I don't really know what everyone means when they wonder if Linux will "win" or NT will "win". For the most part, NT has had minimal impact on the Unix/Linux world. I don't think anything is going to change in the near future.
Think about all the cool things you get by working with Unix:
We get all the new fun hardware first (let's face it, Unix is easier to port to new hardware than NT). Unix is almost always the first _real_ OS that runs on new platforms. Even weird one's like the "itsy".
We get all the cool technology first (think of email, TCP/IP, the world wide web, videoconferencing, etc.)
There are like 8 versions of Unix where we own the source code. Even if all the other Unix vendors go bankrupt, Unix will go on.
It's an easier environment to get stuff done
I wish M$ the best with their Windows platform. Whether Windows lives or dies really has never affected me, so this is easy for me to do. But its not a competition. I don't see how NT succeeding means Unix is failing.
By definition anyone who is uploading huge amounts of information is adding content to the web. This is a _good_ thing. I find it annoying that all the high-speed service providers want all their subscribers to be Microsoft-sedated surfers.
Very few (I'm sure) subscribers are running high-bandwidth services so is it _really_ a problem? I doubt it. It seems more likely that they encountered a few problems, realized they could convince most of their (non-technical) subscribers that this is the _only_ solution. Now they have a way to charge more $$$ for offering hosting services.
I think @home subscribers should VOICE their objections vehemently in the newsgroups and demand a technical compromise that makes sense.
It worries me that the net is becoming more like TV where you can't become a content provider unless you have the $$$.
The AOL analogy sounded like bogus logic. It doesn't fit this situation at all.
Wasn't it hmm... "S Byrne" or something? Man, that was the sweetest code -- I started to build a whole mythology about who these guys were. I'm getting misty just thinking about it! Ok.. here's an apple ][ system monitor quiz:
I remember checking out every computer and book store for the source code for applesoft basic and was shocked to learn that they wouldn't just give it to you. In the back of the Apple ][ Reference Manual, they published the source code for the system monitor. I had to suffice with the "What's Where" book.
Bill Gates has been pissing me off for the last 20 years and I've just about HAD IT! Start releasing your goddamn source code, M$!!!!
PS. Can anyone else think of a another M$-developed product that was burned into ROM?
I positively hate seeing the Linux/OS community flagellating themselves over silliness like this. I don't have to apologize because someone else wrote a nasty email. It doesn't say much about someone's intelligence when they attempt to lump all Linux users under a malicious stereotype. It's bad enough seeing a "respected" corporation doing it (geez, Mindcraft.... how adolescent can you get? Lowering yourself into name-calling fight with a bunch of pent-up teenagers is not very professional...), but it kills me to see us berating ourselves.
I remember seeing a review (BYTE i think) of various compilers and gcc finished near the top on several platforms for executable speed. Does anyone know how GCC rates these days?
If this column appeared on usenet, it would be called flamebait (or at least parts of it would). Perhaps that's a commentary on the state of conventional forms of journalism (eg. the columnist).
At any rate, most of what he said was silly and hyperbolic. Linux is 30-year old technology? Actually the oldest part of it is 8 years old, on average most of linux is 3 years old I'd estimate and its cycling all the time.
The writef obviously referred to when Ken Thompson first started working on a distinguishable OS later to be called Unix. Yes that was 1969, but what did Unix look like in 1969? It barely had worked out the concept of directories and devices. (Check out Ritchie's article on describing what using Unix was like in the first few years here.) Does that look anything like Linux or Unix today?
Unix (and Linux) will be around in 30 years (albeit in an evolved form) simply because it can run on anything! Think about all the trends in computing that Unix has outlived because it adapted. Linux is the most dynamic and adaptable Unix ever invented because it is so open.
Are we going to be using intel-based PCs with keyboards and SVGA monitors in 30 years? Something's wrong if we are. Will Windows be able to adapt? Nothing Microsoft has done in recent years has demonstrated any degree of innovation or adaptability. Will the open source community just eventually dump the linux code base? Why would it?
In 30 years, Unix will be here. Windows won't.
Re:X, windows and things like Berlin.
on
Fifteen Years of X
·
· Score: 1
Here! Here!
The whole oracle/java NC (network computer) thing kinda boggled me cuz X does everything that NCs would do. I bet a lot of engineers at NEC and other xterm makers felt silly designing NCs after years of building xterms.
Is this a VNC-based tool? I tried VNC cuz it sounded like the perfect solution for NT-boxes hobbling your computing environment. I was disappointed in two critical areas.
First, its a remote frame-buffer protocol and it shows. It simply blindly draws what ever is on the NT-box's screen and it does it very slowly (compared to running a remote X client). Second: from what I've seen, the NT machine is still single user. What I hoped it would allow me to do is log in to a machine that someone else is sitting at and get a windows desktop. Instead what happens is the user and I share the display -- a feature that has very limited use.
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen years old. We've been using X since before 486's existed. It runs fine on plenty of different hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen years old. It runs fine on plenty of different hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
I can't believe the negative comments I'm reading concerning X. I'm sure some of them are meant in a constructive way but as far as I'm concerned, X is the most amazing software written since Unix.
Sure X can seem slow in certain scenarios but who is willing to give up the flexibility it offers? At this moment I'm sitting at an old hp300 typing this reply using netscape under KDE (both are running off my laptop upstairs). Why? Cuz my hp300 I don't have KDE or netscape for my hp300 and I hate my laptop's keyboard and its screen is only 8-bit. It drives me _insane_ when I work with wintel suckers who have it hardwired into their brain that you have to *sit* at the keyboard that you are using.
Things X has let me do that no other technology would allow:
Edit a document in MS Word (under Wabi on a Sparc10) at my office while I'm sitting in my underwear at home dialing up over a 14.4 modem. Yes the startup was slow but from that point on it was perfectly useable and it never once came close to crashing.
Run a graphical client and server on separate machines (something I often do in my work) without moving from my chair.
Flash nudie pics on a co-workers screen while his boss is in his office
And probably the biggest payoff is trying to buy software from vendors. If my desktop machine is hp300 but their app only runs on the solaris machine in account three floors down, no problem.
Sure X can be improved (what can't) but its an amazing work both in design and in usefulness. Even the code is remarkable. Before C++ was being used outside of AT&T, moch of X's code was object-oriented...
What amazes me is that MS didn't adopt X when NT came out. It was free and rock solid and would have given them features that NT 5.0 can barely hold a candle to. Then maybe people would stop thinking of X as a Unix thing. I still have people at work who run windows and refer to Reflection/X as a "unix emulator". Um... its not: It's a Windows X server.
Anyone who thinks X is not amazing is just plain wrong and will the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Just because the brain isn't a digital system doesn't mean you can't measure the information the brain can hold. Bits are useful (really, reallu useful) in digital systems but the concept of a bit predates computers. It is for example a very useful concept in code-breaking and signalling.
From an information theory point of view, there's nothing ridiculous about calculating the information capacity of the brain. Although it has a very concrete meaning in the realm of computer jargon, it is fundamentally a unit for measuring information content.
As I understand it, individual neurons, denrites, axons, nor synapses cannot retain a "state" by themselves. Groupings of connected neurons seem to be able to retain state. In fact they any particular cell assembly has the ability to stabilize to several states. Something that can hold 2 states has an informational content of 1 bit; 4 states = 2 bits and so one.
I think the capacity of the brain would be far less than the estimate you suggest.
From what I remember from computational neuroscience books in the early 80s, it doesn't appear that a neuron can hold any state by itself but groups of interconnected neurons ("cell assemblies" i think the term was) are collectively able to stabilize in "states".
If a cell assembly consists of on average 100 neurons and can stabilize into 8 different states (I made these numbers us figuring that they sounded reasonable), then a cell assembly can hold about 3 bits of information. If there 100 billion neurons in the brain, there are about a billion cell assemblies which means on the order of 3Gbits or 375MB per brain.
Why try to hide what the linux/OS community really is? So there are some angry puppies out there. There are angry puppies everywhere. Who will we kid pretending to be saints?
If industry/mainstream doesn't accept us on our technical merit, they will remain that far behind us.
1) I honestly don't mean to advocate people being abusive with each other. We should be respectful to each other -- period. But not because it'll make people like Linux.
2) If the abusive email came from Linus, ESR, and RHS then it perhaps would reflect on the OS community. It didn't however and it won't.
3) Bill Gates doesn't have a stellar reputation but Microsoft is widely accepted by the mainstream.
Please don't chastise us for not behaving nicely. If we had a legal department we'd have sued. If we had a marketing department we'd have pulled a full page ad in the New York Times. But we don't. So you got a mail bomb (a tiny one at that) and a few flaming emails. Which would Bryar have preferred?
A main goal of the entire OS movement was to work around the proprietary vendors that are beginning to embrace us now. I agree that, in general, people should be nice and thoughtful to each other. But does anyone care if the "reputation" of the open source movement is "spoiled" in the mainstream's eyes?
That's the funniest (albeit unintentional) thing I've heard in days: "Sorry the email is so slow, folks. Those damn regular expressions are just chewing up our gateway..." ROTFL....
Slashdot Mirror
Think about all the cool things you get by working with Unix:
I wish M$ the best with their Windows platform. Whether Windows lives or dies really has never affected me, so this is easy for me to do. But its not a competition. I don't see how NT succeeding means Unix is failing.
By definition anyone who is uploading huge
amounts of information is adding content to the
web. This is a _good_ thing. I find it annoying
that all the high-speed service providers want
all their subscribers to be Microsoft-sedated
surfers.
Very few (I'm sure) subscribers are running
high-bandwidth services so is it _really_ a
problem? I doubt it. It seems more likely
that they encountered a few problems, realized
they could convince most of their (non-technical) subscribers that this is the _only_ solution.
Now they have a way to charge more $$$ for offering hosting services.
I think @home subscribers should VOICE their
objections vehemently in the newsgroups and
demand a technical compromise that makes sense.
It worries me that the net is becoming more like
TV where you can't become a content provider unless you have the $$$.
The AOL analogy sounded like bogus logic. It doesn't fit this situation at all.
I'm still deeply confused about what XML is all
about. I know that SGML is ideal for business documents so what does XML lack that makes it inferior?
Concerning the article, I hope the DOJ forces
M$ to start conforming to standards (like SGML).
that was the sweetest code -- I started to
build a whole mythology about who these guys
were. I'm getting misty just thinking about it! Ok.. here's an apple ][ system monitor
quiz:
I remember checking out every computer and book store for the source code for applesoft basic and was shocked to learn that they wouldn't just give it to you. In the back of the Apple ][ Reference
Manual, they published the source code for the
system monitor. I had to suffice with the "What's Where" book.
Bill Gates has been pissing me off for the last 20 years and I've just about HAD IT! Start releasing
your goddamn source code, M$!!!!
PS. Can anyone else think of a another M$-developed product that was burned into ROM?
Someone should point this out to Mindcraft =)
Damn I wish we had more lawyers in the OS world...
I positively hate seeing the Linux/OS community flagellating themselves over silliness like this. I don't have to apologize because someone else wrote a nasty email. It doesn't say much about someone's intelligence when they attempt to lump all Linux users under a malicious stereotype. It's bad enough seeing a "respected" corporation doing it (geez, Mindcraft.... how adolescent can you get? Lowering yourself into name-calling fight with a bunch of pent-up teenagers is not very professional...), but it kills me to see us berating ourselves.
I remember seeing a review (BYTE i think) of
various compilers and gcc finished near the top
on several platforms for executable speed. Does anyone know how GCC rates these days?
If this column appeared on usenet, it would be called flamebait (or at least parts of it would). Perhaps that's a commentary on the state of conventional forms of journalism (eg. the columnist).
At any rate, most of what he said was silly and hyperbolic. Linux is 30-year old technology? Actually the oldest part of it is 8 years old, on average most of linux is 3 years old I'd estimate and its cycling all the time.
The writef obviously referred to when Ken Thompson first started working on a distinguishable OS later to be called Unix. Yes that was 1969, but what did Unix look like in 1969? It barely had worked out the concept of directories and devices. (Check out Ritchie's article on describing what using Unix was like in the first few years here.) Does that look anything like Linux or Unix today?
Unix (and Linux) will be around in 30 years (albeit in an evolved form) simply because it can run on anything! Think about all the trends in computing that Unix has outlived because it adapted. Linux is the most dynamic and adaptable Unix ever invented because it is so open.
Are we going to be using intel-based PCs with keyboards and SVGA monitors in 30 years? Something's wrong if we are. Will Windows be able to adapt? Nothing Microsoft has done in recent years has demonstrated any degree of innovation or adaptability. Will the open source community just eventually dump the linux code base? Why would it?
In 30 years, Unix will be here. Windows won't.
Here! Here!
The whole oracle/java NC (network computer) thing
kinda boggled me cuz X does everything that NCs
would do. I bet a lot of engineers at NEC and other xterm makers felt silly designing NCs after
years of building xterms.
"...I'm running Enlightenment and Gnome, but it still ..."
I think we see the problem here...
Is this a VNC-based tool? I tried VNC cuz it sounded like the perfect solution for NT-boxes hobbling your computing environment. I was disappointed in two critical areas.
First, its a remote frame-buffer protocol and it shows. It simply blindly draws what ever is on the NT-box's screen and it does it very slowly (compared to running a remote X client).
Second: from what I've seen, the NT machine is still single user. What I hoped it would allow me to do is log in to a machine that someone else is sitting at and get a windows desktop. Instead what happens is the user and I share the display -- a feature that has very limited use.
The point so nice, I said it twice. Sorry for the waste of bandwidth.....
(I need a coffee...)
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen years old. We've been using X since before 486's existed. It runs fine on plenty of different hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
Perhaps you missed the headline. X is fifteen
years old. It runs fine on plenty of different
hardware including a 486-66 that I use to this
day. As early as 1990 I can remem running X
off wintel box displays and under MacOS with a 68030. Realistically, it takes forever for Windows' desktop to start up compared to starting
an X window manager (with the possible exceptions of E or fvwm). And I've seen how long it takes for Windows95 to startup on a P90 with 8MB of RAM -- like 2.5 minutes. Sorry Windows loses on all counts. I'm skeptical you can even start win95 with 4MB ram in a human lifetime.
Also: What happens if you are running an app that requires a 16- or 24-bit display (like Java) on an 8-bit display under Windows? it craps out. What happens under X? It adjusts to the avail colourmap.
Crashing: The only X server I've ever seen crash is my hp300 because its an HPUX X server running on a netBSD kernel and its an X11R5 server trying to communicate with X11R6 clients. Despite all this, it crashes maybe once a week. And I don't blame it considering how badly I'm abusing it. Other than that, my X servers run for months without restarting them.
Also: X runs under basically every variant of Unix that's existed in the past 10 years as well as VMS, MacOS, Windows, OS/2 and hundreds of terminals. And they can all interoperate and display to/from each other. Can any windows-based network transparency solution do that? Nope.
It sounds very much like the X you are talking about is XFree86. Yes that's hard to configure and I can image that craps out on you often. Not because you are stupid or because X is crap but because the XF86 project gets almost no official support from wintel video-card vendors! Imagine if every video card driver submitted an XF86Config file for their card so *you* don't have to worry about the timings? Many of those configuration problems would be history.
Concerning XF86 vs Windows95. In XF86, you can overclock your video card to get higher-than-suggested resolutions. For example, my NVidia driver under win95/nt only supports 1200x1000 resolution. Under XF86 I can milk 1600x1200 out of it. Once again, windows loses.
Sure X can seem slow in certain scenarios but who is willing to give up the flexibility it offers? At this moment I'm sitting at an old hp300 typing this reply using netscape under KDE (both are running off my laptop upstairs). Why? Cuz my hp300 I don't have KDE or netscape for my hp300 and I hate my laptop's keyboard and its screen is only 8-bit. It drives me _insane_ when I work with wintel suckers who have it hardwired into their brain that you have to *sit* at the keyboard that you are using.
Things X has let me do that no other technology would allow:
Sure X can be improved (what can't) but its an amazing work both in design and in usefulness. Even the code is remarkable. Before C++ was being
used outside of AT&T, moch of X's code was object-oriented...
What amazes me is that MS didn't adopt X when NT came out. It was free and rock solid and would have given them features that NT 5.0 can barely hold a candle to. Then maybe people would stop thinking of X as a Unix thing. I still have people at work who run windows and refer to Reflection/X as a "unix emulator". Um... its not: It's a Windows X server.
Anyone who thinks X is not amazing is just plain
wrong and will the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Che
Just because the brain isn't a digital system doesn't mean you can't measure the information the brain can hold. Bits are useful (really, reallu useful) in digital systems but the concept of a bit predates computers. It is for example a very useful concept in code-breaking and signalling.
From an information theory point of view, there's
nothing ridiculous about calculating the information capacity of the brain. Although it has a very concrete meaning in the realm of computer jargon, it is fundamentally a unit for measuring information content.
As I understand it, individual neurons, denrites, axons, nor synapses cannot retain a "state" by themselves. Groupings of connected neurons seem
to be able to retain state. In fact they any particular cell assembly has the ability to stabilize to several states. Something that can hold 2 states has an informational content of 1 bit; 4 states = 2 bits and so one.
I think the capacity of the brain would be far less than the estimate you suggest.
From what I remember from computational neuroscience books in the early 80s, it doesn't appear that a neuron can hold any state by itself but groups of interconnected neurons ("cell assemblies" i think the term was) are collectively able to stabilize in "states".
If a cell assembly consists of on average 100 neurons and can stabilize into 8 different states
(I made these numbers us figuring that they sounded reasonable), then a cell assembly can hold about 3 bits of information. If there 100 billion
neurons in the brain, there are about a billion cell assemblies which means on the order of 3Gbits or 375MB per brain.
Why try to hide what the linux/OS community really is? So there are some angry puppies out there.
There are angry puppies everywhere. Who will we
kid pretending to be saints?
If industry/mainstream doesn't accept us on our technical merit, they will remain that far behind us.
Three points (not entirely on-topic) in response:
1) I honestly don't mean to advocate people being abusive with each other. We should be respectful to each other -- period. But not because it'll make people like Linux.
2) If the abusive email came from Linus, ESR, and RHS then it perhaps would reflect on the OS community.
It didn't however and it won't.
3) Bill Gates doesn't have a stellar reputation but Microsoft is widely accepted by the mainstream.
Please don't chastise us for not behaving nicely. If we had a legal department we'd have sued. If we had a marketing department we'd have pulled a full page ad in the New York Times. But we don't.
So you got a mail bomb (a tiny one at that) and a few flaming emails. Which would Bryar have preferred?
A main goal of the entire OS movement was to work around the proprietary vendors that are beginning to embrace us now. I agree that, in general, people should be nice and thoughtful to each other. But does anyone care if the "reputation" of the open source movement is "spoiled" in the mainstream's eyes?
That's the funniest (albeit unintentional) thing
I've heard in days: "Sorry the email is so slow,
folks. Those damn regular expressions are just chewing up our gateway..." ROTFL....
Or better yet... tell us how to get invited to those ConsumerOne events!