Just FYI, I was responding to an AC who got modded into oblivion. S/he didn't understand the point of the OP, so I was clarifying. My post kinda looks out of context without the parent.
The Solaris software is of proven quality and at least equal or better then Linux and the open source model will assure that it stays up there.
I'll grant everything before the "and." We don't know what Sun's OSS model will look like. It certainly won't be the GPL, and I'll be amazingly surprised if it's even as liberal as the BSD licence. People aren't fond of giving away their code so that a corporation can make money off of it, so if Sun's model is anything like Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, it will stifle development by the community, not encourage it.
By making it work with competing hardware platforms, there is no reason anymore to switch software to facilitate lower hardware costs.
Granted. Solaris on x86 was a very wise move. However, one big reason to run Solaris is the tight integration with hardware, which can't be said about Solaris on x86. Also, as much as Schwartz talks about running Solaris on Dell (HP, whatever) commodity boxes, it has a very short hardware compatibility list -- much shorter than that of Linux.
Sun with Solaris has already a large installed base and by becoming free and open source there is no reason for existing Solaris users to switch to Linux.
Circular. He's arguing why people should stay with Solaris; "there's no reason to switch" is not a reason at all, but a question-begging.
Sun has a proven reputation in terms of quality of support. This should be at least as good or better then that of the Linux supporters.
The help ticket I have currently open with Solaris will turn five months old on Wednesday. It was three weeks before any action was taken on it. It also had a four-hour response time. The issue has still not been resolved. Sun's support is far from stellar, despite what they'd have you believe. In fact, their support (or lack thereof) has been the trump card in my quest to get my boss to accept Linux.
Because Sun by default is the only designated party managing the open source software, there will be no risk of a version bonanza with multiple incompatible versions.
This may be nice to the PHB, but the ability to fork is something developers like. Plus, as was mentioned on/. just today, Linus is the final arbiter of the Linux kernel and, as long as he keeps doing a good job, will remain so. Multiple vendors (as opposed to multiple versions) ensures healthy competition, which is why Linux has gone from a nifty experiment and useful OS for unimportant things like web servers to OS of choice for everything from Wall Street to government desktops in just a few years.
I see no danger to Linux. And frankly, Solaris was already dirt cheap, but the support still costs big bucks, which means that Solaris still costs about as much as RHEL. Or, if you don't want support, it costs just as much as RHEL without support. That's the only front they gained on, and I don't see it as very critical.
sh and ksh are separate for a reason. Solaris sh (more so than other sh's) is *very* stripped down -- no tab completion, no command history, etc. -- so that there are no side effects. When you hit tab, you get a literal tab. That makes it harder for hackers to place little "easter eggs" and make "!!" expand to "rm -rf/".
/lib and/usr/lib are separate for similar reasons./lib holds system libraries, while/usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
This is the sort of stuff Schwartz is talking about when he mentions military-grade security. Linux has stressed usability over this sort of security (which I don't mind), and, interestingly enough, linking sh to ksh and linking/lib to/usr/lib makes Solaris more Linux-ish. Also, many hardcore Solaris admins would regard it as a security hole and, if you're running the servers for the NSA or Wall Street, it probably is.
Grandparent: And those features are so good that Sun promotes them, rather then (as the article pointed out) spewing out FUD about Linux.
You: You mean unlike all the FUD from Red Hat?
Dude, RTFA. Red Hat != Linux, Linux != Red Hat.
The GP has a very good point. I tuned in to watch Sun's seminar, hoping I would -- gee, I dunno, see some of what Solaris 10 has to offer? Instead, it was "Bash Red Hat" day. Maybe Schwartz needs to take lessons from Steve Jobs on how to unveil products. I would not be surprised if the phrase "Red Hat" was mentioned significantly more during the presentation than the phrase "Solaris 10." They just didn't show us their product, or give us any reason to buy it (besides a minor DTrace demo); all they did was spread FUD.
This is the same business tactic as the RIAA is using: if you refuse to evolve, legislate! Rather than adapt to a changing world, make new business models illegal. Sure, it may cripple you in the long run, but as long as we avoid that invisible hand and keep the stockholders happy, all is well. Right?
But, of course, the question is: what does a=b mean? Was that example in Pascal or C? (It matters! A lot!) Or in nice, ambiguous BASIC?
(eq? a b) has the advantage of the fact that, even though I don't know Lisp, I understood immediately that it was checking for equality, not assigning. And it is fewer characters than if (a == b).
Unfortunately, an encyclopedia's failure mechanism is much more insidious and hard to detect.
Thankfully, debugging and coding are both orders of magnitude easier.
Look, when Linux was three years old, it was in version 1.0. It only supported single-processor i386 machines. Imagine if Johnathan Schwartz had come along then and said: "You nincompoops! Your little pet 'free software' experiment will never succeed! You can't let just anyone work on your OS and expect some 'quasi-darwinian' process to sort it all out! Idiots!'
Of course, at that time, Linux was a toy OS. But if you watched Sun's webex yesterday, Schwartz (predictably) spent the whole time ragging on Linux, which is now, after 14 years of development, a definite viable competitor to Sun.
Give Wikipedia 11 more years, and see how it's faring. Right now, it's loaded with early adopters -- geeks, in other words -- so articles like the Slashdot trolling phenomenon are remarkably well-developed, while Alexander Hamilton is not quite up to snuff. In 11 years, I don't doubt that the Encyclopedia Brittanica will be forced either to give away their content (like Sun will be doing with Solaris 10) or fund some little has-been company to sue Wikipedia for licensing rights to the encyclopedia (SCO).
Or die. That's an option, too, when an asteroid hits your planet and you don't know how to evolve.
According to management (and the shareholders to whom they answer), the game is essential -- it's essential for profit. Physical harm doesn't have anything to do with it; it just makes the case easier to make to the press. Workers can strike for whatever reason they please.
I think the whole point of this mess is that the EA employees are getting screwed: they're working 80-hour weeks, and getting no extra compensation. That's plain illegal, and even if it wasn't, it's something the workers shouldn't put up with. Striking -- or even threatening a strike -- would rectify this situation.
Gee, that's a great idea, if you ignore the fact that afterwards you don't have a fucking job. The game industry is very very small and very very competetive, and, chances are, EA makes you sign a non-compete -- i.e., you can't work in computer games for N months/years after you leave. You also can't pull unemployment if you quit.
Here's a way better idea: Don't like the job? UNIONIZE! If the job is so horrible that all the workers strike, EA will immediately have troble filling it and change their practices. Magic of group negotiation.
The problem is that the guy in TFA started out working for a smaller company (Maxis), which got swallowed by EA. If you read yesterday's TFA (RYTFA?), it was noted that the computer game industry has undergone massive consolidation in the past year, with dozens of small publishers folding and getting swallowed by multinational behemoths. So that little shop with a soul today could easily become just another arm of Evil Assrapers tomorrow.
Somehow, I find it amazing that on a site chock-full of libertarians and liberal weenies, unionization comes up so infrequently. I know striking is difficult, but software development is a field in which it is uniquely effective: it's imperative that the same people finish a project who started it, or you waste months showing the new team the ropes. You can't just hire a bunch of scabs to stamp out code like it's steel.
Wow, you smacked the nail right on the head. Personally, I'm a big fan of anarchosyndicalism -- I guess I probably lean a little further left than you.
One previous poster mentioned that, given the absense of a powerful (monarchical/dictatorial) state, ad hoc "governments" (clans, tribes, gangs, unions, etc.) would spring up. While that's pure horror to the average American, I think that's pretty swell.
Just refusing to vote is like proclaiming oneself 'anticapitalistic' with a sweatshop-made chinese cotton T-shirt.
Hrm?
No it's not. I'm refusing to take part in (i.e., to support the claims to legitimacy of) the system. You apparently think that the only way to be anti-government is to participate in the government by voting. I disagree. I think that, if you're going to proclaim yourself against imperialism, to appropriate your example, you shouldn't take part in it, e.g., by purchasing goods from foreign sweatshop labor.
Somehow, you expect supporting the system to topple it. That's just backward.
Voting, or running myself, would be supporting the very fucking system I oppose. Great plan, jackass. If you think voting is the only way to change a system, try the following steps:
1. Pull your head out of your ass.
2. Read up on Ghandi.
3. Read up on Trotsky.
4. Read up on elections in North Korea, Myanmar, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, etc.
5. Reinsert head in ass.
That's two ways to crumble the system without voting and three examples of voting being meaningless.
Perhaps you've heard of Audre Lorde, who famously said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Voting will never dismantle the two-party dictatorship, no matter how much indoctrinated zealots like yourself scream about it.
That's true, and it's something I thought a lot about. But casting a blank ballot would indicate that I support the system while disagreeing with all of the candidates. A spoiled ballot isn't something I thought of, to be honest. I like the idea, but I cancelled my voter registration last time I moved.
I also thought of going to a polling place (or, rather, 300 feet from one) with a sign reading "Voting is a sham," but I doubt I'd get time off for that like my co-workers get for actually voting.
I'll bitch about the president all I want -- I'll just refrain from saying, "If only (Bush|Kerry|Nader|Whoever) had won,..." That's because the problem isn't the dude in the suit, the problem is the fact of the president. And when it's the system I oppose, not the person, I reserve full rights to a) refuse to lend my consent to the system by voting; and b) bitch all I want about it.
This mantra is just one of many aspects of a culture that refuses to see the conscientious refusal to vote as valid. It ultimately reinforces the system and blinds us to change. The "Vote or die," "I don't care who you vote for, just vote," etc., slogans that we hear repeated are, plain and simple, pro-government.
...which we already knew. Even newborns show affinities for their own language over other languages, and by just a few months babies have already lost the ability to distinguish some phonemes that aren't in their language. I agree with the grandparent: nothing to see here, move along.
Agreed! Everyone else seems to be too busy giving the companies cockrubs to notice that the agreement basicall says: "We'll follow all the laws of the country, and, in addition, we won't kill anyone. On purpose. Unless they deserve it."
What I'd like to see is an agreement that says:
a. We'll follow all labor laws of the U.S.
b. We'll pay a liveable wage (which is an altogether different beast from minimum wage).
That would be an impressive step in the right direction. This is just pablum. Stop applauding them for coming up to a basic level of expected decency.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI, I was responding to an AC who got modded into oblivion. S/he didn't understand the point of the OP, so I was clarifying. My post kinda looks out of context without the parent.
The Solaris software is of proven quality and at least equal or better then Linux and the open source model will assure that it stays up there.
I'll grant everything before the "and." We don't know what Sun's OSS model will look like. It certainly won't be the GPL, and I'll be amazingly surprised if it's even as liberal as the BSD licence. People aren't fond of giving away their code so that a corporation can make money off of it, so if Sun's model is anything like Microsoft's Shared Source initiative, it will stifle development by the community, not encourage it.
By making it work with competing hardware platforms, there is no reason anymore to switch software to facilitate lower hardware costs.
Granted. Solaris on x86 was a very wise move. However, one big reason to run Solaris is the tight integration with hardware, which can't be said about Solaris on x86. Also, as much as Schwartz talks about running Solaris on Dell (HP, whatever) commodity boxes, it has a very short hardware compatibility list -- much shorter than that of Linux.
Sun with Solaris has already a large installed base and by becoming free and open source there is no reason for existing Solaris users to switch to Linux. Circular. He's arguing why people should stay with Solaris; "there's no reason to switch" is not a reason at all, but a question-begging.
Sun has a proven reputation in terms of quality of support. This should be at least as good or better then that of the Linux supporters. The help ticket I have currently open with Solaris will turn five months old on Wednesday. It was three weeks before any action was taken on it. It also had a four-hour response time. The issue has still not been resolved. Sun's support is far from stellar, despite what they'd have you believe. In fact, their support (or lack thereof) has been the trump card in my quest to get my boss to accept Linux.
Because Sun by default is the only designated party managing the open source software, there will be no risk of a version bonanza with multiple incompatible versions.
This may be nice to the PHB, but the ability to fork is something developers like. Plus, as was mentioned on /. just today, Linus is the final arbiter of the Linux kernel and, as long as he keeps doing a good job, will remain so. Multiple vendors (as opposed to multiple versions) ensures healthy competition, which is why Linux has gone from a nifty experiment and useful OS for unimportant things like web servers to OS of choice for everything from Wall Street to government desktops in just a few years.
I see no danger to Linux. And frankly, Solaris was already dirt cheap, but the support still costs big bucks, which means that Solaris still costs about as much as RHEL. Or, if you don't want support, it costs just as much as RHEL without support. That's the only front they gained on, and I don't see it as very critical.
/lib and /usr/lib are separate for similar reasons. /lib holds system libraries, while /usr/lib holds user-installed libraries. It makes threat containment easier.
This is the sort of stuff Schwartz is talking about when he mentions military-grade security. Linux has stressed usability over this sort of security (which I don't mind), and, interestingly enough, linking sh to ksh and linking /lib to /usr/lib makes Solaris more Linux-ish. Also, many hardcore Solaris admins would regard it as a security hole and, if you're running the servers for the NSA or Wall Street, it probably is.
You: You mean unlike all the FUD from Red Hat?
Dude, RTFA. Red Hat != Linux, Linux != Red Hat.
The GP has a very good point. I tuned in to watch Sun's seminar, hoping I would -- gee, I dunno, see some of what Solaris 10 has to offer? Instead, it was "Bash Red Hat" day. Maybe Schwartz needs to take lessons from Steve Jobs on how to unveil products. I would not be surprised if the phrase "Red Hat" was mentioned significantly more during the presentation than the phrase "Solaris 10." They just didn't show us their product, or give us any reason to buy it (besides a minor DTrace demo); all they did was spread FUD.
This is the same business tactic as the RIAA is using: if you refuse to evolve, legislate! Rather than adapt to a changing world, make new business models illegal. Sure, it may cripple you in the long run, but as long as we avoid that invisible hand and keep the stockholders happy, all is well. Right?
/pulls on asbestos longjohns
(eq? a b) has the advantage of the fact that, even though I don't know Lisp, I understood immediately that it was checking for equality, not assigning. And it is fewer characters than if (a == b).
Look, when Linux was three years old, it was in version 1.0. It only supported single-processor i386 machines. Imagine if Johnathan Schwartz had come along then and said: "You nincompoops! Your little pet 'free software' experiment will never succeed! You can't let just anyone work on your OS and expect some 'quasi-darwinian' process to sort it all out! Idiots!'
Of course, at that time, Linux was a toy OS. But if you watched Sun's webex yesterday, Schwartz (predictably) spent the whole time ragging on Linux, which is now, after 14 years of development, a definite viable competitor to Sun.
Give Wikipedia 11 more years, and see how it's faring. Right now, it's loaded with early adopters -- geeks, in other words -- so articles like the Slashdot trolling phenomenon are remarkably well-developed, while Alexander Hamilton is not quite up to snuff. In 11 years, I don't doubt that the Encyclopedia Brittanica will be forced either to give away their content (like Sun will be doing with Solaris 10) or fund some little has-been company to sue Wikipedia for licensing rights to the encyclopedia (SCO).
Or die. That's an option, too, when an asteroid hits your planet and you don't know how to evolve.
But Johnathan, I thought hardware was supposed to be free, not software. What gives?
I think the whole point of this mess is that the EA employees are getting screwed: they're working 80-hour weeks, and getting no extra compensation. That's plain illegal, and even if it wasn't, it's something the workers shouldn't put up with. Striking -- or even threatening a strike -- would rectify this situation.
Here's a way better idea: Don't like the job? UNIONIZE! If the job is so horrible that all the workers strike, EA will immediately have troble filling it and change their practices. Magic of group negotiation.
The problem is that the guy in TFA started out working for a smaller company (Maxis), which got swallowed by EA. If you read yesterday's TFA (RYTFA?), it was noted that the computer game industry has undergone massive consolidation in the past year, with dozens of small publishers folding and getting swallowed by multinational behemoths. So that little shop with a soul today could easily become just another arm of Evil Assrapers tomorrow.
Somehow, I find it amazing that on a site chock-full of libertarians and liberal weenies, unionization comes up so infrequently. I know striking is difficult, but software development is a field in which it is uniquely effective: it's imperative that the same people finish a project who started it, or you waste months showing the new team the ropes. You can't just hire a bunch of scabs to stamp out code like it's steel.
...does he have a Gibson?
It doesn't even look like Coral or Mirrordot got caches of the page before it Hindenburged. Dang.
Check out this post and my reply.
One previous poster mentioned that, given the absense of a powerful (monarchical/dictatorial) state, ad hoc "governments" (clans, tribes, gangs, unions, etc.) would spring up. While that's pure horror to the average American, I think that's pretty swell.
No it's not. I'm refusing to take part in (i.e., to support the claims to legitimacy of) the system. You apparently think that the only way to be anti-government is to participate in the government by voting. I disagree. I think that, if you're going to proclaim yourself against imperialism, to appropriate your example, you shouldn't take part in it, e.g., by purchasing goods from foreign sweatshop labor.
Somehow, you expect supporting the system to topple it. That's just backward.
Voting, or running myself, would be supporting the very fucking system I oppose. Great plan, jackass. If you think voting is the only way to change a system, try the following steps:
1. Pull your head out of your ass.
2. Read up on Ghandi.
3. Read up on Trotsky.
4. Read up on elections in North Korea, Myanmar, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, etc.
5. Reinsert head in ass.
That's two ways to crumble the system without voting and three examples of voting being meaningless.
Perhaps you've heard of Audre Lorde, who famously said: "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." Voting will never dismantle the two-party dictatorship, no matter how much indoctrinated zealots like yourself scream about it.
I also thought of going to a polling place (or, rather, 300 feet from one) with a sign reading "Voting is a sham," but I doubt I'd get time off for that like my co-workers get for actually voting.
I'll bitch about the president all I want -- I'll just refrain from saying, "If only (Bush|Kerry|Nader|Whoever) had won,..." That's because the problem isn't the dude in the suit, the problem is the fact of the president. And when it's the system I oppose, not the person, I reserve full rights to a) refuse to lend my consent to the system by voting; and b) bitch all I want about it.
This mantra is just one of many aspects of a culture that refuses to see the conscientious refusal to vote as valid. It ultimately reinforces the system and blinds us to change. The "Vote or die," "I don't care who you vote for, just vote," etc., slogans that we hear repeated are, plain and simple, pro-government.
Another de-voted anarchist refusing to vote.
...which we already knew. Even newborns show affinities for their own language over other languages, and by just a few months babies have already lost the ability to distinguish some phonemes that aren't in their language. I agree with the grandparent: nothing to see here, move along.
This t-shirt comes to mind...
What I'd like to see is an agreement that says:
a. We'll follow all labor laws of the U.S.
b. We'll pay a liveable wage (which is an altogether different beast from minimum wage).
That would be an impressive step in the right direction. This is just pablum. Stop applauding them for coming up to a basic level of expected decency.
Or, if they wanted to make half a million /.ers simultaneously spooge, they could GPL it.