot effect is generally caused by lack of bandwidth rather than lack of webserver performance.)
Read the title of the article, please.
Google's got the dope yo!
Google doesn't retain the images, so check it out before MS pulls those too.
Why is it that Be couldn't be ported to G3s or G4s, but every other Linux and *BSD kernel could?
Actually, in Debian parlance, stable just means it is 20 years old. (Yes, I know woody was finally released.)
gee, i dunno, maybe, delete your flash plugin?
Damn I wished I had saved my mod points! This is one of the best explanations of common internet theft that I've ever read; can I please quote you? Someone mod this guy up!
They have this already. It's called Microsoft Office X. I swear to God it is on by default.
Actually I am quite aware of the capabilities of HFS+, but at the same time I am very disappointed in the use those capabilities are getting. It would be a small feat (for a filesystem engineer, not me) to add completely extensible metadata support and basic journalling to HFS+. Instead, Apple (at the moment) seems to be foresaking every good aspect of the filesystem except for long file names. Perhaps because they realize the performance/reliability they would gain by moving all the metadata out of the filesystem into a RDBMS.
In reponse to "what's wrong with file extensions?": nothing, unless they are used as the sole method of identifiying files. While this isn't quite the case in OS X, the guidelines seem to state (once again, at the moment) that it will be.
There is nothing wrong with file extensions, just the same as there is nothing wrong with the creator/type system. However, when you use one and not the other, you are losing capabilities.
File extensions allow any system, regardless of file system, to tell what a file is supposed to be. Creators and types allow the user's computer to know what application the user wants the file to open in. Magic-number checks tell the computer definitively what the file contains.
I'm not biased towards or against any of these systems. I want the best consumer-oriented UNIX in the world to have them all!Does this mean that Apple is finally going to put some kind of reasonably modern filesystem under OS X?
Have they finally seen the true genius behind their own iTunes interface?
Have they finally realized that they will shortly be THE ONLY operating system that still relies on file extensions as the primary way of identifying files?
I truly hope that this snippet is as wonderful as it sounds, as it may finally restore my faith in Apple, as well as cure me of my unhealthy Debian and XFS addiction.Uhh...Same setup here, only with 384 MB of RAM, and I question your definition of "great". Also, you seemed to miss my point about _supporting_ the subject, which is that you can't make a valid comparison. Now to address your definition of the word "great":
Great too me means never having to wait for the interface to catch up to the speed at which I think, and I'm not even close to the fastest thinker in the world. I'll even go as far as to say that OS X is actually "snappy" in most respects on my machine. Unless I want to, say, listen to an MP3. Or minimize a terminal window while there is text scrolling in it. Or use XDarwin rootless. Or resize a window with more than 5 controls in it.
As far as running Linux on a Palm, what do you expect? A full fledged office suite or photo-editing program? You can't get that with the _native_ OS! Well, you can, but using it with a stylus and Grafiti is painful at best. At least with Linux it can become more than an overpriced organizer/gameboy.
I completely agree. OS X runs well only on the Mac hardware less than a year old. Anything other than that feels like you bought the machine at the beginning of the cold war. It has an interface that is easy enough for a 4 year old or a 90 year old to use. You can get a wide variety of _mainstream_ games and productivity packages to run on it, as well as decent approximations of the world's greatest development tools.
Linux on the other hand, runs _well_ on anything from a Palm to a DreamCast to an iMac to an iSeries. It has an interface that is easy enough for any competent developer to use. Pretty much anything that allows you to develop code is available for Linux. You can get some great productivity applications as well, but once again these are always rough approximations, not the real thing.
Both are rock-solid in terms of _system_ stability, but leave application stability (the important part) in the hands of the developer (anyone found a way around that yet?) This is about the only similarity, other than the fact that both are trying to fill the niches that Windows already occupies. This is never a good idea. First create your own niche, then use that niche to make other niches obsolete. Or hire someone to silence the competition
I've been upgrading to the latest 2.4.18 kernel pretty much every time a release comes out. Now my architecture isn't the wierdest, it's a beige G3 with a USB/FireWire card, Rage Orion, serial camera, USB scanner, FireWire CD-RW, and a serial Palm V with a Keyspan USB adapter.
Guess what? Through every kernel upgrade, all this hardware just works...better than under OS X (some of it doesn't wok at all under OS X). And I've never had a problem with the VM, or anything else. I don't see how a little mistake like this amounts to a hill of beans. At least they told everyone.
Remember how MS was telling security experts not to talk about or even disclose security exploits until _after_ a patch was released? And how long do that take? Well, if MS gets their way, you have know way of knowing until your NT box gets hacked. And when will the patch come out? Better check that Windows Update every 6 hours! What's that? You have better things to do with your time? Then why did you update your kernel the moment it was released???
Slashdotters are really beginning to sound a lot like Mac users.
I am actually shocked whenever I here a noisy, clicking hard drive, even though I know it is the norm. I never buy anything but the cheapest Maxtor I can find, and they don't make any noise I can discern over the computer's fan. Why PC manufacturers use anything else when Maxtor is usually the cheapest is beyond me.
I've tried every Apple mouse, two Logitech (one regular non-optical and one wireless optical), and a slew of others.
Nothing had impressed me more than the Optical Intellimouse Explorer until I tried the Wireless Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It tracks even smoother than the wired version, looks great, and doesn't light up the bathe room in a red glow when I turn off the light. The driver software (on Mac) is well designed, unobtrusive, and even tells you when the battery is low.
Then there is support: when my original Intellimouse died (after 2 years, not under warranty), I read them the serial number off the bottom, gave them my address, and they shipped me a replacement _overnight_, at no cost. When I say overnight, I mean I called at 9 PM and got it before noon the next day. I mail order lots of stuff, and have only seen this kind of performance from Outpost.com.
I am anti-microsoft-pro-little-guy whenever I can be, but Microsoft has my money when it comes to mice.
This is what you get when you build an operating system with "platform sanity" as the underlying principle as opposed to raking in as much cash as you can.
I'm not sure where I read this, but I'm sure slashdot linked to it: Linus built his monolithic kernel to deal with the lowest common denominator of processors (despite developing only for x86), while everyone else was optimizing microkernels for a specific architecture, making their work very hard to port. The goal, as I understand it, was not to support as much hardware as possible, but to design the operating system _well_.
What we wound up with as a result is an operating system that scales incredibly well and runs on anything that has a "sane" cpu and 4 mb of ram. The result for me is that I can't throw any hardware away. Sure, my Power Mac 6500 can run Mac OS 8 fine, but it's not terribly useful. Now it is my "high end" server, complete with the _latest_ GNOME 1.4 running over VNC. Sure my Pentium 133 can run Windows 3.1 well, but, well, that was _never_ very useful. Now it's a DNS, mail, and file server. The performance on my G3 running next to my G4 running OS X is just ridiculous, and even my DreamCast can do more!
This results in me saving an enormous amount of money. Forget the fact that Linux is free, even if it cost me $100/seat, I would still save _thousands_ in new hardware. The only problem is that I can't donate my old hardware to people who need it, and my room keeps getting smaller.
When I set up my mailserver, I was a total newbie, but evey piece of documentation I read warned of the evils of open relays, and that all my friends would hate me if I had one.
This was only for my home cable network, so worst case scenario I can expire my DHCP lease and change my dynamic domain name, but I still never had an open relay.
Unless you are on these blacklist because of something you did before spam was a problem (what, 10 years ago???), I think you deserve it, especially if this is a business network you are administering. If it is someone else's fault, feel free to forward my comment to them.