Actually, the Linux kernel has lots of bugs with regards to being correct C code. If you port it to another compiler, you're going to fix a lot of bugs. Making Linux more portable is likely to clean up a lot of issues.
We wouln't want *Akamai* to get Slashdotted now *would we*? Thank God Slashdot can take up the slack.
Come on, posting articles is nice and all, but this server was not going to be slashdotted(period), it didn't require registration, and it isn't even noticably loaded.
And, of course, there's the legal issue that this is Apple's copyrighted content that you're moving to another site.
Yeeeessss...and this is also exactly what any current multiproc-enabled OS will do.
If the application only uses a single thread, then only one processor is going to be running that code at any given time.
Perhaps in a research OS with research compilers it would be possible to work around some of this (calculate parallelizable tasks).
Actually, all the parent post said was that Win2k has stupid multiprocessor support. If your system load is less than 2, it's just stupid to swap an application from CPU to CPU, getting 50% load on each. Then you pay the expensive price of wiping out the page cache all over for every switch.
It'd be better to keep scheduling a given program on a given processor if at all possible. Programs should have intelligent affinities in a good SMP OS.
You kidding? Without this story you would have never made your insightful, facinating, interesting post, and the rest of us would have had to go without.
Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.
AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.
Steps in roll-your-own:
Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment): None GNOME KDE ROX foXdesktop Perltop Equinox XFce Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.
If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps. gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock. Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen. Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables: sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager. enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy. ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows. blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.
Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.
The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.
Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.
Text editor: I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.
Web browser: Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment! mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so. dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else. There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.
File manager: You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool: Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans. GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface. Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus). ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager. There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.
Terminal emulator: GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with. Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead. Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast. Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal. xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world. rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.
Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!
But don't go giving him an altruism award anytime soon...I believe it was only last year that Apple gave him a private jet (quite a few millions), and recently that they gave him quite a few more millions in stock options. The $1 salary is a cute quote, but doesn't mean much.
How about this? Shafting your employees and ripping a company up without a pretty clear, concise, and well-defined goal is a bad idea. You kill worker morale, you lose customer confidence, and you (as in any reorganization) are going to be losing money for a while. As a matter of fact, the only people that are likely to benefit from this merger *may* be the shareholders of HP (which I really, really doubt...Compaq is a godawful acquisition), and, of course, the execs, which get nice merger bonuses.
Frankly, I think the entire idea of executive bonuses for execs in strategic decision-making positions should be tossed in the trash. It biases the exec to do a job that will make them money, not that will help the company. If the board of the directors wants to vote to give a specific person a nice fat bonus for something exceptional, great.
For a market like this -- parallelizable scientific computing will, at least for several years more, stick with x86. Why? It's cheap. No one cares about a slick desktop or neat UI features if you just want another headless box in the cluster chewing away at numbers.
Of course, none of these people are going to be using Windows, either...
It's all relative. I still happily use my PII/266 as my main box. I just use Linux, Sawfish, and a suite of fast apps (dillo and rxvt are the two primary ones).
If you're using galeon, you can use the trick that always works in gtk+/gnome programs -- move the mouse to the menu item you want to bind a key to and hit the key combination. Voila! New binding.
GNOME apps generally save these, but most GTK apps just drop them at the end of the instance.
Dillo *does* support cookies (at least in the copy I'm using), has one of the very best (if not the best) listed support for PNG on the libpng website, *does* support bookmarks (right click on a page, choose add bookmark), sort of supports frames (a la lynx...you can navigate to one frame). It supports tables well enough for all the pages I use, though the (rare) nested table does post a bit of a problem. It does not support CSS, I agree with you there.
I keep a copy of mozilla around, but all my day-to-day browsing is done in dillo. I like a fast, responsive web browsing environment. Mozilla does not cut it (at least on my machine).
It's not crippleware. Crippleware is where you have deliberately feature-impeded software, usually to force someone to buy a full copy.
It's true that dillo has almost no i18n support...it needs to use the gtk2 font rendering system (pango) to do so, and doing so would involve a reasonable amount of work. Pango may not be powerful enough alone -- it's actually a very complex problem to do layout with international characters.
And as for "what can you do with dillo", you can browse the web. I'm typing this in dillo right now. Frankly, the number of times I've seen Javascript correctly and usefully used can be counted on one hand.
Dillo is fast, secure, and free. It uses an absolutely minimal amount of screen space (you can even double-click in a page to hide the toolbar and status bar, and if you have the status bar size set to tiny...)
I love dillo, but YMMV...if you don't feel comfortable away from MSIE, then so be it.
This solution reminds me of the bit in Full Metal Jacket where the drill sergeant decides that peer pressure will be effective at forcing an out-of-line trainee to conform. It worked.
Of course, it pissed everyone off and ended up getting the drill sergeant shot.:-)
I think I'd like to see Hollywood bend over and give up all their movies involving weaponry before we wipe out the games. We'll see how far *that* gets.
I think the parent post pretty much sums up anti-spam sorts.
I dislike spam, but I've seen so much more *crap* from anti-spam sorts that I'm starting to wish that they didn't exist.
I especially hate server-side spam filtering, because it means that I have to trust the spam-fighting ability of some mail admins to never falsely block good mail. Why? I can set up my own (better) client-side solutions with procmail than they're going to. Much better that way.
You have *got* to be kidding. The DUL getting shut down is the best thing for the Internet that's happened in a long time. They've blocked legitimate mail more times than I can count, and pissed me off more than Microsoft. Go back to blocking spam in an RFC-compliant manner, thank you very much.
And "smart hosts" (mail gateways) are quite annoying. If you move from ISP to ISP like I do (from college to home multiple times a year) you always have to remember to switch the gateway. Your retry send policy is locked to the ISP's chosen policy. You only find out about mail sending errors next time you check your mail, not when sending it. You can't use end-to-end mailserver encryption. You're asking for a Carnivore invasion of privacy. Finally, you're buckling under to the sorts that are trying to stop the Internet from being a reliable peer-to-peer system...with a required mail gateway, the mail admin has successfully brought your sending email anywhere to a single point of failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the Linux kernel has lots of bugs with regards to being correct C code. If you port it to another compiler, you're going to fix a lot of bugs. Making Linux more portable is likely to clean up a lot of issues.
We wouln't want *Akamai* to get Slashdotted now *would we*? Thank God Slashdot can take up the slack.
Come on, posting articles is nice and all, but this server was not going to be slashdotted(period), it didn't require registration, and it isn't even noticably loaded.
And, of course, there's the legal issue that this is Apple's copyrighted content that you're moving to another site.
Yeeeessss...and this is also exactly what any current multiproc-enabled OS will do.
If the application only uses a single thread, then only one processor is going to be running that code at any given time.
Perhaps in a research OS with research compilers it would be possible to work around some of this (calculate parallelizable tasks).
Actually, all the parent post said was that Win2k has stupid multiprocessor support. If your system load is less than 2, it's just stupid to swap an application from CPU to CPU, getting 50% load on each. Then you pay the expensive price of wiping out the page cache all over for every switch.
It'd be better to keep scheduling a given program on a given processor if at all possible. Programs should have intelligent affinities in a good SMP OS.
You kidding? Without this story you would have never made your insightful, facinating, interesting post, and the rest of us would have had to go without.
Sure. Just about any UNIX desktop environment is as flexible as LiteStep. Roll your own...don't feel like you just need to use KDE or GNOME or something like that. I've got a rather nice desktop with sawfish, the sawfish pager, all status information being shown via gkrellm, and programs launched via the keyboard using xbindkeys. No GNOME or KDE flavoring necessary.
AfterStep is probably the closest in functionality to LiteStep, but I personally prefer Enlightenment if you're looking for flash, Sawfish if you're looking for functionality, and Black Box if you're looking for speed.
Steps in roll-your-own:
Choose a base desktop environment (keep in mind that you can just mix and match bits of them...I used to use the GNOME panel without the rest of GNOME, and a roommate uses GNOME apps with the KDE environment):
None
GNOME
KDE
ROX
foXdesktop
Perltop
Equinox
XFce
Once you've chosen a desktop environment (or the lack of one), and possibly removed the parts of it that you don't like (with GNOME, I wholeheartedly suggest trying it without Nautilus, possibly without anything but the panel), then you get to choose a dock. Your current desktop may or may not include a dock/panel/wharf.
If it doesn't, icedock provides an environment-independent wharf for the afterstep-style wharf system -- swallowing apps.
gkrellm (seems to be currently down) makes for a nice status-monitor style dock.
Or you can make your own impromptu dock...I've built them before by starting xload and xlock with proper geometry arguments to stack them on top of each other, and having sawfish make the windows sticky and slap 'em at the edge of the screen.
Now a window manager. There are so many of these that I'm not going to list them all. I'll mention a few notables:
sawfish is a fairly fast, *extremely* flexible (everything's written in lisp, much like emacs) window manager that uses gtk. Currently GNOME's default. I love this thing, but it doesn't come with a pager, so you either need to use a base desktop environment with a pager or use spager.
enlightenment is, at least until the next major release, still a window manager and not a desktop environment. Lots of emphasis on eye candy.
ion, a novel window manager that's designed to be managed entirely with the keyboard and never overlap windows.
blackbox is what I'd suggest if you needed a fast environment that still looked nice.
Most WMs support launching programs with given key combinations. I'd advise against this. The excellent XBindKeys is window-manager independent, quite capable, allows you to kill off your window manager and still use keys to start programs, etc. Plus, there's a nice benefit to using a different program than your window manager to launch programs. If you never launch external programs with your WM, you can renice -10 `pidof sawfish` or whatever your window manager is. Making your window manager (and X) meaner with respect to CPU scheduling makes for a much more snappy environment when edge flipping or the like. Sure, it might take a sec for the mozilla windows in the background to finish redrawing when I flip to a new desktop, but in the meantime I can do my work without waiting around for them.
The reason you don't want to make your WM meaner if you use it to launch programs is that then all the programs will also be equally mean.
Decide on the Big Four applications of any X desktop. Text editor, web browser, file manager, and terminal emulator.
Text editor:
I can't possibly cover this holy war here. My personal preference is xemacs, which is a bit of a learning curve for new users from Windows, but well worth it in power in the long run. You may want something that meshes more with the rest of your chosen desktop environment.
Web browser:
Just because KDE uses Konqueror and GNOME uses galeon by default is no reason to stick with those. Of course, you also can use either Konq without KDE or galeon without GNOME. You're rolling your own environment!
mozilla is now (after years of work) a good web browser. Big, still slow and still RAM-hungry, but usably so.
dillo Lightweight, very fast, pretty stable, very screen-space efficient...I can't say enough good things about dillo. If you use dillo as your primary browser, be aware of the fact that it has fewer features than the large browsers, that it doesn't currently (without a patch) support SSL, that it uses a UNIXish config-file preferences interface, and that it doesn't lay out nested tables or wrap text around images the same way Mozilla does. I keep Mozilla around as a backup browser, but dillo is so freakishly fast that it's hard to want to use anything else.
There are a few other browsers, but Konqueror, Mozilla, and dillo are (IMHO) the big GUI players on Linux. Amaya is a specialty browser, Opera (thanks to its MDI interface) doesn't seem to have caught on much in the Linux world, and Navigator 4.x is definitely on its way out the door.
File manager:
You may choose to simply use a command-line shell and the standard file utilities (cp, rm, ls) to do your file management -- I do, and I've tried hard to give other things a chance. But if you prefer to use a specalized GUI tool:
Konqueror can be used, even if you aren't using KDE (you do, of course, need the KDE libraries installed). Faster than gecko (the engine in mozilla and galeon) and almost as standards compliant, Konqueror has a lot of fans.
GMC is no longer being developed, but it's a reasonable lightweight interface.
Nautilus, the current official GNOME file manager is big, slow, RAM-hungry, and pretty. Not sure how well Nautilus works outside of GNOME (given that Konqueror can work outside of KDE, I would expect this capability of Nautilus).
ROX filer is a very fast little gtk file manager.
There are a lot of file managers out there, so I won't list them all, especially as I'm happy with just bash and the POSIX tools.
Terminal emulator:
GNOME and KDE both come with terminal emulators -- gnome-terminal and Konsole. I'm not very impressed with either -- they're both very slow and aren't available apart from their associated desktop environment. Konsole supports tabbed terminals, which some people may like. Both of them are fairly easy to configure, and are suitable for newbies to work with.
Multi Gnome Terminal extends gnome-terminal significantly with Konsole-style tabs and a set of other features. If you like gnome-terminal, you should probably consider using this instead.
Eterm is a RAM-heavy terminal emulator that was designed to look nice. For all the tinting and blending it can do, reasonably fast.
Aterm seems to be basically a less featureful, less memory-hungry Eterm-like terminal.
xterm is the reasonably fast not-so-pretty fairly RAM-hungry terminal that's used all over the world.
rxvt is easily my favorite terminal emulator. rxvt uses less RAM than anything else out there, and is incredibly fast. You can compile in only the features you want to use (which can, of course, also be disabled at runtime). Background images are supported, but emphasis is not much on eye candy. Very configurable. The biggest drawback is that configuration is through traditional UNIX methods, which may scare away some -- X resources, command line options, compile-time options.
Whatever you do, choose a set of software that you like, and remember -- your desktop environment is based on Linux, which means it should composed of exactly the parts that you like most. Have fun!
Actually, he's been paid $1 for each year so far.
But don't go giving him an altruism award anytime soon...I believe it was only last year that Apple gave him a private jet (quite a few millions), and recently that they gave him quite a few more millions in stock options. The $1 salary is a cute quote, but doesn't mean much.
HP killed off their calculator development division a while back. I believe that was another Carly move.
It's kind of depressing -- Carly gets all sorts of recognition because she's the only female CEO of any major tech company...but she's an awful CEO.
"Honor" may be a bit too ideological.
How about this? Shafting your employees and ripping a company up without a pretty clear, concise, and well-defined goal is a bad idea. You kill worker morale, you lose customer confidence, and you (as in any reorganization) are going to be losing money for a while. As a matter of fact, the only people that are likely to benefit from this merger *may* be the shareholders of HP (which I really, really doubt...Compaq is a godawful acquisition), and, of course, the execs, which get nice merger bonuses.
Frankly, I think the entire idea of executive bonuses for execs in strategic decision-making positions should be tossed in the trash. It biases the exec to do a job that will make them money, not that will help the company. If the board of the directors wants to vote to give a specific person a nice fat bonus for something exceptional, great.
It worked well enough for me to do up an rtf resume with it, the only task I've wanted a word processor for so far.
:-)
AbiWord also lacks tables. Still a handy piece of software.
How many people use footnotes again? Not many office users. They aren't in yet, but they're coming.
I think it should be "1/20th the size".
:-)
20 times smaller would be -19.
For a market like this -- parallelizable scientific computing will, at least for several years more, stick with x86. Why? It's cheap. No one cares about a slick desktop or neat UI features if you just want another headless box in the cluster chewing away at numbers.
Of course, none of these people are going to be using Windows, either...
Windows does not suffer from this problem
It's all relative. I still happily use my PII/266 as my main box. I just use Linux, Sawfish, and a suite of fast apps (dillo and rxvt are the two primary ones).
The ultimate wireless dumb terminal!
Yes, it would be awful if Yahoo got slashdotted, wouldn't it? Better post the article, just to make sure.
If you're using galeon, you can use the trick that always works in gtk+/gnome programs -- move the mouse to the menu item you want to bind a key to and hit the key combination. Voila! New binding.
GNOME apps generally save these, but most GTK apps just drop them at the end of the instance.
Show me a GUI browser that's better than dillo on the 386 to high PII range. Dillo is *fast*.
Huh?
Dillo *does* support cookies (at least in the copy I'm using), has one of the very best (if not the best) listed support for PNG on the libpng website, *does* support bookmarks (right click on a page, choose add bookmark), sort of supports frames (a la lynx...you can navigate to one frame). It supports tables well enough for all the pages I use, though the (rare) nested table does post a bit of a problem. It does not support CSS, I agree with you there.
I keep a copy of mozilla around, but all my day-to-day browsing is done in dillo. I like a fast, responsive web browsing environment. Mozilla does not cut it (at least on my machine).
It's not crippleware. Crippleware is where you have deliberately feature-impeded software, usually to force someone to buy a full copy.
It's true that dillo has almost no i18n support...it needs to use the gtk2 font rendering system (pango) to do so, and doing so would involve a reasonable amount of work. Pango may not be powerful enough alone -- it's actually a very complex problem to do layout with international characters.
And as for "what can you do with dillo", you can browse the web. I'm typing this in dillo right now. Frankly, the number of times I've seen Javascript correctly and usefully used can be counted on one hand.
Dillo is fast, secure, and free. It uses an absolutely minimal amount of screen space (you can even double-click in a page to hide the toolbar and status bar, and if you have the status bar size set to tiny...)
I love dillo, but YMMV...if you don't feel comfortable away from MSIE, then so be it.
This solution reminds me of the bit in Full Metal Jacket where the drill sergeant decides that peer pressure will be effective at forcing an out-of-line trainee to conform. It worked.
:-)
Of course, it pissed everyone off and ended up getting the drill sergeant shot.
I think I'd like to see Hollywood bend over and give up all their movies involving weaponry before we wipe out the games. We'll see how far *that* gets.
Speaking of federal law, why *is* this potential federal law? What benefit is there in not leaving this up to the states to decide?
Windows is used by a lot more than that, but that doesn't make it not suck from a technical perspective.
I think the parent post pretty much sums up anti-spam sorts.
I dislike spam, but I've seen so much more *crap* from anti-spam sorts that I'm starting to wish that they didn't exist.
I especially hate server-side spam filtering, because it means that I have to trust the spam-fighting ability of some mail admins to never falsely block good mail. Why? I can set up my own (better) client-side solutions with procmail than they're going to. Much better that way.
You have *got* to be kidding. The DUL getting shut down is the best thing for the Internet that's happened in a long time. They've blocked legitimate mail more times than I can count, and pissed me off more than Microsoft. Go back to blocking spam in an RFC-compliant manner, thank you very much.
And "smart hosts" (mail gateways) are quite annoying. If you move from ISP to ISP like I do (from college to home multiple times a year) you always have to remember to switch the gateway. Your retry send policy is locked to the ISP's chosen policy. You only find out about mail sending errors next time you check your mail, not when sending it. You can't use end-to-end mailserver encryption. You're asking for a Carnivore invasion of privacy. Finally, you're buckling under to the sorts that are trying to stop the Internet from being a reliable peer-to-peer system...with a required mail gateway, the mail admin has successfully brought your sending email anywhere to a single point of failure.