They tell you UNIX has higher TCO, and to prove it point at a study they funded, fair enough so far...
But when you read the study, it shows that what's EXPENSIVE about Unix, is (1) Expensive (non Intel) hardware -- Linux doesn't use that, save $10,000 (2) Expensive (non MS) OS -- Linux is free as in beer, save (in their study) $9,000 (3) Expensive devel environment -- GNU tools, save $5000 (4) Expensive DBA stuff -- Same price as NT from most vendors for Linux
In fact, I suspect most UNIX users would argue that these figures are deliberately inflated anyway. But that's beside the point They claim Linux is just like UNIX, but use a study that makes it obvious why that's not true.
Nah, RedHat are pretty conservative about security fixes (If you update just because stuff is new, go play with potato and DON'T DO IT ON YOUR PRODUCTION MACHINE)
An RH security fix usually just bumps the patch revision, and therefore doesn't cause any damage Upgrades from say 5.x to 6.x should be approached with rather more caution (still much better than a re-install IMHO)
Oh, and another thing. Early reports of Win2K (nee NT 5.0) talked about a high-end produce to follow in 60 days. After the re-announcement last year, Microsoft again confirmed that Datacenter Edition would trail other versions by 60 -- 90 days.
In more recent press releases though, the time has extended to "three to four months". So, even if W2K ships this Christmas, they have until April to get it working with 8 CPUs and more than 4Gb of memory.
It's not over until we see the Shipping Date and the Prices
When I started tracking NT5 it was due to arrive (slightly delayed) in Summer 1998 Towards the end of 1997, when it was already obvious to industry observers, Microsoft announced a possible delay... into early 1999 By the original target date in June 1998, Steve Ballmer was saying "beginning part of next year". When Microsoft re-announced NT5 (as Windows 2000) they began to talk about Q3 and quietly even about Q4 shipping.
This summer, with users clutching bug-ridden RC1 CDs, the press started muttering about RTM in October Some organisations committed to running W2K this summer. They have live systems, right now, running BETA software. The administrators are understandably scared. Microsoft meanwhile, is telling the press that they'll "probably" have Win2K in the shops this year.
So it's "probably" going to be only 18 months late. Vapourware.
I have RH6.0 here. Let's imagine there are 46 packages licensed under your "fair" scheme. Red Hat sold the CD to their distributor for $50, I bought it for $75
How much money does Jim, who wrote "Slightly Better FTP", included on the CD, get for his 1.0% Does he get $0.50? $0.75? $0.01?
Actually, he'll get nothing, because no-one's going to pay $000s to figure out how much to pay Jim for his tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of an almost free product. Trying to make money by charging everyone a penny just makes accountants and lawyers richer.
The UK conversion is still only partially complete. It will finish eventually, but the last little nagging things take a long time. The most obvious example is the road signs. You won't see metric road signs in the UK this millenium.
The Pint of Beer in a pub is still a pint, but a measure of Vodka is now 25ml Almost all groceries are now sold by the kg or the litre. Corner shops often still have imperial scales though. And motorists may put 5 gallons of petrol in the tank, but the prices are in litres.
The US should start now, or they won't complete metrication before 2100. It's _embarassing_ to screw up like this, and you knew it was gonna happen a lifetime ago...
While we're reminding the Americans that their measurements are non-standard.
Americans - STOP USING NON-STANDARD PAPER NOW Everybody else on the planet is using a paper standard that - Looks nicer (A4 ratio is pleasing to the eye) - Has an ISO standard - Scales nicely (envelopes to posters in one simple standard) - Just Works (TM)
Please catch up to the 20th century and next time buy A4. Government studies show you'll SAVE money too!
Huh? Take a 400x400 transparent interlaced PNG and view it in NS 4.5x Now try that in Mozilla, and see how much better it is already now that a PNG developer is on board.
If you REALLY want to kill GIF, help work on MNG standardisation and open source implementations. MNG brings you everything you liked about animated GIF, MJPEG and FLI in a patent-free PNG family format.
Looking around here, I would say most Sun's being used for hacking, 2nd desktop boxes etc. have GTK+ Lots of fairly ordinary apps these days use GTK+, it's not very big and it is quite well tested on various non-Linux platforms.
The desktop environments aren't penetrating (proprietary Unices already have CDE) so there's no GNOME or KDE that I can see, and hardly any Qt However, the "sweeter" license and simple API of GTK+ has meant that even some of our internal apps now depend on it. That would never have happened with Qt.
It'll never be a core part of Solaris, but GTK+ on Suns is here to stay.
As you admitted, Cygnus made money (were more profitable than they are now, in fact) when they were a pure Open Source company Now Cygnus was a relatively small company (their equivalent in the Closed Source might be someone like Inprise/Borland) So, if you scale that up to general purpose software, as Red Hat have, then you're looking at a lot more profit.
Yes, it's risky -- but the stock market is supposed to handle acceptable risks, otherwise everyone would stick to running Private companies. Red Hat's PR will take a beating if the price re-aligns suddenly for some reason, but more likely it will just coast down over a few years until Red Hat goes into the black and everyone realises how undervalued it is
Open Source will never be profitable in the same way as MS, because their profits come straight out of the customer's pocket, no expenses involved. We can however expect Red Hat to be just as profitable as any other services company.
Your underwriter comment makes no sense -- you don't want 7% off the top of a major IPO? Not many people could say that...
Windows: Download the EXE file, click on it Click Yes, Next, No, Proceed, Yes, Next, Next, OK Watch the entire machine reboot (huh?)
Linux: Download the RPM file (not my fault if you choose to make your own life difficult and run Slackware) Double Click on the RPM file in your graphical file manager Ta da! No need to even logout (for simpler apps anyway)
The FreeBSD developers wouldn't agree with your sentence. FreeBSD is not "necessarily a superset of linux"
FreeBSD provides a syscall emulation layer which means most everyday Linux apps can run on FreeBSD. Since most everyday Linux apps are GPL or BSD, and therefore come with source, who even cares?
IMHO The Linux development model is better, and the code for both is Free, so I support the one which matches my philosophy best (Linux) The only *BSD machines we have in this lab are testing IPv6, they seem fine but a bit old-school for my liking. Takes all sorts though.
I love NAT as much as the next man, but it's fundamentally a bad hack.
You lose transparency, flexibility and ultimately performance from doing this kind of thing. For a $100 student house network, it's great to use NAT, for a $100M company it gets ugly really fast.
Look more closely at your NAT box some time, it has Application-Level protocol handlers, because otherwise apps like Quake, CuSeeMe, FTP etc. wouldn't work correctly. As time passes, and users demand more sophisticated services, it gets harder for NAT to work properly, and the implementation gets more and more fragile.
Supporting NAT because it's cheaper than upgrading is a false economy, like sticking with Win16 to save on NT licenses. You'll feel the pain later.
Re:Returning some of the 16.7 million...
on
CNN On IPv6
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· Score: 1
Yes, AFAIK most of the really large chunks of IP space which weren't being used have been returned.
Considering the quality of patents the USPTO is allowing, you'll be lucky if your "better way" is even allowed to use a Computer.
Claims in modern software patents tend to go like this:
1. We claim a fairly specific thing which only a moderately intelligent human would have thought of 2. We claim an impossible thing, which we mistakenly thought was possible. 3. We claim thing (1) but with different words 4. We claim something that's in every CS textbook 5. We claim something any 5 year old could figure out Yes, EVERYONE knows they are invalid, but unfortunately that's for some value of EVERYONE which doesn't include the USPTO
If I went to Washington every year and begged for a license to print money, how many times would I have to ask before they told me to shut the hell up? Yet, every year IP companies go down on their hands and knees and tell stories of woe and doom, and Washington's still listening...
I know elected officials don't tend to be the brightest guys on the block, but even they must have figured out that Mickey Mouse would still have been created if Disney hadn't anticipated 1000 years of continuous cash flow in return...
Remember, the top officials in companies pushing for these "reforms" must also be real human beings. Make sure they know that increasing IP control will strangle every new creation they see around them. Even the most Scrooge-like Disney executive must be made to understand why the endless extensions of copyright's frontier are a BAD THING
I understand where you're coming from, and I still have a machine that's gone from early Slackware to Kernel 2.0.36 and Gnome purely by hand (no packages etc.) However, yesterday morning I upgraded from RH5.2 to RH6.0, the second such upgrade I've done on this PII, and it went much more smoothly than the equivalent changes by hand Sure, an experienced user like me has 20--30 minutes of tweaks to apply after the install finishes, but RH makes it easy to see what they've changed (.rpmsave files) and what they didn't risk changing (.rpmnew files) The user-side configuration, thanks to the beauty of Unix, is untouched and remains ready to go.
Almost all the changes RH made would have improved the system for a newbie, and wouldn't have needed tweaking if I didn't fiddle. e.g. They added procmail rules to sendmail.cf, thus voiding my old.forward-based approach. The new settings seemed tighter, and the install process itself was flawless (500+ packages updated in 1 hour over FTP, much quicker than by hand)
Even for Linux power users, RH/Debian/Mandrake/ whatever are *much* easier to keep up-to-date than any other OS I've seen.
Re:not necessarily a good idea
on
Linux Lite?
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· Score: 2
Your Linux PC is not a toaster... Toaster = Gameboy Tetris (anyone who can't operate one isn't a fully functioning member of society)
Video = N64 (most people can get it to work, but they don't know how or why it does what it does)
Private Aircraft = Linux PC (anyone can be taught to fly one, but they may need constant supervision, and they're pretty likely to crash it)
Society doesn't always handle tech well (the idea that everyone should be encouraged to operate 100kph 1000kg machinery in populated areas is just craziness, and it's a tribute to human ingenuity that we've made it as safe as it is to drive a Car)
Today's attitude to computers (Uh, I deleted it, how do I get it back?) is just a less extreme example of this in action, and I think it's pretty sad to Dumb Down Computers just to let people be more lazy...
That said, I support the idea that Out-of-box Linux should not be set up as a fully-daemonized Unix if it's intended for desktop users, if you really NEED an SMTP server you can read the paragraph which tells you how to activate the damn thing.
The situation's not really as bad as some people are making out
DGA solves most of the basic "Make the GUI go away and give me 2D graphics with non-jittery pointer stuff" problems which were a complete pain just two or three years ago (remember crashes in SVGAlib Doom!)
OpenGL solves all your 3D niceness (yes, even extensions, though some stuff like the T-buffer may be too gimmicky for OGL)
The sound stuff is a bit of a mess, I admit, and while the OSS APIs were OK in an era when DOS games rolled their own DMA code I look forward to seeing something better from future Linux dists, perhaps ALSA?
Aside from the inevitable "Huh?" questions you get on any new platform, porting to Linux looks pretty OK to me. 90% of publishers just don't give a damn (they often feel the same way about NT) and that's fine, but don't blame their financial decisions on Linux.
No! It's always a bad idea to allow a small erosion of values in exchange for some apparently wonderful benefit. The problem is that erosion adds up, and it's much harder to fight for it once it's gone. If Debian permits a non-open package to go into Debian core (where BIND belongs) then it's just one small step before you're signing your soul over just to get a usable version of Linux.
The BIND people are like most old-school BSD groups, their number one aim is to get high quality working software to as many people as possible. They will accept any license as long as it includes free redistribution in some form.
That's fine -- but it doesn't mean that what's good for them is good for Free Software. For Debian, and other free software projects the number one priority must be to keep software Free.
Two other points while I'm here (1) Outside the USofA there are BETTER, FASTER, and MORE FREE implementations of the RSA algorithm. No-one outside the BIND group wants the awful RSAREF code. (2) The patent will expire next year, so if BIND insist on shipping this non-free code I hope they will undertake to replace it with FREE code next year.
Last time I looked W2K was only offering scalability beyond the classic 4 CPUs with 4Gb of memory for their "Datacenter" Server range, and perhaps the big memory stuff alone on "Advanced" Server.
That means your heavy-duty stand-alone applications require you to purchase a very expensive product, which is tuned exclusively for network server and database work. You'll get an expensive set of server apps and licenses "for free" which you'll never use, and wait several weeks after the initial release for each and every service pack (they're always delayed for the high-end NT versions).
If you're interested in spending this kind of money, run Linux or *BSD on hardware that's designed to have 64Gb of memory and 12 CPUs (eg UltraSparc or Alpha) and don't worry about stupid kludges from Intel or any other 32-bit vendor. When even Intel are telling you that IA32 is a dead-end, it's time to get off.
In fact, if you've really got this type of job to do, your priority is probably scalability and performance, in which case a Proprietary Unix on it's own native hardware is going to look much more attractive. Want to buy some E450s?
There's another way of doing that of course, but it's evil as hell. If you don't have any REAL subnets / LANs then you can tell the ridges that all conference rooms are really in all the vLANs of the organisations, and stuff will just magically work. I suspect the behind-the-scenes cost in data traffic is horrific, but I don't care:) This also lets you grab a server, complete with UPS, and run over to another building with it, and hardly anyone notices:) Or so I'm told (Do you read this stuff Tim?)
Those libraries are parts of GTK+ 1.2 (except the C++ library) GTK+ is not a "Gnome library" any more than Qt is a "KDE library"
The reason old builds worked and this one doesn't was because AS IT SAYS IN PLAIN ENGLISH this build is intended for glibc2.1 You presumably don't have glibc 2.1, or if you do, your GTK+ and C++ libraries aren't built against it. To try M9, get glibc2.1 and those libraries built for the new libc.
If you don't have GTK+ 1.2 at all, I have no idea how you expected most new GUI stuff to run, seems like half of Freshmeat is GTK+ apps these days.
I know it's intentional, but it's still all style over content. As other posters have said, it's fun to be bitter and jaded once in a while but SUCK gets tired very quickly. Although they do their research, and you won't catch any glaring technical errors, you can't trust their opinions.
It's odd that so many journalists seem to think that mass-market acceptance will kill Free Software. Especially when we've already seen that even USERS, who proprietary developers consider worse than scum, are contributing to Free Software by reporting bugs, suggesting ideas, testing pre-releases and contributing documentation.
MONEY can only change Free Software for the better. Today there are fewer projects which are proceeding slowly or not at all because of lack of funds. Companies like Red Hat can afford to buy standards documents, join industry groups and get at information which would otherwise be inaccessible to Free Software.
The worst problem Free Software faces from mass-market popularity is the splitting of some non-GPL projects when some members decide that there's profit in taking the code closed-source. Fortunately I think most really big projects (XFree, *BSD, Apache) have too much momentum to be badly hurt if/ when this happens.
The weenies being described have already left. The first of them was gone the moment you could get a floppy disk set which booted Linux. By the time Linux was on cover-disks in the local 7--11 all of them had moved on.
Right now these same idiots have an old Slackware CD under their pile of BeOS developer releases, and if you look closely you'll see OS/2 in there too. They're getting pretty tired of BeOS by now -- and Win2K beta CDs aren't exciting any more these days, they want something, anything NEW.
But why should we care anyway? Most of them probably never wrote a line of code, and they're certainly not the kind of people to write documentation or help to make software useful for others. Their only contribution was a temporary boost in popularity.
The only thing that might take *quality* talent away from Linux is the arrival of a genuine "next generation" of Free OS. The HURD was, and still might be a possible taker for this position, but it's looking more likely that the challenger will be a complete outsider. When. If.
Don't hold your breath. No one's interested in the OS kernel these days -- all the excitement is cross-platform and happening at a much higher level. Even the architectural differences aren't of much significance when manufacturers are choosing PCI, USB, and Ethernet.
Slashdot Mirror
They tell you UNIX has higher TCO, and to prove it point at a study they funded, fair enough so far...
But when you read the study, it shows that what's EXPENSIVE about Unix, is
(1) Expensive (non Intel) hardware -- Linux doesn't use that, save $10,000
(2) Expensive (non MS) OS -- Linux is free as in beer, save (in their study) $9,000
(3) Expensive devel environment -- GNU tools, save $5000
(4) Expensive DBA stuff -- Same price as NT from most vendors for Linux
In fact, I suspect most UNIX users would argue that these figures are deliberately inflated anyway. But that's beside the point
They claim Linux is just like UNIX, but use a study that makes it obvious why that's not true.
Nah, RedHat are pretty conservative about security fixes
(If you update just because stuff is new, go play with potato and DON'T DO IT ON YOUR PRODUCTION MACHINE)
An RH security fix usually just bumps the patch revision, and therefore doesn't cause any damage
Upgrades from say 5.x to 6.x should be approached with rather more caution (still much better than a re-install IMHO)
Oh, and another thing.
Early reports of Win2K (nee NT 5.0) talked about a high-end produce to follow in 60 days.
After the re-announcement last year, Microsoft again confirmed that Datacenter Edition would trail other versions by 60 -- 90 days.
In more recent press releases though, the time has extended to "three to four months".
So, even if W2K ships this Christmas, they have until April to get it working with 8 CPUs and more than 4Gb of memory.
It's not over until we see the Shipping Date and the Prices
When I started tracking NT5 it was due to arrive (slightly delayed) in Summer 1998
Towards the end of 1997, when it was already obvious to industry observers, Microsoft announced a possible delay... into early 1999
By the original target date in June 1998, Steve Ballmer was saying "beginning part of next year".
When Microsoft re-announced NT5 (as Windows 2000) they began to talk about Q3 and quietly even about Q4 shipping.
This summer, with users clutching bug-ridden RC1 CDs, the press started muttering about RTM in October
Some organisations committed to running W2K this summer. They have live systems, right now, running BETA software. The administrators are understandably scared.
Microsoft meanwhile, is telling the press that they'll "probably" have Win2K in the shops this year.
So it's "probably" going to be only 18 months late. Vapourware.
I have RH6.0 here. Let's imagine there are 46 packages licensed under your "fair" scheme.
Red Hat sold the CD to their distributor for $50, I bought it for $75
How much money does Jim, who wrote "Slightly Better FTP", included on the CD, get for his 1.0%
Does he get $0.50? $0.75? $0.01?
Actually, he'll get nothing, because no-one's going to pay $000s to figure out how much to pay Jim for his tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of an almost free product.
Trying to make money by charging everyone a penny just makes accountants and lawyers richer.
The UK conversion is still only partially complete. It will finish eventually, but the last little nagging things take a long time.
The most obvious example is the road signs. You won't see metric road signs in the UK this millenium.
The Pint of Beer in a pub is still a pint, but a measure of Vodka is now 25ml
Almost all groceries are now sold by the kg or the litre. Corner shops often still have imperial scales though.
And motorists may put 5 gallons of petrol in the tank, but the prices are in litres.
The US should start now, or they won't complete metrication before 2100.
It's _embarassing_ to screw up like this, and you knew it was gonna happen a lifetime ago...
While we're reminding the Americans that their measurements are non-standard.
Americans - STOP USING NON-STANDARD PAPER NOW
Everybody else on the planet is using a paper standard that
- Looks nicer (A4 ratio is pleasing to the eye)
- Has an ISO standard
- Scales nicely (envelopes to posters in one simple standard)
- Just Works (TM)
Please catch up to the 20th century and next time buy A4. Government studies show you'll SAVE money too!
Huh?
Take a 400x400 transparent interlaced PNG and view it in NS 4.5x
Now try that in Mozilla, and see how much better it is already now that a PNG developer is on board.
If you REALLY want to kill GIF, help work on MNG standardisation and open source implementations.
MNG brings you everything you liked about animated GIF, MJPEG and FLI in a patent-free PNG family format.
Looking around here, I would say most Sun's being used for hacking, 2nd desktop boxes etc. have GTK+
Lots of fairly ordinary apps these days use GTK+, it's not very big and it is quite well tested on various non-Linux platforms.
The desktop environments aren't penetrating (proprietary Unices already have CDE) so there's no GNOME or KDE that I can see, and hardly any Qt
However, the "sweeter" license and simple API of GTK+ has meant that even some of our internal apps now depend on it. That would never have happened with Qt.
It'll never be a core part of Solaris, but GTK+ on Suns is here to stay.
As you admitted, Cygnus made money (were more profitable than they are now, in fact) when they were a pure Open Source company
Now Cygnus was a relatively small company (their equivalent in the Closed Source might be someone like Inprise/Borland)
So, if you scale that up to general purpose software, as Red Hat have, then you're looking at a lot more profit.
Yes, it's risky -- but the stock market is supposed to handle acceptable risks, otherwise everyone would stick to running Private companies.
Red Hat's PR will take a beating if the price re-aligns suddenly for some reason, but more likely it will just coast down over a few years until Red Hat goes into the black and everyone realises how undervalued it is
Open Source will never be profitable in the same way as MS, because their profits come straight out of the customer's pocket, no expenses involved. We can however expect Red Hat to be just as profitable as any other services company.
Your underwriter comment makes no sense -- you don't want 7% off the top of a major IPO? Not many people could say that...
Windows:
Download the EXE file, click on it
Click Yes, Next, No, Proceed, Yes, Next, Next, OK
Watch the entire machine reboot (huh?)
Linux:
Download the RPM file (not my fault if you choose to make your own life difficult and run Slackware)
Double Click on the RPM file in your graphical file manager
Ta da! No need to even logout (for simpler apps anyway)
The FreeBSD developers wouldn't agree with your sentence. FreeBSD is not "necessarily a superset of linux"
FreeBSD provides a syscall emulation layer which means most everyday Linux apps can run on FreeBSD.
Since most everyday Linux apps are GPL or BSD, and therefore come with source, who even cares?
IMHO The Linux development model is better, and the code for both is Free, so I support the one which matches my philosophy best (Linux)
The only *BSD machines we have in this lab are testing IPv6, they seem fine but a bit old-school for my liking. Takes all sorts though.
I love NAT as much as the next man, but it's fundamentally a bad hack.
You lose transparency, flexibility and ultimately performance from doing this kind of thing. For a $100 student house network, it's great to use NAT, for a $100M company it gets ugly really fast.
Look more closely at your NAT box some time, it has Application-Level protocol handlers, because otherwise apps like Quake, CuSeeMe, FTP etc. wouldn't work correctly.
As time passes, and users demand more sophisticated services, it gets harder for NAT to work properly, and the implementation gets more and more fragile.
Supporting NAT because it's cheaper than upgrading is a false economy, like sticking with Win16 to save on NT licenses. You'll feel the pain later.
Yes, AFAIK most of the really large chunks of IP space which weren't being used have been returned.
Considering the quality of patents the USPTO is allowing, you'll be lucky if your "better way" is even allowed to use a Computer.
Claims in modern software patents tend to go like this:
1. We claim a fairly specific thing which only a moderately intelligent human would have thought of
2. We claim an impossible thing, which we mistakenly thought was possible.
3. We claim thing (1) but with different words
4. We claim something that's in every CS textbook
5. We claim something any 5 year old could figure out
Yes, EVERYONE knows they are invalid, but unfortunately that's for some value of EVERYONE which doesn't include the USPTO
Why won't this just die?
If I went to Washington every year and begged for a license to print money, how many times would I have to ask before they told me to shut the hell up?
Yet, every year IP companies go down on their hands and knees and tell stories of woe and doom, and Washington's still listening...
I know elected officials don't tend to be the brightest guys on the block, but even they must have figured out that Mickey Mouse would still have been created if Disney hadn't anticipated 1000 years of continuous cash flow in return...
Remember, the top officials in companies pushing for these "reforms" must also be real human beings. Make sure they know that increasing IP control will strangle every new creation they see around them. Even the most Scrooge-like Disney executive must be made to understand why the endless extensions of copyright's frontier are a BAD THING
However, yesterday morning I upgraded from RH5.2 to RH6.0, the second such upgrade I've done on this PII, and it went much more smoothly than the equivalent changes by hand
Sure, an experienced user like me has 20--30 minutes of tweaks to apply after the install finishes, but RH makes it easy to see what they've changed (.rpmsave files) and what they didn't risk changing (.rpmnew files)
The user-side configuration, thanks to the beauty of Unix, is untouched and remains ready to go.
Almost all the changes RH made would have improved the system for a newbie, and wouldn't have needed tweaking if I didn't fiddle.
e.g. They added procmail rules to sendmail.cf, thus voiding my old
The new settings seemed tighter, and the install process itself was flawless (500+ packages updated in 1 hour over FTP, much quicker than by hand)
Even for Linux power users, RH/Debian/Mandrake/ whatever are *much* easier to keep up-to-date than any other OS I've seen.
Video = N64 (most people can get it to work, but they don't know how or why it does what it does)
Private Aircraft = Linux PC (anyone can be taught to fly one, but they may need constant supervision, and they're pretty likely to crash it)
Society doesn't always handle tech well (the idea that everyone should be encouraged to operate 100kph 1000kg machinery in populated areas is just craziness, and it's a tribute to human ingenuity that we've made it as safe as it is to drive a Car)
Today's attitude to computers (Uh, I deleted it, how do I get it back?) is just a less extreme example of this in action, and I think it's pretty sad to Dumb Down Computers just to let people be more lazy...
That said, I support the idea that Out-of-box Linux should not be set up as a fully-daemonized Unix if it's intended for desktop users, if you really NEED an SMTP server you can read the paragraph which tells you how to activate the damn thing.
Nick.
DGA solves most of the basic "Make the GUI go away and give me 2D graphics with non-jittery pointer stuff" problems which were a complete pain just two or three years ago (remember crashes in SVGAlib Doom!)
OpenGL solves all your 3D niceness (yes, even extensions, though some stuff like the T-buffer may be too gimmicky for OGL)
The sound stuff is a bit of a mess, I admit, and while the OSS APIs were OK in an era when DOS games rolled their own DMA code I look forward to seeing something better from future Linux dists, perhaps ALSA?
Aside from the inevitable "Huh?" questions you get on any new platform, porting to Linux looks pretty OK to me. 90% of publishers just don't give a damn (they often feel the same way about NT) and that's fine, but don't blame their financial decisions on Linux.
Nick.
The BIND people are like most old-school BSD groups, their number one aim is to get high quality working software to as many people as possible. They will accept any license as long as it includes free redistribution in some form.
That's fine -- but it doesn't mean that what's good for them is good for Free Software. For Debian, and other free software projects the number one priority must be to keep software Free.
Two other points while I'm here (1) Outside the USofA there are BETTER, FASTER, and MORE FREE implementations of the RSA algorithm. No-one outside the BIND group wants the awful RSAREF code. (2) The patent will expire next year, so if BIND insist on shipping this non-free code I hope they will undertake to replace it with FREE code next year.
Nick.
That means your heavy-duty stand-alone applications require you to purchase a very expensive product, which is tuned exclusively for network server and database work. You'll get an expensive set of server apps and licenses "for free" which you'll never use, and wait several weeks after the initial release for each and every service pack (they're always delayed for the high-end NT versions).
If you're interested in spending this kind of money, run Linux or *BSD on hardware that's designed to have 64Gb of memory and 12 CPUs (eg UltraSparc or Alpha) and don't worry about stupid kludges from Intel or any other 32-bit vendor. When even Intel are telling you that IA32 is a dead-end, it's time to get off.
In fact, if you've really got this type of job to do, your priority is probably scalability and performance, in which case a Proprietary Unix on it's own native hardware is going to look much more attractive. Want to buy some E450s?
Nick.
There's another way of doing that of course, but it's evil as hell. :) :)
If you don't have any REAL subnets / LANs then you can tell the ridges that all conference rooms are really in all the vLANs of the organisations, and stuff will just magically work. I suspect the behind-the-scenes cost in data traffic is horrific, but I don't care
This also lets you grab a server, complete with UPS, and run over to another building with it, and hardly anyone notices
Or so I'm told (Do you read this stuff Tim?)
The reason old builds worked and this one doesn't was because AS IT SAYS IN PLAIN ENGLISH this build is intended for glibc2.1 You presumably don't have glibc 2.1, or if you do, your GTK+ and C++ libraries aren't built against it. To try M9, get glibc2.1 and those libraries built for the new libc.
If you don't have GTK+ 1.2 at all, I have no idea how you expected most new GUI stuff to run, seems like half of Freshmeat is GTK+ apps these days.
I know it's intentional, but it's still all style over content.
As other posters have said, it's fun to be bitter and jaded once in a while but SUCK gets tired very quickly. Although they do their research, and you won't catch any glaring technical errors, you can't trust their opinions.
It's odd that so many journalists seem to think that mass-market acceptance will kill Free Software. Especially when we've already seen that even USERS, who proprietary developers consider worse than scum, are contributing to Free Software by reporting bugs, suggesting ideas, testing pre-releases and contributing documentation.
MONEY can only change Free Software for the better. Today there are fewer projects which are proceeding slowly or not at all because of lack of funds. Companies like Red Hat can afford to buy standards documents, join industry groups and get at information which would otherwise be inaccessible to Free Software.
The worst problem Free Software faces from mass-market popularity is the splitting of some non-GPL projects when some members decide that there's profit in taking the code closed-source. Fortunately I think most really big projects (XFree, *BSD, Apache) have too much momentum to be badly hurt if/ when this happens.
Nick.
The weenies being described have already left. The first of them was gone the moment you could get a floppy disk set which booted Linux. By the time Linux was on cover-disks in the local 7--11 all of them had moved on.
Right now these same idiots have an old Slackware CD under their pile of BeOS developer releases, and if you look closely you'll see OS/2 in there too. They're getting pretty tired of BeOS by now -- and Win2K beta CDs aren't exciting any more these days, they want something, anything NEW.
But why should we care anyway? Most of them probably never wrote a line of code, and they're certainly not the kind of people to write documentation or help to make software useful for others. Their only contribution was a temporary boost in popularity.
The only thing that might take *quality* talent away from Linux is the arrival of a genuine "next generation" of Free OS. The HURD was, and still might be a possible taker for this position, but it's looking more likely that the challenger will be a complete outsider. When. If.
Don't hold your breath. No one's interested in the OS kernel these days -- all the excitement is cross-platform and happening at a much higher level. Even the architectural differences aren't of much significance when manufacturers are choosing PCI, USB, and Ethernet.
Nick.