I noticed that too, but that wasn't the only problem. For around 5 hours, the network was down, but for about an hour after it was back up, the slashdot machine was refusing all port 80 connections.
You're missing the point. Tru64 will still be Tru64, a complete OS on its own. GNOME and KDE will merely be window managers (not part of the OS), and RPM isn't even a FSF project.
Linux, on the other hand, is not a complete OS on its own. You can boot Tru64 by itself. You cannot boot a kernel by itself.
The GNU OS will be an OS by itself as well. For the moment, it's missing a kernel, so you can use the Linux kernel as a replacement, making a GNU/Linux hybrid OS, or "GNU OS with the Linux kernel."
I really have no problem with people using "Linux" as a general shortened term to describe the OS. However, explicitly referring to something as the "Linux OS" is just plain wrong. If somebody said "I run Linux," that's fine, but if you say "I run the Linux OS," that's not.
As for RedHat, yes it's a distribution of an operating system. I'm not sure what it's official name is. Debian GNU/Linux is also a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
But why is BSD a failure? Why does it continue to lose marketshare? These questions are never answered. Only a complete idiot would think that BSD is winning. BSD is in an ongoing downslide. As the marketplace consolidates, BSD has become one of the first casualties.
Your comments sound oddly familiar to the condition of Unix in general, circa 1995:
But why is Unix a failure? Why does it continue to lose marketshare? These questions are never answered. Only a complete idiot would think that Unix is winning. Unix is in an ongoing downslide. As the marketplace consolidates, Unix has become one of the first casualties.
If you're choosing Linux over BSD because of marketing, why aren't you running Windows instead?
Depends on your uses. For many purposes, 4 MB most certainly does not qualify as a "low memory footprint." DR-DOS has a memory footprint of around 50-75KB, and can run useful programs with a total of 640KB installed RAM. Can Linux handle that?
On a somewhat unrelated note, people often cite the VB runtime module as a disadvantage of VB, yet they cite the dynamic linking of Linux as an advantage of Linux. How can it be both at the same time?
I'd be happy to see a more "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." focus here. Perhaps I'm strange, but I see the opposite problem that you do. Slashdot tends to post lots of "somebody or other said linux is bad" or "somebody else said linux is good for PHBs," and i really could care less what mr. critic said about linux. I'd rather have more solid tech articles, regardless of the OS. Cool technology is cool technology, whether it's on Windows, MacOS, BeOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.
Note that WinNT had 98% CPU load going at 4.5 MB/sec. You mention that you don't notice a performance hit at 900kB/sec. If the CPU load varies linearly with transfer speed, NT would only use around 19.5% of the CPU at the 900kB/sec you're getting, at which point you probably wouldn't *notice* any performance hits either.
glibc is obviously a part of the GNU OS, and was written as such. Since it, and other pieces of the not-yet-completed GNU OS are currently used in conjunction with the Linux kernel (since Hurd isn't yet complete), that makes the resulting OS a GNU/Linux hybrid.
Saying that glibc is not part of the OS would be like saying that all the DLLs and the registry are not part of Windows - only kernel32 is. That obviously makes no sense.
Well, I couldn't get to slashdot at all for about 45 minutes this afternoon. Then when I finally did get here, none of the new articles from today showed up on my main page, even after reloading several times. Then around 30 minutes later when I reloaded again, the 6 or so new articles were there. Odd.
Bandwidth doesn't seem to be the problem - if it were, the site would still load, but really slowly. Lots of times I can't get *any* response at all, not even a ping reply. That sounds more like an OS problem of not being able to handle the load properly.
Rob also mentioned that MySQL is not too reliable.
On the contrary, they specifically pointed out that these same questions could be asked of NT, and mentioned that many people don't think NT is ready for prime-time either. They also mentioned that "The Standish Group agrees" with that analysis of NT.
So basically, they don't think either Linux or NT is up to the task.
Well, in the x86 chip market, it seems we're down to three now - Intel (still the leader), AMD (catching up), and WinChip (whose chips, despite the name, work in OSs other than Windows).
I personally have a Pentium II 266 and a Winchip C6 200, but I'll probably get a K7-based system when the K7 comes out, so I'll have one from each. Competition is good.
PS - why is the WinChip 200 so damn slow? I don't use that computer a lot, so it doesn't really bother me, but it seems to be about the same speed as my dad's pentium 120 laptop...is it supposed to be that speed? Any idea what the Pentium Rating would be on that? (I like how Cyrix does that...makes comparison a lot easier)
Well, if the kernels aren't stable, why are they in the "stable" tree? If they were still development kernels, they should've been kept in 2.1.x until the bugs were ironed out, and then released as 2.2.0. 2.2.0 should be the stable kernel, not 2.2.15 or whatever.
That's my point. A mission-critical server is not going to reboot every two weeks to install the newest release of the kernel, even if it does contain patches for bugs that you haven't had to worry about yet.
Linux is based on UNIX, and Thompson nearly single-handedly defined the basics of a UNIX system. Therefore, Linux is an OS that follows the design philosophy of Thompson, and as such, I'd consider him an excellent judge of implementations of his ideas.
He "looked at the code" and saw that some was good and some was bad and implying that because a lot of people had a hand in it that it isn't so good. I would like to know the definition of "bad" in this case. Is he saying that the "bad" code doesn't work or does he know of a more efficient way to write it. Maybe it just was formatted poorly for all we know. If the code _works_ but isn't as efficient as it could be does that make linux poor? Hardly.
Less efficient is definitely bad. It doesn't make it useless, it just makes it poorer than a solution that is more efficient. Plus, Thompson had problems with the stability of Linux, not just its efficiency. I know I personally have gotten it to crash at least six or seven times, and I've had to reset another 10-15 times when I accidentally cat a binary file to stdout and can't get the damn console fixed (even MS-DOS 1.0 can handle this properly - why can't Linux?).
All modern operating systems are written by many people. Some of those coders are better than others so I don't see the distinction with linux. The proof is in the pudding. Linux works well for me, it works well for many 10s/100s of thousands of machines that he says linux is no good for.
Well, Windows works fine for millions of people, too, but that doesn't make it technically advanced. DOS worked fine for millions of people too.
Hmmm. Did his version of unix never crash and not have _any_ poor code in it? Did he write it *all* and did he write it alone? I have no idea but to just spout "He WROTE unix" is as vague as his comments.
He pretty much wrote it alone. I'm sure he had some help, and K&R (the C inventors), IIRC, ported it to C, but Thompson wrote an extremely large portion of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed that too, but that wasn't the only problem. For around 5 hours, the network was down, but for about an hour after it was back up, the slashdot machine was refusing all port 80 connections.
I think they meant "free software General Public License." Somebody needs to do some research before writing articles.
You're missing the point. Tru64 will still be Tru64, a complete OS on its own. GNOME and KDE will merely be window managers (not part of the OS), and RPM isn't even a FSF project.
Linux, on the other hand, is not a complete OS on its own. You can boot Tru64 by itself. You cannot boot a kernel by itself.
The GNU OS will be an OS by itself as well. For the moment, it's missing a kernel, so you can use the Linux kernel as a replacement, making a GNU/Linux hybrid OS, or "GNU OS with the Linux kernel."
Hmm, the punk band Propagandhi manages to spell it right. I guess punks are smarter than journalists after all.
"shut the hell up" is an immature thing to say to the leader of the Free Software movement. I'd guess that's why it was moderated down.
I really have no problem with people using "Linux" as a general shortened term to describe the OS. However, explicitly referring to something as the "Linux OS" is just plain wrong. If somebody said "I run Linux," that's fine, but if you say "I run the Linux OS," that's not.
As for RedHat, yes it's a distribution of an operating system. I'm not sure what it's official name is. Debian GNU/Linux is also a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system.
But why is BSD a failure? Why does it continue to lose marketshare? These questions are never answered. Only a complete idiot would think that BSD is winning. BSD is in an ongoing downslide. As the marketplace consolidates, BSD has become one of the first casualties.
Your comments sound oddly familiar to the condition of Unix in general, circa 1995:
But why is Unix a failure? Why does it continue to lose marketshare? These questions are never answered. Only a complete idiot would think that Unix is winning. Unix is in an ongoing downslide. As the marketplace consolidates, Unix has become one of the first casualties.
If you're choosing Linux over BSD because of marketing, why aren't you running Windows instead?
I wasn't really offerring solutions, just pointing out a problem =)
"Linux" refers to a kernel. You can call the OS GNU/Linux if you wish, "GNU OS with a Linux kernel" if you wish, or just plain "GNU OS."
America Online is considering the Linux operating system...
What is this? I've heard of a Linux kernel, but I don't know anything about a Linux operating system.
Depends on your uses. For many purposes, 4 MB most certainly does not qualify as a "low memory footprint." DR-DOS has a memory footprint of around 50-75KB, and can run useful programs with a total of 640KB installed RAM. Can Linux handle that?
On a somewhat unrelated note, people often cite the VB runtime module as a disadvantage of VB, yet they cite the dynamic linking of Linux as an advantage of Linux. How can it be both at the same time?
I'd be happy to see a more "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." focus here. Perhaps I'm strange, but I see the opposite problem that you do. Slashdot tends to post lots of "somebody or other said linux is bad" or "somebody else said linux is good for PHBs," and i really could care less what mr. critic said about linux. I'd rather have more solid tech articles, regardless of the OS. Cool technology is cool technology, whether it's on Windows, MacOS, BeOS, FreeBSD, or Linux.
Note that WinNT had 98% CPU load going at 4.5 MB/sec. You mention that you don't notice a performance hit at 900kB/sec. If the CPU load varies linearly with transfer speed, NT would only use around 19.5% of the CPU at the 900kB/sec you're getting, at which point you probably wouldn't *notice* any performance hits either.
Congratulations, Jon, you finally got your quotes working =) "blah blah" looks so much nicer than ?blah blah? does.
Well, you don't anymore.
glibc is obviously a part of the GNU OS, and was written as such. Since it, and other pieces of the not-yet-completed GNU OS are currently used in conjunction with the Linux kernel (since Hurd isn't yet complete), that makes the resulting OS a GNU/Linux hybrid.
Saying that glibc is not part of the OS would be like saying that all the DLLs and the registry are not part of Windows - only kernel32 is. That obviously makes no sense.
Well, I couldn't get to slashdot at all for about 45 minutes this afternoon. Then when I finally did get here, none of the new articles from today showed up on my main page, even after reloading several times. Then around 30 minutes later when I reloaded again, the 6 or so new articles were there. Odd.
Betting the farm on Linux+mod_perl+mysql?
Bandwidth doesn't seem to be the problem - if it were, the site would still load, but really slowly. Lots of times I can't get *any* response at all, not even a ping reply. That sounds more like an OS problem of not being able to handle the load properly.
Rob also mentioned that MySQL is not too reliable.
On the contrary, they specifically pointed out that these same questions could be asked of NT, and mentioned that many people don't think NT is ready for prime-time either. They also mentioned that "The Standish Group agrees" with that analysis of NT.
So basically, they don't think either Linux or NT is up to the task.
Well, in the x86 chip market, it seems we're down to three now - Intel (still the leader), AMD (catching up), and WinChip (whose chips, despite the name, work in OSs other than Windows).
I personally have a Pentium II 266 and a Winchip C6 200, but I'll probably get a K7-based system when the K7 comes out, so I'll have one from each. Competition is good.
PS - why is the WinChip 200 so damn slow? I don't use that computer a lot, so it doesn't really bother me, but it seems to be about the same speed as my dad's pentium 120 laptop...is it supposed to be that speed? Any idea what the Pentium Rating would be on that? (I like how Cyrix does that...makes comparison a lot easier)
So if I have an early-to-mid-80s television with an RCA logo on it, is it a "real" RCA or somebody else's?
compare that to slashdot, whose "superior" Open Source solution of mySQL keeps crashing every five minutes...
Well, if the kernels aren't stable, why are they in the "stable" tree? If they were still development kernels, they should've been kept in 2.1.x until the bugs were ironed out, and then released as 2.2.0. 2.2.0 should be the stable kernel, not 2.2.15 or whatever.
That's my point. A mission-critical server is not going to reboot every two weeks to install the newest release of the kernel, even if it does contain patches for bugs that you haven't had to worry about yet.
Sure, those OSs all have their problems, but when was the last time you saw a VMS box crash?
He may have wrote Unix but he didn't write Linux.
Linux is based on UNIX, and Thompson nearly single-handedly defined the basics of a UNIX system. Therefore, Linux is an OS that follows the design philosophy of Thompson, and as such, I'd consider him an excellent judge of implementations of his ideas.
He "looked at the code" and saw that some was good and some was bad and implying that because a lot of people had a hand in it that it isn't so good.
I would like to know the definition of "bad" in this case. Is he saying that the "bad" code doesn't work or does he know of a more efficient way to write it. Maybe it just was formatted poorly for all we know.
If the code _works_ but isn't as efficient as it could be does that make linux poor? Hardly.
Less efficient is definitely bad. It doesn't make it useless, it just makes it poorer than a solution that is more efficient. Plus, Thompson had problems with the stability of Linux, not just its efficiency. I know I personally have gotten it to crash at least six or seven times, and I've had to reset another 10-15 times when I accidentally cat a binary file to stdout and can't get the damn console fixed (even MS-DOS 1.0 can handle this properly - why can't Linux?).
All modern operating systems are written by many people. Some of those coders are better than others so I don't see the distinction with linux.
The proof is in the pudding. Linux works well for me, it works well for many 10s/100s of thousands of machines that he says linux is no good for.
Well, Windows works fine for millions of people, too, but that doesn't make it technically advanced. DOS worked fine for millions of people too.
Hmmm. Did his version of unix never crash and not have _any_ poor code in it? Did he write it *all* and did he write it alone? I have no idea but to just spout "He WROTE unix" is as vague as his comments.
He pretty much wrote it alone. I'm sure he had some help, and K&R (the C inventors), IIRC, ported it to C, but Thompson wrote an extremely large portion of it.