No large files support; xfs will fix this. Read the press release.
poor RAID support; I haven't had any experience of this, but to really compete, something as good as Sun's disksuite would be required.
poor NFS; I don't think anyone has as good an NFS implementation as Sun. However, we need NFS v3 support to be at the leading edge.
Poor desktop; GNOME, KDE, GNUStep; these are all coming along in leaps and bounds. You also have to be sure about which market you're aiming at; RAID isn't needed on a desktop, and a fancy GUI isn't needed on a server.
HA clustering; there are some things coming out for this at the moment. In any case, linux is an easier environment to do this, where everything can be handled through the command line, without reboots. Try doing some of those things under NT!
procfs: see this:
jr% df -k/proc
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on /proc 0 0 0 0%/proc jr% uname -a SunOS oldmaster 5.5.1 Generic_103640-26 sun4m sparc SUNW,SPARCstation-5
Sun introduced a lot in Solaris 7, but procfs wasn't one of them. AFAIK, procfs has been around since Solaris 2.x, but I'm not sure. --
I don't really know much of the comparisons between NTFS and XFS, but here are my experiences:
SGI said that XFS would never get corrupted, so fsck wasn't written so as to check it; then they realised that XFS can get corrupted, so they released xfscheck (or is is xfschk? can't remember). In any event, I've seen disk corruption that even xfscheck can't fix; it's not foolproof. That said, all file systems suffer from corruption.
By the same token, M$ said that NTFS wouldn't fragment, and I can tell you that it does, and the performance hit is phenomenal. I believe NT 5^H2000 is going to include DiskKeeper by Execsoft for this reason.
In short, I think that XFS is better in my experience. I'm very glad of this development, and hope the legal issues of licencing can be met so that it becomes part of linux proper. --
Agreed; the general feel I got was that they were watching linux, but didn't see the market there at the moment. They are in the business of making money, and they obviously don't feel that the payoff is worthwhile at this time. However, some companies might miss the boat if they suddenly realise that linux is bigger than they thought and they have a 3 month development cycle to get up to speed on linux. If this is the case, companies like Corel, Oracle and others could really start cleaning up. Only time will tell. --
Edit, Preferences, Fonts, Use my fonts, overriding document fonts, Reload page. That didn't take 3 hours, did it?
In any case, the article is more of FUD; "passwords need to be synchronised across the network"; obviously haven't heard of NIS(+) (yes, you can get NIS+ for linux).
However, it does cover some valid points; linux needs a journaling filesystem and some other stuff to really compete in the big world. --
This is where media reporting can really get screwed up if they want to show a particular story. All they have to do is find someone particularly geeky/nerdy and show them as one of the "people who play Doom/Quake/whatever". That would really calm down the public, wouldn't it. (note: that was sarcasm)
The main thing about the net sites is that they are full of the people who are being targetted by this wave of anti-geek reporting, so the web sites will have most of the debunking of the stories. Unfortunately, the web sites don't always reach the people we want to speak to; your average Joe Bloggs in the street, who sees the newspaper and TV news stories about how bad these games are for childrens' psyche.
What we need is for someone (or a small group of individuals) to volunteer to appear on some chat show and for the show to accept just to give another view of the story. Unfortunately, I can't see it happening... --
Just a small comment; how is this radically different from web sites using banner ads to generate revenue? Even slashdot has them.
All we're seeing here is another method of companies generating revenue; time will tell just how successful it is. The main problem will be evaluating its usefulness, since one download could equate to 1, 2 or twenty people seeing the ad. In some cases, it might be downloaded, looked at once and deleted, making the ad less than effective.
The big problem with this is the effect it will have on package sizes. A small package with too many ads will be bigger than it should be, but the effect of a small ad in a large package (eg, MS Office) would be less noticable. --
hype hype overreaction and more hype
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
If you believe some of these people, I am liable to go psycho and kill lots of people at any moment. I play AD&D (not as much as I used to, though). I play violent games (Quake II, Doom in various format, Duke Nukem). I listen to heavy metal music.
However, I consider myself to be a reasonably-balanced individual. I don't count myself as "normal", either; I have some wacky outlooks on life, a vicious sense of humour, but I can't ever see myself going out on a killing spree. It violates what I consider to be my outlook on life; "do what you want as long as you don't hurt others" (hurt in this sense is both physical and mental).
In my case, these violent games (both computer and RPG) are my way of letting off steam. If I feel tense, I'll go shoot some strogs or hack at some orcs. More often than not, I'll thrash out a few tunes, playing along to Metallica or Iron Maiden on my guitar. If I didn't have these outlets, I'd probably end up hitting someone because I was so full of tension. Go figure.
The AD&D "satanic" link is, IMHO, total BS. I remember hearing about it when I was about 18 and couldn't see the link. It had never occured to me that RPG's could be linked to satanism, but some people object to them. I happen to have two good friends who are both Christians, both of whom have played AD&D (one only started recently, as it happens). Neither view the game as corrupting them in any way.
Unfortunately, people often look for something to blame after these incidents. I guess it's a natural way for people to deal with it. What many people ignore is the cause and effect; was DOOM the cause of the violence, or did the violent personality lead to them playing DOOM? There may be a link, but what caused what? --
This is one of the first things I've seen on the web which acknowledges RMS's efforts towards the free software community. Whatever ills he may have done, it is unlikely that much of the software we have today would exist.
It's just a shame some of his attitudes are so objectionable and act as the beginning of religious flame-wars. --
Linux scales to 16 processors, IIRC. NT can scale to a theoretical 16 as well, although it's pretty much limited to 4 under Intel and 8 on Alpha.
Solaris is designed to run on up to 64 processors (an E10000 Starfire), each of up to 400MHz. It's only really IRIX and Cray stuff that goes over 64 processors, although you could argue that Beowulf can go that high, but that's clustering, not SMP.
Journaling would be good, as it would dramatically improve the reliability of linux under system crashes (rare under linux) or other hardware failures (isn't a lot you can do if the power supply dies). Bear in mind, however, that Solaris has only just put this in by default; before you had to pay for things like Solstice disk suite to get a journaling filesystem, so linux doesn't lag that far behind. --
we've got an Enterprise 5500 in the server room here that (after I got done with it;) ) has almost as much GNU software on it as my Linux boxen do
That's a fair point; I've been setting stuff up for Solaris x86 recently (we're dual-booting some PC's this year) and there's a lot of GNU stuff in there (gcc being used to build most of it, with gzip, autoconf and other stuff kicking around as well).
I've never heard anyone suggest that it be called GNU/Solaris
Urm, slightly different perspective; SunOS is the operating system (ie, kernel) and Solaris is the packaged bundle including CDE, NIS and other addons. It would therefore be GNU/SunOS.
It's a grey area of what defines an OS; your view is obviously the kernel (it's the kernel that defines what the computer is). I don't think changing the name to GNU/linux is going to bring things forward in any case. --
Sadly, the title is enough to sum up what most of this article is going to promote...
it's the kernel that defines the OS..... it's still Slackware Linux, not GNU/Linux
Ah, but it's the same kernel as Redhat/debian/SuSe/whatever linux (or at least from the same source tree). You are actually contradicting yourself here! What makes slackware is the collection of tools bundled with the kernel including the installation tool(s).
What you have to bear in mind is just how much of linux is linux and how much is actually GNU software. Much of what goes into/bin and/lib on a standard installation is GNU software; only the kernel (and its sources) can really be considered to be "linux". Where would linux be without glibc, sh-utils, gcc etc? However, the second point for this has to be does this justify calling it GNU/Linux? Which is more important, the kernel or the apps on top of it? My opinion on the latter question is that the kernel has to be more important, because without it, you couldn't run the apps. However, how would you feel if you got NTOSKRNL.EXE on its own and got told that was your operating system? There are several arguments for and against the labelling of linux (and I'm playing devil's advocate again...) and it would seem that general opinion is against RMS in this.
Anyways, my opinion of RMS is that he needs to mellow out a bit. I think he has done a lot for the open source community and I doubt anyone can seriously deny him that. Unfortunately, he seems rabid about his ideas, making somewhat less than popular with others. The idea of all software being free is unlikely to ever happen, as if there is no reward for becoming a programmer, less people will takeup the profession, lowering standards over time. --
I was planning on writing a review on this for/., but haven't got round to reading it properly yet, so I got beaten to it..:)
Anyway, I have a few criticisms of the book. Firstly, he needs to get his acronyms sorted out; he lists two definitions of GIMP, one in the preface and one in chapter two. I don't have the book here, so I can't tell you what they are offhand.
Secondly, there is no CD/floppy of the sources. Admittedly, there is a URL for downloading the sources over the net, but having a CD/floppy would have been nice, especially if it had come with source of GTK/glib as well, just for completeness.
Other than this, it covers the basics of creating windows, buttons and other widgets pretty well. For those of you wanting to learn GTK/glib, this is the only book which covers this at the moment, and is probably a must buy unless you can use the gtk tutorials on the web.
As someone else said, GTK is available under Solaris and other platforms, so calling this a linux book is a misnomer. There is nothing (as far as I have seen) which makes this a linux-only book. --
Seems reasonably up to date; kernel 2.2.3, xfree 3.3.3.1 etc. May be worth me updating to get a "clean" linux 2 installation. I've been busily upgrading stuff (kernel, X, gnome) breaking RPM dependencies all over the shop. Telling RPM "I know better than you do" is a real PITA. --
Bleh; I was one of the 2000, but didn't get chosen. *sigh* oh, well, just have to wait until it gets release, then buy it. One reason I'll buy it to show that linux users are willing to pay for software, if it's good enough. --
A similar project to this can be found at the Free Internet Roleplay Experience which has been set up to promote MUD's and their ilk.
Here, any unallocated monies are donated to the Red Cross (probably because the founders are primarily Swiss:) ) and equipment (I believe they use SPARC's) is to be donated to the FSF on dissolution. Contributing members (who donate the money) have a say in how it is spent.
This may be worth a look to see how others have approached the problem.
As background, MUME used to run at epfl.ch, until one day, the server crashed and they asked the sysadmin to start it up again. The sysadmin went "what MUD?", looked at the bandwidth stats and told them to get a new site! The force of the players wanting to keep it open was enough to get money donated and a site sorted out. It has been there for 2 years now.
It's a fairly small patch to fix the problem; check the BUGTRAQ archives (it was posted yesterday).
After compiling 2.2.0 last night, I'd like to warn of another little caveat.
If you use Solaris x86 in a partition before your linux partitions, be prepared to reboot to single user mode (or a previous kernel) to fix your system. I'd guess this only applies if you compile in ufs support and x86 partition table support. What you get is some extra partitions, so I have:
hda1: Win95 FAT32
hda2: Solaris x86 partition
hda3: linux
hda4: (not used)
hda5: Solaris x86 s0
hda6: Solaris x86 s1
...
hda11: Solaris x86 s7
hda12: Linux /
hda13 onwards: other linux partitions.
Obviously, hda5 used to be / for linux; now it isn't so linux wouldn't boot. Took a little work (especially as / was mounted ro..) but it's booting now and working fairly well. Now to get sound working again...
Slashdot Mirror
- No large files support; xfs will fix this. Read the press release.
- poor RAID support; I haven't had any experience of this, but to really compete, something as good as Sun's disksuite would be required.
- poor NFS; I don't think anyone has as good an NFS implementation as Sun. However, we need NFS v3 support to be at the leading edge.
- Poor desktop; GNOME, KDE, GNUStep; these are all coming along in leaps and bounds. You also have to be sure about which market you're aiming at; RAID isn't needed on a desktop, and a fancy GUI isn't needed on a server.
- HA clustering; there are some things coming out for this at the moment. In any case, linux is an easier environment to do this, where everything can be handled through the command line, without reboots. Try doing some of those things under NT!
procfs: see this: Sun introduced a lot in Solaris 7, but procfs wasn't one of them. AFAIK, procfs has been around since Solaris 2.x, but I'm not sure.--
SGI said that XFS would never get corrupted, so fsck wasn't written so as to check it; then they realised that XFS can get corrupted, so they released xfscheck (or is is xfschk? can't remember). In any event, I've seen disk corruption that even xfscheck can't fix; it's not foolproof. That said, all file systems suffer from corruption.
By the same token, M$ said that NTFS wouldn't fragment, and I can tell you that it does, and the performance hit is phenomenal. I believe NT 5^H2000 is going to include DiskKeeper by Execsoft for this reason.
In short, I think that XFS is better in my experience. I'm very glad of this development, and hope the legal issues of licencing can be met so that it becomes part of linux proper.
--
Agreed; the general feel I got was that they were watching linux, but didn't see the market there at the moment. They are in the business of making money, and they obviously don't feel that the payoff is worthwhile at this time. However, some companies might miss the boat if they suddenly realise that linux is bigger than they thought and they have a 3 month development cycle to get up to speed on linux. If this is the case, companies like Corel, Oracle and others could really start cleaning up. Only time will tell.
--
In any case, the article is more of FUD; "passwords need to be synchronised across the network"; obviously haven't heard of NIS(+) (yes, you can get NIS+ for linux).
However, it does cover some valid points; linux needs a journaling filesystem and some other stuff to really compete in the big world.
--
The main thing about the net sites is that they are full of the people who are being targetted by this wave of anti-geek reporting, so the web sites will have most of the debunking of the stories. Unfortunately, the web sites don't always reach the people we want to speak to; your average Joe Bloggs in the street, who sees the newspaper and TV news stories about how bad these games are for childrens' psyche.
What we need is for someone (or a small group of individuals) to volunteer to appear on some chat show and for the show to accept just to give another view of the story. Unfortunately, I can't see it happening...
--
All we're seeing here is another method of companies generating revenue; time will tell just how successful it is. The main problem will be evaluating its usefulness, since one download could equate to 1, 2 or twenty people seeing the ad. In some cases, it might be downloaded, looked at once and deleted, making the ad less than effective.
The big problem with this is the effect it will have on package sizes. A small package with too many ads will be bigger than it should be, but the effect of a small ad in a large package (eg, MS Office) would be less noticable.
--
However, I consider myself to be a reasonably-balanced individual. I don't count myself as "normal", either; I have some wacky outlooks on life, a vicious sense of humour, but I can't ever see myself going out on a killing spree. It violates what I consider to be my outlook on life; "do what you want as long as you don't hurt others" (hurt in this sense is both physical and mental).
In my case, these violent games (both computer and RPG) are my way of letting off steam. If I feel tense, I'll go shoot some strogs or hack at some orcs. More often than not, I'll thrash out a few tunes, playing along to Metallica or Iron Maiden on my guitar. If I didn't have these outlets, I'd probably end up hitting someone because I was so full of tension. Go figure.
The AD&D "satanic" link is, IMHO, total BS. I remember hearing about it when I was about 18 and couldn't see the link. It had never occured to me that RPG's could be linked to satanism, but some people object to them. I happen to have two good friends who are both Christians, both of whom have played AD&D (one only started recently, as it happens). Neither view the game as corrupting them in any way.
Unfortunately, people often look for something to blame after these incidents. I guess it's a natural way for people to deal with it. What many people ignore is the cause and effect; was DOOM the cause of the violence, or did the violent personality lead to them playing DOOM? There may be a link, but what caused what?
--
It's just a shame some of his attitudes are so objectionable and act as the beginning of religious flame-wars.
--
Solaris is designed to run on up to 64 processors (an E10000 Starfire), each of up to 400MHz. It's only really IRIX and Cray stuff that goes over 64 processors, although you could argue that Beowulf can go that high, but that's clustering, not SMP.
Journaling would be good, as it would dramatically improve the reliability of linux under system crashes (rare under linux) or other hardware failures (isn't a lot you can do if the power supply dies). Bear in mind, however, that Solaris has only just put this in by default; before you had to pay for things like Solstice disk suite to get a journaling filesystem, so linux doesn't lag that far behind.
--
It's a grey area of what defines an OS; your view is obviously the kernel (it's the kernel that defines what the computer is). I don't think changing the name to GNU/linux is going to bring things forward in any case.
--
What you have to bear in mind is just how much of linux is linux and how much is actually GNU software. Much of what goes into /bin and /lib on a standard installation is GNU software; only the kernel (and its sources) can really be considered to be "linux". Where would linux be without glibc, sh-utils, gcc etc? However, the second point for this has to be does this justify calling it GNU/Linux? Which is more important, the kernel or the apps on top of it? My opinion on the latter question is that the kernel has to be more important, because without it, you couldn't run the apps. However, how would you feel if you got NTOSKRNL.EXE on its own and got told that was your operating system? There are several arguments for and against the labelling of linux (and I'm playing devil's advocate again...) and it would seem that general opinion is against RMS in this.
Anyways, my opinion of RMS is that he needs to mellow out a bit. I think he has done a lot for the open source community and I doubt anyone can seriously deny him that. Unfortunately, he seems rabid about his ideas, making somewhat less than popular with others. The idea of all software being free is unlikely to ever happen, as if there is no reward for becoming a programmer, less people will takeup the profession, lowering standards over time.
--
Anyway, I have a few criticisms of the book. Firstly, he needs to get his acronyms sorted out; he lists two definitions of GIMP, one in the preface and one in chapter two. I don't have the book here, so I can't tell you what they are offhand.
Secondly, there is no CD/floppy of the sources. Admittedly, there is a URL for downloading the sources over the net, but having a CD/floppy would have been nice, especially if it had come with source of GTK/glib as well, just for completeness.
Other than this, it covers the basics of creating windows, buttons and other widgets pretty well. For those of you wanting to learn GTK/glib, this is the only book which covers this at the moment, and is probably a must buy unless you can use the gtk tutorials on the web.
As someone else said, GTK is available under Solaris and other platforms, so calling this a linux book is a misnomer. There is nothing (as far as I have seen) which makes this a linux-only book.
--
Seems reasonably up to date; kernel 2.2.3, xfree 3.3.3.1 etc. May be worth me updating to get a "clean" linux 2 installation. I've been busily upgrading stuff (kernel, X, gnome) breaking RPM dependencies all over the shop. Telling RPM "I know better than you do" is a real PITA.
--
Bleh; I was one of the 2000, but didn't get chosen. *sigh* oh, well, just have to wait until it gets release, then buy it. One reason I'll buy it to show that linux users are willing to pay for software, if it's good enough.
--
Here, any unallocated monies are donated to the Red Cross (probably because the founders are primarily Swiss :) ) and equipment (I believe they use SPARC's) is to be donated to the FSF on dissolution. Contributing members (who donate the money) have a say in how it is spent.
This may be worth a look to see how others have approached the problem.
As background, MUME used to run at epfl.ch, until one day, the server crashed and they asked the sysadmin to start it up again. The sysadmin went "what MUD?", looked at the bandwidth stats and told them to get a new site! The force of the players wanting to keep it open was enough to get money donated and a site sorted out. It has been there for 2 years now.
Not for actually doing it, mind you; just for telling us. Wave goodbye to server throughput...:)
After compiling 2.2.0 last night, I'd like to warn of another little caveat.
If you use Solaris x86 in a partition before your linux partitions, be prepared to reboot to single user mode (or a previous kernel) to fix your system. I'd guess this only applies if you compile in ufs support and x86 partition table support. What you get is some extra partitions, so I have:
Obviously, hda5 used to be / for linux; now it isn't so linux wouldn't boot. Took a little work (especially as / was mounted ro..) but it's booting now and working fairly well. Now to get sound working again...