I have a question; how did AMD really prove that it was doing any better than Intel? Did they design any new processor archetecture? No, not really, they simply tacked on some new registers and expanded with bitwidth to accomidate 64 bits. Did they design any signficiantly impacting streaming media extensions? Well, you could argue they made 3Dnow, but it caught on about as well as the original MMX extensions did, and that is to say, not at all.
Now, I respect AMD for what they have done, but it is simply unfair to call them great innovators. They are great implementors; Intel writes the standards and they make them fly. And until AMD grow some balls and diverge from Intel, they're going to be right where they are now; stuck in second.
This isn't to say that AMD is the worse company, they're just misguided. In many ways Intel has coerced them to follow, but in many ways, it's totally their fault. Even when IBM got out of the game of running against Intel in an Intel-world, AMD continued because they had something to prove? Because they had no idea what they were doing, but knew they could do it better than Intel? What exactly is AMD doing?
Let me say AMD was right in trying to strike out from Intel, but they didn't step hard enough, and in many ways, are contributing to their own position. Intel was simply ready for this, and made their own, compatible implementation (which everyone hates, but it's perfectly fair.. Intel made SSE1/2/3 and MMX and well...). If AMD were stiff about wanting to be on top, they'd run against IBM with a PowerPC implementation, or they'd make their own, faster implementation of x86, removing old instructions and replacing them with faster, RISCier ones.
Don't hate me for arguing my point; hate me for the facts. AMD has what it takes to be a seriously major contender for top rank chip company. They could split the marketshare wide open, and run beside everyone. But they seem to be happy where they are. Starting the Anti-trust fire is a simple way to destroy yourself (legal costs will bankrupt you), and Intel's legal department's been waiting for this call for years. They've had plenty of time to sign everyone to NDAs, shred their internal docs, etc. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying that there are better ways to beat a burley beast than to cry foul and run to your government/mommy. It's the same way that Apple will end up regaining their much needed marketshare in the computer world.
One last point; for the last time, AMD wasn't an option to Apple because AMD simply couldn't provide them with a part that's low enough heat emissions to be used in their platforms. Their new machines are *trying* to reduce the footprint of their computers so that they are not so cumbersom; smaller laptops, tablet patents, the iPod, the Mac Mini, the iMac for goodness sake. Apple is trying to make the computer invisible, and the only way to do this, is to use a small, low powered chip, preferably something that's so low voltage and wattage it can be considered an embedded processor and guess what? The Pentium M exactly fits that bill. The Turion simply isn't as low watt, and AMD still hasn't beaten their reputation of their processors lasting in the corporate eyes. I'm really rooting for AMD, but if they want to win, they simply MUST fight fire with fire, and stop complaining when things are finally starting to go right for them!!
The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip, but I'm afraid they simply over-designed it to the point they're carrying too much baggage in the means of pipeline stages to keep encoders happy. And I really hate AMD users who validate everything by the benchmarks since almost any benchmark currently available is optimized either which way, and the only way to really tell is to use the damned hardware and get a feel for it.
Of course, it may seem trollish to bag at benchmarks, but really, I simply don't feel like they prove anything anymore. None really test for what they need to (multiple instructions? multiple threads? Fully qualified float, integer and vector math? Please, 3D mark used to be good, but they've been caught cheating, so let's not go there.
I really love and admire both AMD and Intel (and these days I'm really more on AMD's side, simply because I'm rooting for the underdog, and I'm a poor college boy), but I feel like neither of them are playing fair anymore. AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner. AMD's still a multibillion dollar corporation, and they CAN catch Intel; they just need to do it and shut their upper lip about it.
Intel on the other hand, still employs a great deal of engineers that sit on their asses because of their current marketing team. There is so much they could be doing with Pentium M that they simply won't do, hopefully this deal with Apple will help them to. There's so much they could do with BIOS that they just won't do, hopefully Apple can alleviate this as well. There is simply so much innovation to be had, and it's so stifled by old technology, bad marketing and biggotry.
On a side note; if Intel went with the Pentium M now, that could really be a sign of monopolistic behavior that AMD could use. The Pentium M was designed by nature to run cooler, period, and thus, can outclock its competitors. I believe the IPC is still a bit lower than A64, but mainly due to A64's bitwidth. We'll see in about a year.
Oh well, I love AMD for their work, but I really think they barked up the wrong tree. I would have supported whole heartedly an implementation of PPC 64-bit or even some grounded up archetecture just as much as I supported Itanium, but they decided to go the cheapest route, faking it for the sake of performance.
Secondly, the Itanium's really not a consumer chip, as much as Intel wants it to be. The Itanium's a hella fast server chip, and that's where it'll stay for the rest of its diminuative mitigated life. I liken it to the POWER chips.
Now, if Intel got off their asses, they'd realize they could have it both ways if they wanted. Release a chip that's got a true x86-32 bit core and a true 64-bit Itanium core, run them in parallel and when code comes for a 32 bit processor, let it run on the x86 core. The earlier P6 cores would suffice, hell, even a Pentium M with a smaller cache and a lower clock speed would work. But that's a very complicated solution, and it's really playing to the masses.
Lastly, I don't want to sound too harsh on AMD, they really are doing their best to get back marketshare, but I really feel they've headed in a bad direction. While it seems like a good business move, it's terribly prolonging x86's life. On top of that, it's causing a huge stir in the market, especially where it concerns the hundred billion dollar giant Intel and the even worse, Microsoft. While both are bloated monopolies, they both have enough money and enough power to shut AMD up permanantly, and where would we be left, Transmeta??? Please. AMD needs to play their cards right and not be so infuriated; their gains are there, for the first time their server hardware is there, they just need to get their reputation running for them. It's really such a complex issue that I don't know where I stand with AMD anymore. I hate them for x86-64, but I love them for their speed. I hate them for keeping Itaniums out of my reach, but I love them for gaming. So complex an issue.
Wow.. after seeing the screenshots (and yes, I know there are a lot of comments already I know about that are like "OMG such a Mac ripp" but I'm not going to go into those right now... ), it actually looks like Microsoft could have gotten something right for a change.
In "Computer" (thank goodness they removed My, I've been doing that since Windows 95..), it shows a little percentage full box so that at a quick glance, you can get a good estimate of how much disk space you have left. If they floated a percentage over it, it would be better, but I liked that touch.
Ubuntu is a Desktop Linux, yes, but it is more than that as well.
Before Ubuntu started, the project UserLinux started, and Ubuntu shares with it plenty of its qualities. In fact, they started at the same time with so many similiar qualities, I'm totally not surprised that one of them died, and the other lived.
Secondly, business machines are Desktop Machines. They are also Laptops. They are also Workstations. They are also Servers of many different kinds. You can't just say a business machine is one of those things. And so, Ubuntu also caters to these other fields. Just because the mindshare of linux users percieve Ubuntu as "yet another desktop linux", the mindshare of business people should look at Ubuntu as "another option". Ubuntu's meaning is the same as UserLinux's meaning: Be what Redhat and SuSE are, but without being a specific corporation's pocket project (Novell and SuSE, Redhat and IBM). Enterprise servers, of course, is the battleground, so in my eyes, this has everything to do with enterprise servers.
I disagree. As a computer company, Apple may not be very mainstream, but they do make computers and they are quite profittable. Many people also own Macs or have used them before in some capacity, and that's more than can be said for any other operating system except for Windows of course (remember, Macs are *everywhere*; schools, public libraries, professional art galleries I've been in have them).
As a music content delivering company, however, they're the mainstream. iPods outnumber most any other MP3 player (if not all, I may be mistaken), they're all over television, newspaper ads, the sides of buildings.
Once a company has hit the billions mark by sells of a consumer good, they can be considered "mainstream" in my book. Hell, I'm not too sure about your logic but I'd even consider Alienware as mainstream (though, like Apple, they are a niche provider; they provide for the gaming niche of course). It all really depends on how you want to define "mainstream".
Debian is "Enterprise Grade" if you've spent years with Debian. I honestly don't think I'd be capable of administrating a Debian server, and I've been running Debian-based distros for the past 5 years, yet I know for a fact I can administrate Windows servers (being a previous System Admin) with about the same time frame of experience.
The problem is how deeply intricate services in Unix are. Everything has to be put in a certain folder. Everything has different runlevels. Everything's got different start up scripts, everything's got their own little special ways of doing everything, and thus, nothing is unified. While I know how to stop and start an SSH daemon, hardware busses, DHCP, and a few other services, I'd be lost if a company told me "okay, install this service and have it up and running by noon.".
So, this will be a welcome addition; a single panel where I can go to add in any new services at any time I like, remove them, and without having to be too obsessed about runlevels and such. I wanna be able to tell it when (at boot/at login) and how often and what user to run under and be done.
Sure I'll get a million responses ("oh this is how you do it, it's not hard, blah blah blah"), but that doesn't help; you can tell *me* how to do it, but until you are able to train people how to do it effectively and quickly, I think system admins will continue to shy away from debian (and sadly, Linux for a lot of the same reasoning).
The worse problem is, even though debian supports RPM (through dpkg re-wrapping rpms basically), the apt system doesn't realize a dependency has been filled (or at least, that's been my experience).
Secondly, WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE DISTRIBUTION MADNESS????? Why can't they just talk to the Ubuntu people (the only people who really have a chance at a new enterprize debian-based system, but only if they play their cards right), and work out the differences?
Um, I'm sorry but plenty of progams that the Gentoo/BSD crowd use statically link to zlib, and thus, must be patched and rebuilt, thus meaning that the grandparent is correct.
While setting up Gentoo for the first time myself, I remarked about this, and of course, my friends told me it would be "no big problem". Sadly, the 500MHz Celeron system I installed it on will now require to be shut down for nearly a week while it goes through everything effected and rebuilds it all. Of course, ccache and distcc will help speed this up, but neither is the perfect solution (distcc requires the computers be up and running and on the network during the entire compile process, ccache can only ccache objects that don't change and can take up a ton of space with cached objects).
Meanwhile all of my file servers will be perfectly alright with an apt-get upgrade and a manditory restart (system policy; I'd much rather insure the newer libraries are loaded into memory than risk it).
..I meant the internals; All of my machines run Debian/Ubuntu, so I have a great understanding of how debian deals with dependencies, finding packages (How dare you leave out apt-cache search?!), etc. There's a lot externally I know, but when it comes to knowing how a package is put together, I don't really know or care. I don't intend on developing software specifically for debian (though if people package it for debian, I wouldn't object).
Did anyone else think that Microsoft's new Beta distribution system will use BitTorrent?? Saves them lots on bandwidth costs, and it's been proven to work (Blizzard's WoW betas for example). Possible? Likely?
Microsoft and even Apple include complete GUI developer's kits, full documentation, et all, in a single package. Linux (specifically Ubuntu) doesn't.
While build-dep might get some of them, as no GNOME application deals with all of GNOME, you're still left grepping through apt-cache to find a library you need.
Some people say this is an advantage of Linux; you only "get what you need", but when you're trying to learn a new platform, I often find it's good to have everything you could possibly need already at your disposal, along with the help documentation so that you may read about it.
I think you have it backwards; Debian is distancing itself from all of its children.
By keeping their incredibly slow support cycle, by not listening to other distributions that rely on Debian's apt system, they're really shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to keeping up.
While Debian I'm sure will continue exist, desktop Debian is certainly dead, and Ubuntu will most definitely take its place, especially with their new endowment and resolve. If you really want to think about it, Ubuntu really is the future of Debian anyways; slowly phasing out perl in favor of python, etc. etc.
My biggest critique of Ubuntu is that it seems to almost handicap anyone who wants to be a software developer.
While yes, we can grep through apt-cache and try to find all of the development packages we need, why can't they just provide a pseudo-package "ubuntu-devel" that has everything (gcc, make and friends, gtk2 dev libraries and docs, etc) wrapped up into a neat little package? This is one of the things I loved about UserLinux that hasn't quite made it into Ubuntu yet.
Agreed. The invention of AJAX will bring a new era to web gaming; flash games where you can actually save state on server basically. When SVG comes to maturity, we'll see a lot of the lower class game citizens being reimplemented here.
Personally, I'd love to see a web version of Nethack, just to see it done. Or better yet, games like the early Final Fantasy series. To me, those games represent when gaming was actually fun and not all about eye candy or competition, it was the story that drew you in, got you addicted, and hours later, it was what you talked to all of your friends about (if you were a geek like most of us here).
It really doesn't require that much to permit communication neurologically; Chimpanzees, Apes, and a lot of other animals show forms of non-verbal communication all of the time. In fact, there are chimps and other great apes that communicate with sign language (though I can't remember their names; google it!)
Verbal communication isn't possible because a lot of these animals lack the muscles and nerves to control vocalizations, a soft pallette for the sound production (vocal chords), and most importantly, they lack English.
One would think their minds are more than developed enough, though their use of English may be something like a little kid's. It would still be interesting to hear a cave man's perspective on life, though I doubt it would be much more than "work, live, die".
A three year old, less-than-humanistically-intellegent organism learning something as complex as blogging at the age of 3?? He must really be a savant of Neanderthals.
But seriously, given they have a vocal pallet close to ours, they should be capable of human speech, and thus English (or any other spoken language) wouldn't be too hard to learn.
Perhaps prosecuted is the wrong word. I mean he didn't violate any laws at all. At most, he violated his ISP's terms of services, and I'll be the first to say if my ISP had in its terms of services that I wasn't allowed to run a Wireless Access Point at the other end, then I wouldn't be using that ISP.
How long will it be until people build a peer to peer internet because all of these jackasses keep prosecuting us like we're terrorists for simply sharing information?
Well, I'd agree with you if you simply decided to give a little evidence along with your post, but I'm going to go ahead and give my evidence on why Linux still is a sub-par operating environment. Feel free to flame me afterwards about how all of my assumptions are incorrect.
"Installing Applications is complicated"
In Windows, there is one way to install an application, even if there are multiple hundreds of different installer frameworks. In the end, it comes down to running a setup program by double clicking on it (or simply inserting a CD if you're lucky), and waiting, and perhaps a reboot at the end if you're unlucky.
In Linux, I first have to determine what kind of Linux I'm running; In Debian I have to "apt-get install package" in a terminal, or use synaptic (if it's installed), aptitude, or some other interface. In Gentoo I have to "emerge package". Oh, and you might wanna throw in those USE flags and a "-v" in there, just so it spits out all of the information. In Slackware I have to grab a tar.gz file and compile it myself (./configure, make, make install in a terminal). The list goes on and on.
In Mac OS X, I have to drag a pretty little icon out of a little window that has an icon that looks like a disk, even for installing some of the more complicated applications.
"Directory structures can be confusing to navigate"
In Windows, the root desktop gives me a few entry points into the file system: My Computer gives me access to all of the file systems currently mounted. My Documents gives me.. well.. my documents. Recycle bin takes me to trash files.
In Linux, if a user is lucky enough to log into either GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or some other desktop environment, the user is presented with a plethora of file system access points. Usually a link to each mounted disk is dropped on the desktop, along with a link to my user's "home" directory. If I'm not so lucky, I'm dropped into my home directory, and I have to find out where everything is in relative to it.
In Mac OS X, the computer mounts all of the disks to the desktop, along with installer images. No exceptions.
In Windows, file names are usually very long and descriptive; "Program Files" indicate where my application's binaries are usually located. "Windows" is where my operating system is mostly located. Ad nauseum.
In Linux, file names are often shortened to as few characters as possible. Directories such as/usr,/dev,/etc exist without much explaination to what they mean, unless you read the standards. (For an example of this, I have often been corrected when I call "/usr" "user", "/dev" "development *doh!*" and "/etc" "all of that other crap".
In Mac OS X, programs are typically located in Programs, documents in Documents, etc. These are also linked to in the side menu as an easy way to navigate to them.
"Interface is confusing and inconsistent"
Do I really, really have to go into this? Windows and Linux fail this test miserably.
"Steep learning curve required to understand system functions"
Windows isn't much of a learning curve simply because it's installed on pretty much every machine shipped currently. It still takes a while for new users to get a hold of newer functions, but the help functionality is there, and is very obtrusive at times.
In Linux, I'm not entirely sure help documentation is installed by default. I have to check with my package manager first. Then if it is, I can either use "man" (why can't we just call this "manual"?) to find help, or I can use one of the desktop environment's tools, provided I can figure out how.
In Mac OS X, help is usually not too much further away than a single menu.
Look, it's very simple. When you design something for people to use, you want to make sure that the names of things make sense to people, and that the locations of things are sensible. Why can't we rename things like/usr to
No offense, but the problem you just suggested seems like one of those "whooptie do" problems.
Mac OS X is designed like any other platform to be a lock in platform, that is, it uses the same file format everywhere. Even iPods are formatted HFS+. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to burn a disk or reformat an iPod, it just means that you *NEED TO BE FAMILIAR WITH THE PLATFORM TO USE IT*.
Just because the way you use computers isn't the same as the way Mac users use their computers, doesn't mean your opinion is magically better than theirs. It means you are looking for something else. If you like compatibility, stay on Windows. Everything in the world runs Windows. If you like to tinker, use Linux. If you just want to use your damned computer, use Mac OS X. It's that simple.
I think Linux, as does Windows, has a new toy to catch up to, and that'd be Mac OS X. In this new game, Linux is even further behind, and Windows is gaining on it, but is terribly slow at it.
Linux could catch up, but people are too divided on things like Beagle for example. I wouldn't touch Beagle's code as it stands with a ten foot pole due to its strongly natured Mono dependencies, which would mean I'd have to install dependency after dependency to get a simple file indexer running, not to mention having to recompile my kernel to support the latest inotify patch.
If inotify was a kernel module and thus replacable within a currently built kernel, life would be better in this aspect, but as VFS is designed, this would probably be quite the task.
Lastly, I don't really know what crack you are smoking. Spatial Nautilus is a user's nightmare; the old window disappears and in it's place is the current directory with no easy, apparent way to get back except clicking through a menu. While you may argue that this is functionally close to Mac OS X, at least we have damned back and forth buttons, and a bar of commonly used folders on the side (I find it would be nicer to have an absolute address bar, but it's definitely livable without one, especially in Mac OS X where you don't get nested so deeply into folders like you would on Linux or Windows).
Beagle is a terrible re-implemented version of Spotlight; it's significantly slower, written in.NET (which requires you to install an assload of extra libraries if that's all you have on your system running.NET code), and requires a kernel recompile just to make it useful.
The iNotify patch in the kernel is useful, but Beagle is probably the last implementation I'd hand my good graces to. Perhaps if they used a real SQL engine (read: redirectable) and did indexing within the server, perhaps if they made the daemon run in userspace and not be so obtrustive (they might have already fixed this, hopefully so. The last time I had Beagle installed it required me to let it run as root and thus indexed EVERYTHING, whether I liked it or not).
Seriously folks, the whole meta-data extracting tool isn't that hard to build. Everyone's over-engineering their products (yes, I am convinced even Apple is currently realizing this). While the part of actually *understanding* the metadata is more important than the foraging of the files to get it. Next time, let's limit it to only crawling the documents/music/movies folders, and then once it has all of the metadata for these types loaded, go for everything else, in its spare time.
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I have a question; how did AMD really prove that it was doing any better than Intel? Did they design any new processor archetecture? No, not really, they simply tacked on some new registers and expanded with bitwidth to accomidate 64 bits. Did they design any signficiantly impacting streaming media extensions? Well, you could argue they made 3Dnow, but it caught on about as well as the original MMX extensions did, and that is to say, not at all.
Now, I respect AMD for what they have done, but it is simply unfair to call them great innovators. They are great implementors; Intel writes the standards and they make them fly. And until AMD grow some balls and diverge from Intel, they're going to be right where they are now; stuck in second.
This isn't to say that AMD is the worse company, they're just misguided. In many ways Intel has coerced them to follow, but in many ways, it's totally their fault. Even when IBM got out of the game of running against Intel in an Intel-world, AMD continued because they had something to prove? Because they had no idea what they were doing, but knew they could do it better than Intel? What exactly is AMD doing?
Let me say AMD was right in trying to strike out from Intel, but they didn't step hard enough, and in many ways, are contributing to their own position. Intel was simply ready for this, and made their own, compatible implementation (which everyone hates, but it's perfectly fair.. Intel made SSE1/2/3 and MMX and well...). If AMD were stiff about wanting to be on top, they'd run against IBM with a PowerPC implementation, or they'd make their own, faster implementation of x86, removing old instructions and replacing them with faster, RISCier ones.
Don't hate me for arguing my point; hate me for the facts. AMD has what it takes to be a seriously major contender for top rank chip company. They could split the marketshare wide open, and run beside everyone. But they seem to be happy where they are. Starting the Anti-trust fire is a simple way to destroy yourself (legal costs will bankrupt you), and Intel's legal department's been waiting for this call for years. They've had plenty of time to sign everyone to NDAs, shred their internal docs, etc. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm saying that there are better ways to beat a burley beast than to cry foul and run to your government/mommy. It's the same way that Apple will end up regaining their much needed marketshare in the computer world.
One last point; for the last time, AMD wasn't an option to Apple because AMD simply couldn't provide them with a part that's low enough heat emissions to be used in their platforms. Their new machines are *trying* to reduce the footprint of their computers so that they are not so cumbersom; smaller laptops, tablet patents, the iPod, the Mac Mini, the iMac for goodness sake. Apple is trying to make the computer invisible, and the only way to do this, is to use a small, low powered chip, preferably something that's so low voltage and wattage it can be considered an embedded processor and guess what? The Pentium M exactly fits that bill. The Turion simply isn't as low watt, and AMD still hasn't beaten their reputation of their processors lasting in the corporate eyes. I'm really rooting for AMD, but if they want to win, they simply MUST fight fire with fire, and stop complaining when things are finally starting to go right for them!!
The Pentium 4's design is superior in the ranks of a server chip, but I'm afraid they simply over-designed it to the point they're carrying too much baggage in the means of pipeline stages to keep encoders happy. And I really hate AMD users who validate everything by the benchmarks since almost any benchmark currently available is optimized either which way, and the only way to really tell is to use the damned hardware and get a feel for it.
Of course, it may seem trollish to bag at benchmarks, but really, I simply don't feel like they prove anything anymore. None really test for what they need to (multiple instructions? multiple threads? Fully qualified float, integer and vector math? Please, 3D mark used to be good, but they've been caught cheating, so let's not go there.
I really love and admire both AMD and Intel (and these days I'm really more on AMD's side, simply because I'm rooting for the underdog, and I'm a poor college boy), but I feel like neither of them are playing fair anymore. AMD gets a rush off copying every implementation Intel's ever made, and yet, when Intel does the same they cry foul? That's not sportsmanly at all, that's just being a whiner. AMD's still a multibillion dollar corporation, and they CAN catch Intel; they just need to do it and shut their upper lip about it.
Intel on the other hand, still employs a great deal of engineers that sit on their asses because of their current marketing team. There is so much they could be doing with Pentium M that they simply won't do, hopefully this deal with Apple will help them to. There's so much they could do with BIOS that they just won't do, hopefully Apple can alleviate this as well. There is simply so much innovation to be had, and it's so stifled by old technology, bad marketing and biggotry.
On a side note; if Intel went with the Pentium M now, that could really be a sign of monopolistic behavior that AMD could use. The Pentium M was designed by nature to run cooler, period, and thus, can outclock its competitors. I believe the IPC is still a bit lower than A64, but mainly due to A64's bitwidth. We'll see in about a year.
Oh well, I love AMD for their work, but I really think they barked up the wrong tree. I would have supported whole heartedly an implementation of PPC 64-bit or even some grounded up archetecture just as much as I supported Itanium, but they decided to go the cheapest route, faking it for the sake of performance.
Secondly, the Itanium's really not a consumer chip, as much as Intel wants it to be. The Itanium's a hella fast server chip, and that's where it'll stay for the rest of its diminuative mitigated life. I liken it to the POWER chips.
Now, if Intel got off their asses, they'd realize they could have it both ways if they wanted. Release a chip that's got a true x86-32 bit core and a true 64-bit Itanium core, run them in parallel and when code comes for a 32 bit processor, let it run on the x86 core. The earlier P6 cores would suffice, hell, even a Pentium M with a smaller cache and a lower clock speed would work. But that's a very complicated solution, and it's really playing to the masses.
Lastly, I don't want to sound too harsh on AMD, they really are doing their best to get back marketshare, but I really feel they've headed in a bad direction. While it seems like a good business move, it's terribly prolonging x86's life. On top of that, it's causing a huge stir in the market, especially where it concerns the hundred billion dollar giant Intel and the even worse, Microsoft. While both are bloated monopolies, they both have enough money and enough power to shut AMD up permanantly, and where would we be left, Transmeta??? Please. AMD needs to play their cards right and not be so infuriated; their gains are there, for the first time their server hardware is there, they just need to get their reputation running for them. It's really such a complex issue that I don't know where I stand with AMD anymore. I hate them for x86-64, but I love them for their speed. I hate them for keeping Itaniums out of my reach, but I love them for gaming. So complex an issue.
Wow.. after seeing the screenshots (and yes, I know there are a lot of comments already I know about that are like "OMG such a Mac ripp" but I'm not going to go into those right now... ), it actually looks like Microsoft could have gotten something right for a change.
In "Computer" (thank goodness they removed My, I've been doing that since Windows 95..), it shows a little percentage full box so that at a quick glance, you can get a good estimate of how much disk space you have left. If they floated a percentage over it, it would be better, but I liked that touch.
Ubuntu is a Desktop Linux, yes, but it is more than that as well.
Before Ubuntu started, the project UserLinux started, and Ubuntu shares with it plenty of its qualities. In fact, they started at the same time with so many similiar qualities, I'm totally not surprised that one of them died, and the other lived.
Secondly, business machines are Desktop Machines. They are also Laptops. They are also Workstations. They are also Servers of many different kinds. You can't just say a business machine is one of those things. And so, Ubuntu also caters to these other fields. Just because the mindshare of linux users percieve Ubuntu as "yet another desktop linux", the mindshare of business people should look at Ubuntu as "another option". Ubuntu's meaning is the same as UserLinux's meaning: Be what Redhat and SuSE are, but without being a specific corporation's pocket project (Novell and SuSE, Redhat and IBM). Enterprise servers, of course, is the battleground, so in my eyes, this has everything to do with enterprise servers.
I disagree. As a computer company, Apple may not be very mainstream, but they do make computers and they are quite profittable. Many people also own Macs or have used them before in some capacity, and that's more than can be said for any other operating system except for Windows of course (remember, Macs are *everywhere*; schools, public libraries, professional art galleries I've been in have them).
As a music content delivering company, however, they're the mainstream. iPods outnumber most any other MP3 player (if not all, I may be mistaken), they're all over television, newspaper ads, the sides of buildings.
Once a company has hit the billions mark by sells of a consumer good, they can be considered "mainstream" in my book. Hell, I'm not too sure about your logic but I'd even consider Alienware as mainstream (though, like Apple, they are a niche provider; they provide for the gaming niche of course). It all really depends on how you want to define "mainstream".
Debian is "Enterprise Grade" if you've spent years with Debian. I honestly don't think I'd be capable of administrating a Debian server, and I've been running Debian-based distros for the past 5 years, yet I know for a fact I can administrate Windows servers (being a previous System Admin) with about the same time frame of experience.
The problem is how deeply intricate services in Unix are. Everything has to be put in a certain folder. Everything has different runlevels. Everything's got different start up scripts, everything's got their own little special ways of doing everything, and thus, nothing is unified. While I know how to stop and start an SSH daemon, hardware busses, DHCP, and a few other services, I'd be lost if a company told me "okay, install this service and have it up and running by noon.".
So, this will be a welcome addition; a single panel where I can go to add in any new services at any time I like, remove them, and without having to be too obsessed about runlevels and such. I wanna be able to tell it when (at boot/at login) and how often and what user to run under and be done.
Sure I'll get a million responses ("oh this is how you do it, it's not hard, blah blah blah"), but that doesn't help; you can tell *me* how to do it, but until you are able to train people how to do it effectively and quickly, I think system admins will continue to shy away from debian (and sadly, Linux for a lot of the same reasoning).
The worse problem is, even though debian supports RPM (through dpkg re-wrapping rpms basically), the apt system doesn't realize a dependency has been filled (or at least, that's been my experience).
Secondly, WHAT THE HELL IS WITH THE DISTRIBUTION MADNESS????? Why can't they just talk to the Ubuntu people (the only people who really have a chance at a new enterprize debian-based system, but only if they play their cards right), and work out the differences?
Um, I'm sorry but plenty of progams that the Gentoo/BSD crowd use statically link to zlib, and thus, must be patched and rebuilt, thus meaning that the grandparent is correct.
While setting up Gentoo for the first time myself, I remarked about this, and of course, my friends told me it would be "no big problem". Sadly, the 500MHz Celeron system I installed it on will now require to be shut down for nearly a week while it goes through everything effected and rebuilds it all. Of course, ccache and distcc will help speed this up, but neither is the perfect solution (distcc requires the computers be up and running and on the network during the entire compile process, ccache can only ccache objects that don't change and can take up a ton of space with cached objects).
Meanwhile all of my file servers will be perfectly alright with an apt-get upgrade and a manditory restart (system policy; I'd much rather insure the newer libraries are loaded into memory than risk it).
..I meant the internals; All of my machines run Debian/Ubuntu, so I have a great understanding of how debian deals with dependencies, finding packages (How dare you leave out apt-cache search?!), etc. There's a lot externally I know, but when it comes to knowing how a package is put together, I don't really know or care. I don't intend on developing software specifically for debian (though if people package it for debian, I wouldn't object).
Did anyone else think that Microsoft's new Beta distribution system will use BitTorrent?? Saves them lots on bandwidth costs, and it's been proven to work (Blizzard's WoW betas for example). Possible? Likely?
You'd like to think so, but it truely isn't.
Microsoft and even Apple include complete GUI developer's kits, full documentation, et all, in a single package. Linux (specifically Ubuntu) doesn't.
While build-dep might get some of them, as no GNOME application deals with all of GNOME, you're still left grepping through apt-cache to find a library you need.
Some people say this is an advantage of Linux; you only "get what you need", but when you're trying to learn a new platform, I often find it's good to have everything you could possibly need already at your disposal, along with the help documentation so that you may read about it.
Heh, it could, but I know jack shit about Debian's packaging system, and frankly don't have the time to learn. ;)
I think you have it backwards; Debian is distancing itself from all of its children.
By keeping their incredibly slow support cycle, by not listening to other distributions that rely on Debian's apt system, they're really shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to keeping up.
While Debian I'm sure will continue exist, desktop Debian is certainly dead, and Ubuntu will most definitely take its place, especially with their new endowment and resolve. If you really want to think about it, Ubuntu really is the future of Debian anyways; slowly phasing out perl in favor of python, etc. etc.
My biggest critique of Ubuntu is that it seems to almost handicap anyone who wants to be a software developer.
While yes, we can grep through apt-cache and try to find all of the development packages we need, why can't they just provide a pseudo-package "ubuntu-devel" that has everything (gcc, make and friends, gtk2 dev libraries and docs, etc) wrapped up into a neat little package? This is one of the things I loved about UserLinux that hasn't quite made it into Ubuntu yet.
Go Willie Nelson!
Well, wasn't that a verbal abortion; I think he meant "Go Willie Nelson.. FAR FAR AWAY AND NEVER RETURN!!!!"
Agreed. The invention of AJAX will bring a new era to web gaming; flash games where you can actually save state on server basically. When SVG comes to maturity, we'll see a lot of the lower class game citizens being reimplemented here.
Personally, I'd love to see a web version of Nethack, just to see it done. Or better yet, games like the early Final Fantasy series. To me, those games represent when gaming was actually fun and not all about eye candy or competition, it was the story that drew you in, got you addicted, and hours later, it was what you talked to all of your friends about (if you were a geek like most of us here).
The problem is, if *any* of it is real, then we have a problem.
Especially recently with all of the banks coming out with information of their customers being comprimised.
It really doesn't require that much to permit communication neurologically; Chimpanzees, Apes, and a lot of other animals show forms of non-verbal communication all of the time. In fact, there are chimps and other great apes that communicate with sign language (though I can't remember their names; google it!)
Verbal communication isn't possible because a lot of these animals lack the muscles and nerves to control vocalizations, a soft pallette for the sound production (vocal chords), and most importantly, they lack English.
One would think their minds are more than developed enough, though their use of English may be something like a little kid's. It would still be interesting to hear a cave man's perspective on life, though I doubt it would be much more than "work, live, die".
A three year old, less-than-humanistically-intellegent organism learning something as complex as blogging at the age of 3?? He must really be a savant of Neanderthals.
But seriously, given they have a vocal pallet close to ours, they should be capable of human speech, and thus English (or any other spoken language) wouldn't be too hard to learn.
Perhaps prosecuted is the wrong word. I mean he didn't violate any laws at all. At most, he violated his ISP's terms of services, and I'll be the first to say if my ISP had in its terms of services that I wasn't allowed to run a Wireless Access Point at the other end, then I wouldn't be using that ISP.
How long will it be until people build a peer to peer internet because all of these jackasses keep prosecuting us like we're terrorists for simply sharing information?
Well, I'd agree with you if you simply decided to give a little evidence along with your post, but I'm going to go ahead and give my evidence on why Linux still is a sub-par operating environment. Feel free to flame me afterwards about how all of my assumptions are incorrect.
/usr, /dev, /etc exist without much explaination to what they mean, unless you read the standards. (For an example of this, I have often been corrected when I call "/usr" "user", "/dev" "development *doh!*" and "/etc" "all of that other crap".
/usr to
"Installing Applications is complicated"
In Windows, there is one way to install an application, even if there are multiple hundreds of different installer frameworks. In the end, it comes down to running a setup program by double clicking on it (or simply inserting a CD if you're lucky), and waiting, and perhaps a reboot at the end if you're unlucky.
In Linux, I first have to determine what kind of Linux I'm running; In Debian I have to "apt-get install package" in a terminal, or use synaptic (if it's installed), aptitude, or some other interface. In Gentoo I have to "emerge package". Oh, and you might wanna throw in those USE flags and a "-v" in there, just so it spits out all of the information. In Slackware I have to grab a tar.gz file and compile it myself (./configure, make, make install in a terminal). The list goes on and on.
In Mac OS X, I have to drag a pretty little icon out of a little window that has an icon that looks like a disk, even for installing some of the more complicated applications.
"Directory structures can be confusing to navigate"
In Windows, the root desktop gives me a few entry points into the file system: My Computer gives me access to all of the file systems currently mounted. My Documents gives me.. well.. my documents. Recycle bin takes me to trash files.
In Linux, if a user is lucky enough to log into either GNOME, KDE, Xfce, or some other desktop environment, the user is presented with a plethora of file system access points. Usually a link to each mounted disk is dropped on the desktop, along with a link to my user's "home" directory. If I'm not so lucky, I'm dropped into my home directory, and I have to find out where everything is in relative to it.
In Mac OS X, the computer mounts all of the disks to the desktop, along with installer images. No exceptions.
In Windows, file names are usually very long and descriptive; "Program Files" indicate where my application's binaries are usually located. "Windows" is where my operating system is mostly located. Ad nauseum.
In Linux, file names are often shortened to as few characters as possible. Directories such as
In Mac OS X, programs are typically located in Programs, documents in Documents, etc. These are also linked to in the side menu as an easy way to navigate to them.
"Interface is confusing and inconsistent"
Do I really, really have to go into this? Windows and Linux fail this test miserably.
"Steep learning curve required to understand system functions"
Windows isn't much of a learning curve simply because it's installed on pretty much every machine shipped currently. It still takes a while for new users to get a hold of newer functions, but the help functionality is there, and is very obtrusive at times.
In Linux, I'm not entirely sure help documentation is installed by default. I have to check with my package manager first. Then if it is, I can either use "man" (why can't we just call this "manual"?) to find help, or I can use one of the desktop environment's tools, provided I can figure out how.
In Mac OS X, help is usually not too much further away than a single menu.
Look, it's very simple. When you design something for people to use, you want to make sure that the names of things make sense to people, and that the locations of things are sensible. Why can't we rename things like
No offense, but the problem you just suggested seems like one of those "whooptie do" problems.
Mac OS X is designed like any other platform to be a lock in platform, that is, it uses the same file format everywhere. Even iPods are formatted HFS+. This doesn't mean that it's impossible to burn a disk or reformat an iPod, it just means that you *NEED TO BE FAMILIAR WITH THE PLATFORM TO USE IT*.
Just because the way you use computers isn't the same as the way Mac users use their computers, doesn't mean your opinion is magically better than theirs. It means you are looking for something else. If you like compatibility, stay on Windows. Everything in the world runs Windows. If you like to tinker, use Linux. If you just want to use your damned computer, use Mac OS X. It's that simple.
I think Linux, as does Windows, has a new toy to catch up to, and that'd be Mac OS X. In this new game, Linux is even further behind, and Windows is gaining on it, but is terribly slow at it.
Linux could catch up, but people are too divided on things like Beagle for example. I wouldn't touch Beagle's code as it stands with a ten foot pole due to its strongly natured Mono dependencies, which would mean I'd have to install dependency after dependency to get a simple file indexer running, not to mention having to recompile my kernel to support the latest inotify patch.
If inotify was a kernel module and thus replacable within a currently built kernel, life would be better in this aspect, but as VFS is designed, this would probably be quite the task.
Lastly, I don't really know what crack you are smoking. Spatial Nautilus is a user's nightmare; the old window disappears and in it's place is the current directory with no easy, apparent way to get back except clicking through a menu. While you may argue that this is functionally close to Mac OS X, at least we have damned back and forth buttons, and a bar of commonly used folders on the side (I find it would be nicer to have an absolute address bar, but it's definitely livable without one, especially in Mac OS X where you don't get nested so deeply into folders like you would on Linux or Windows).
Beagle is a terrible re-implemented version of Spotlight; it's significantly slower, written in .NET (which requires you to install an assload of extra libraries if that's all you have on your system running .NET code), and requires a kernel recompile just to make it useful.
The iNotify patch in the kernel is useful, but Beagle is probably the last implementation I'd hand my good graces to. Perhaps if they used a real SQL engine (read: redirectable) and did indexing within the server, perhaps if they made the daemon run in userspace and not be so obtrustive (they might have already fixed this, hopefully so. The last time I had Beagle installed it required me to let it run as root and thus indexed EVERYTHING, whether I liked it or not).
Seriously folks, the whole meta-data extracting tool isn't that hard to build. Everyone's over-engineering their products (yes, I am convinced even Apple is currently realizing this). While the part of actually *understanding* the metadata is more important than the foraging of the files to get it. Next time, let's limit it to only crawling the documents/music/movies folders, and then once it has all of the metadata for these types loaded, go for everything else, in its spare time.