"The last Linus-only release before getting together with Andrew".
Also, why do you think Andrew Morton has started maintaining the "2.6 must-fix list" and had moderated two IRC conferences to know who will feel responsible for which lacking bug fixes etc.?
Sorry, should have added a link rightaway, so
here it is. I think Linus didn't enjoy the 2.4 series as much as development kernels, and maybe also understood that others could be better at the more boring side of evaluating bug fixes etc. (Hats off for that!) He might share the maintenance with Andrew Morton, or possibly completely hand it over by 2.6.0.
2.5 is the development branch, it doesnt need "maintaining".
Well, it's already mostly in maintenance status, i.e. waiting for bugfixes, more testers reporting and so on.
...as he is just about to hand over maintenance of 2.5/2.6 to Andrew Morton. So maybe he actually hopes to do some hacking again, instead of just integrating other peoples' work. Cool!
Conferring with a few friends who are lawyers in this field, the consensus is that to get the legal fees at least, he'd have to demonstrate far more than his innocence, but also the RIAA's foreknowledge of his innocence most likely.
Don't want to be bitching about the U.S. legal system as is common on/., but I think this is really one of its weakest point.
In Germany (and I presume in many other states), the side who looses a court battle has to cover
the so called "Gerichtskosten" (court expenses), which covers all legal fees paid by the opposing side, plus a bunch of expenses (such as costs for expert witnesses etc.) made by the court.
This makes it a lot easier to fight the battle if you are weaker on money but having the clearly stronger case.
Yes. But you have to take into account that overall it is still a very small percentage (of desktop computers) that run or will run Linux.
The highly applauded
switch of the city of Munich to Linux had an order volume of 30 millions of Euros over a couple of years. That's just about nothing in M$'s budget. (They have fighted so heavily for it just for it's symbolic and psychological value.)
Your point is taken, but the issue is that we are talking about infrastructure here. There will always be an economic need for infrastructure, and thus there will always be money to create it.
But raising this money by collecting royalties from every user of that infrastructure is a bad idea. To exaggerate a little (yeah, just little), imagine where the economoy would be if everyone had to pay 0.01 cent to the inventor of the wheel for every turn of a wheel he is using...
More to the point, a new web standard that would require paying royalties for every implementation would hinder the technology sector.
Sorry, I don't buy this. Yes, I've used valgrind in the little (some 7000 lines of hand-written code, plus machine generate code), and it found one and a half bug.
That's extremely useful, because it might have taken one of us two hours to pin-point this problem. But not more.
I'd think that these tools can save you maybe 5% or 10% of the time you need to spend debugging. (And this is a lot, since debugging takes so much time.)
But the important is still good testing. Think of obscure ways to test your function just after you have written it. Think whether you have tested all code paths that you added. Think about corner cases causing unexpected interactions with other code.
Microsoft asked a London lawyer about the legality of its discount scheme. Well, among other thing, he wrote: If any case was brought up, "we would obviously contest that assumption [that MS has a market-dominant position]". Really impressive what lawyers can think of trying to claim!
But even he had to admit that the possible determination of market-dominance should play a role in their court straegy...
I wondered the same, too, while I was reading the comments -- and I am really amazed how many comments this story got!
Children or teenagers nowhere in the world are nice persons all the time. But I see two points that are different in the U.S. (where I've been quite a couple of times for a few weeks) compared to Germany (where I live):
1. This has been mentioned already: Yes, I think Americans are a little more competitive. This doesn't just concern grades, but also popularity, which girls you date, etc. Well you know better than me about that. (And don't get me wrong, of course there are high school students on both sides of the extremes everywhere, yes - but maybe just a little more on the one side in the US. And enough of them to make this a noticable difference.)
2. For a German teenager, school is only part of his life. If he is playing in a soccer team - well, then he is doing that in a "Verein" (a word that isn't fully translated by "club"). If he is playing an instrument, then he is going to a music school for that. All the extra hobbies usually happen outside of school, maybe with friends from school, maybe with other friends.
They "get a life" outside of school. That makes all that social hierarchy stuff in school a little less important, they are a bit more relaxed about it. (And it doesn't matter as much in school what hobbies someone has.)
On the other hand, I imagine an American teenager would miss a lot in a German school. It's a place for learning, to have some fun, for sure. But it's not a place to spend your time.
Frankly, I think your comment is quite some way off.
About "endgame", computers are only superior once they reach their pre-computed database, i.e. endings with 6 pieces or less. Otherwise, endgame is definitely the weakest part of their game.
Generally speaking, the strength depends rather on whether the position is highly tactical, with many variations to read out (Computers win, of course!), or whether it involves more strategic planning (where humans are still superior -- but computers are catching up!).
Most middle games are pretty tactical, and therefore your claim about weakness in the middle game isn't very true, either.
The NUMA-aware scheduler was merged recently despite the feauture freeze. The patch was considered non-intrusive (and safe for non-NUMA architectures). Feature freeze is not code freeze.
Re:But what I am rellay looking forward to...
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If the web page has invalid HTML, we really shouldn't have to care about whether or not it renders "properly" since it wasn't written "properly" - but even a very large majority of those pages are displayed properly, because Konq has an IE-compatible mode that renders most pages the same way that IE does. (IE renders a lot of broken HTML when it shouldn't.)
Well, I guess this is one of the most frequently debated topics on slashdot. Yes, I know konqueror is perfectly standards conformant (well, at least I haven't met a bug there yet).
And the web pages I maintain validate at w3c.org. (Great to have the W3-button in the extended toolbar, btw!)
But sorry, there do exist a lot of web pages that have horrible code but still interesting (to me) content. I don't mind if such a page is layouted a bit strangely, but if some of the content gets hidden such that I can't read it anymore, then that's annoying. (And if I know the maintainers of those pages are doing this in their freetime without much computer expertise, no then I don't send them "Your web page doesn't validate"-complaint e-mail either.)
But hey, I wasn't complaining, KDE is great and 3.2 will be even greater.
But what I am rellay looking forward to...
on
KDE 3.1 Released
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...is 3.2, when the safari improvements will be fully merged into khtml.
VNC is nice to have (but would I ever use it),
some might like tabbed browsing, etc. etc., but that's nothing like finally having good javascript support, better and faster rendering in konqueror.
...but I'd much prefer to be able to actually
use the tool.
They have regularly provided helpful posts to linux-kernel listing huge number of bugs,
see
their most recent message listing potential buffer overruns.
This would be an extremely valuable tool for any Software project, proably even more useful than e.g. valgrind.
Not much I'd say. Take "process_load". There are a couple of processes running, some of them called "background load" by Con, the others called "workload".
The workload is a little faster in 2.5, the background load a lot slower. Why should this be better? The kernel compile ("workload") could just be the load YOU are running in background.
These benchmarks are certainly extremely useful for developers, telling them how behaviour in a multi-tasking situation changed. But they don't serve for a "2.5 is so much better/worse than 2.4" (at least not without careful interpretation).
Slashdot Mirror
Also, why do you think Andrew Morton has started maintaining the "2.6 must-fix list" and had moderated two IRC conferences to know who will feel responsible for which lacking bug fixes etc.?
Sorry, should have added a link rightaway, so here it is. I think Linus didn't enjoy the 2.4 series as much as development kernels, and maybe also understood that others could be better at the more boring side of evaluating bug fixes etc. (Hats off for that!) He might share the maintenance with Andrew Morton, or possibly completely hand it over by 2.6.0.
2.5 is the development branch, it doesnt need "maintaining".
Well, it's already mostly in maintenance status, i.e. waiting for bugfixes, more testers reporting and so on.
...as he is just about to hand over maintenance of 2.5/2.6 to Andrew Morton. So maybe he actually hopes to do some hacking again, instead of just integrating other peoples' work. Cool!
When will it be stable enough for early-adoption users? (Do you still expect it to make it into 2.6.0?)
What are the key features that should make me, having a typical developer's desktop box, switch from ext3/ReiserFS v3/... to ReiserFS V4?
Don't want to be bitching about the U.S. legal system as is common on /., but I think this is really one of its weakest point.
In Germany (and I presume in many other states), the side who looses a court battle has to cover
the so called "Gerichtskosten" (court expenses), which covers all legal fees paid by the opposing side, plus a bunch of expenses (such as costs for expert witnesses etc.) made by the court.
This makes it a lot easier to fight the battle if you are weaker on money but having the clearly stronger case.
Just think, if you write just one such line per day, you could start competing with Bill Gates' annual income.
Well...definitely not on slashdot ;)))
The highly applauded switch of the city of Munich to Linux had an order volume of 30 millions of Euros over a couple of years. That's just about nothing in M$'s budget. (They have fighted so heavily for it just for it's symbolic and psychological value.)
Is there a country were people will spell right?
Slashdot karma of course, by being able to post extremely well-informed comments! Any takers?
...when the funniest thing you have read in a while is about a software update causing random e-mail loss...
But raising this money by collecting royalties from every user of that infrastructure is a bad idea. To exaggerate a little (yeah, just little), imagine where the economoy would be if everyone had to pay 0.01 cent to the inventor of the wheel for every turn of a wheel he is using...
More to the point, a new web standard that would require paying royalties for every implementation would hinder the technology sector.
That's extremely useful, because it might have taken one of us two hours to pin-point this problem. But not more. I'd think that these tools can save you maybe 5% or 10% of the time you need to spend debugging. (And this is a lot, since debugging takes so much time.)
But the important is still good testing. Think of obscure ways to test your function just after you have written it. Think whether you have tested all code paths that you added. Think about corner cases causing unexpected interactions with other code.
It's as easy as that, and as hard as that.
Yes. But we have rules for that. They are called anti-trust laws.
Microsoft asked a London lawyer about the legality of its discount scheme. Well, among other thing, he wrote: If any case was brought up, "we would obviously contest that assumption [that MS has a market-dominant position]". Really impressive what lawyers can think of trying to claim!
But even he had to admit that the possible determination of market-dominance should play a role in their court straegy...
Children or teenagers nowhere in the world are nice persons all the time. But I see two points that are different in the U.S. (where I've been quite a couple of times for a few weeks) compared to Germany (where I live):
1. This has been mentioned already: Yes, I think Americans are a little more competitive. This doesn't just concern grades, but also popularity, which girls you date, etc. Well you know better than me about that. (And don't get me wrong, of course there are high school students on both sides of the extremes everywhere, yes - but maybe just a little more on the one side in the US. And enough of them to make this a noticable difference.)
2. For a German teenager, school is only part of his life. If he is playing in a soccer team - well, then he is doing that in a "Verein" (a word that isn't fully translated by "club"). If he is playing an instrument, then he is going to a music school for that. All the extra hobbies usually happen outside of school, maybe with friends from school, maybe with other friends.
They "get a life" outside of school. That makes all that social hierarchy stuff in school a little less important, they are a bit more relaxed about it. (And it doesn't matter as much in school what hobbies someone has.)
On the other hand, I imagine an American teenager would miss a lot in a German school. It's a place for learning, to have some fun, for sure. But it's not a place to spend your time.
About "endgame", computers are only superior once they reach their pre-computed database, i.e. endings with 6 pieces or less. Otherwise, endgame is definitely the weakest part of their game.
Generally speaking, the strength depends rather on whether the position is highly tactical, with many variations to read out (Computers win, of course!), or whether it involves more strategic planning (where humans are still superior -- but computers are catching up!).
Most middle games are pretty tactical, and therefore your claim about weakness in the middle game isn't very true, either.
Which liberty? Liberty to use ftp? So HTTP-only doesn't deserve security??? I don't quite get it...
8)
Wonder what this has to do with the Linux Desktop Summit...
See the good discussion in the LWN article on this topic.
Well, I guess this is one of the most frequently debated topics on slashdot. Yes, I know konqueror is perfectly standards conformant (well, at least I haven't met a bug there yet). And the web pages I maintain validate at w3c.org. (Great to have the W3-button in the extended toolbar, btw!)
But sorry, there do exist a lot of web pages that have horrible code but still interesting (to me) content. I don't mind if such a page is layouted a bit strangely, but if some of the content gets hidden such that I can't read it anymore, then that's annoying. (And if I know the maintainers of those pages are doing this in their freetime without much computer expertise, no then I don't send them "Your web page doesn't validate"-complaint e-mail either.)
But hey, I wasn't complaining, KDE is great and 3.2 will be even greater.
VNC is nice to have (but would I ever use it), some might like tabbed browsing, etc. etc., but that's nothing like finally having good javascript support, better and faster rendering in konqueror.
I'll wait for 3.2 with upgrading.
They have regularly provided helpful posts to linux-kernel listing huge number of bugs, see their most recent message listing potential buffer overruns.
This would be an extremely valuable tool for any Software project, proably even more useful than e.g. valgrind.
Not much I'd say. Take "process_load". There are a couple of processes running, some of them called "background load" by Con, the others called "workload".
The workload is a little faster in 2.5, the background load a lot slower. Why should this be better? The kernel compile ("workload") could just be the load YOU are running in background.
These benchmarks are certainly extremely useful for developers, telling them how behaviour in a multi-tasking situation changed. But they don't serve for a "2.5 is so much better/worse than 2.4" (at least not without careful interpretation).
..running it through a different much simpler program that would cut off just before the last movement...[that is the infamous Ode of Joy].
Well, let's forgive Beethoven, he was deaf when he wrote it.