Once again Linus is the man. While I immediately flamed even though I really don't know much about the details, he comes out with a cool, rational explanation and has no hard feelings.
Everyone who flames anything (including me) needs to think about how Linus handles these things, and realize he is where he is at for a reason.
If this is true, BitMover should expect a big financial hit.
BitKeeper's main claim to fame was that Linus and the kernel folks used it. That's the kind of endorsement that you can't buy for any amount of money. Without that, most people would never even know BitKeeper exists.
Its a really stupid move. An open source competitor might have taken some of their business, but most of the open source users would probably be using something else free anyway. 90% of corporate customers would rather pay for something. An open source clone would probably validate BitKeeper.
I never saw Microsoft give away NT Server or Windows Server back in the day or now. The MS server OS's are pretty expensive, when you start counting client licenses. They pulled that freebie thing with Netscape but not Novell. Yes, they were cheaper than Novell but thats because Novell charged too much for Netware, not because MS was giving anything away in the server arena. And the core software they are selling now (Linux) is free to Novell. So they should be able to undercut Windows Server pretty effectively.
All the comments on how Netware was so great make me laff. Read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters" by Merrill R. Chapman, to get a good feel for why Netware went by the wayside. Its wasn't the 'suits' that killed them, it was the engineers. They had a bunch of egotisical engineers who refused to build what the market wanted. Yes, it is/was a fast stable file server. But thats about it. You couldn't really run apps on it. And when the clients of the world are all running Windows, and Netware is expensive and difficult to use with Windows, there you go.
1. simple examples that show exactly how to do one thing. keep it minimally sufficient.
2. complete examples that pull it all together.
Many Microsoft SDK sample sets include elaborate supporting infrastructure which means you have to figure the whole thing out in order to understand a single function. DirectX 9 SDK is a prime specimen. It has the type 2 examples, but no type 1 examples. You have to read hundreds of lines of code to learn how to do simple things. The directx 9 samples are an SDK on top of an SDK.
Comer's INternetworking with TCP/IP volume III is another one on a smaller scale. In the parts about setting up simple TCP and UDP sockets, it builds an infrastructure that combines TCP and UDP, rather than just showing the steps for each socket type. Yea, it all looks pretty simple when you have been doing it a while but its hard for a beginner.
I think its in the nature of programmers to fancier than they need to be, because thats the fun part. Sample code is one place you want to avoid that tendency.
Who has counted Sun out? How about the stock market? Anyone in this thread who really likes Sun should go buy some of their very cheap stock ($4.43, down from $60.00 in 2001) and make a zillion on their comeback.
put some of that in your social security personal account!
This kind of thing happens once in a while. When you have 100's of folks working on a system, sometimes things slip through that are local optimums that don't look so good from a global level.
Don't attribute inadvertent slip-ups to some nefarious high level strategy. Even when the culprit is Google or god forbid, Micro$oft.
And it appears most of the 'it has to be free' crowd don't want to be the ones to pay. if you haven't made a dontation to wikipedia, then you need to shut up.
Wind River DID NOT do the Mars Rover software. JPL did. JPL only used Vxworks as the OS. Any mature real time OS would have worked. JPL did the hard part.
We are switching from PVCS to subversion. Besides being pretty crappy and expensive, PVCS uses the lock/modify/checkin paradigm. Every time when I convert a PVCS user to Subversion they are scared because of the edit/conflict/merge idea. "OHMYGOD I have to lock my files or anything can happen". (Because I am not articulate) I have a hard time conveying the benefit of the CVS/subversion way.
My rationale is that if two people need to modify a file the conflicts exist independent of the version control mechanism, its just that locking serializes modifications and and merging has you modifying in parallel and then fixing it all at once, which is more efficient than making someone wait. Not to mention the idiots who lock everything and then go on vacation.
I usually just say 'try it and you will see that subversion is way easier to use and the rare conflicts are easy to merge'.
Any recommendations?
The Subversion Book seems to have most of what you need to know and its free as in speech and beer.
from the review it does seem to have a couple of chapters about general project organization that aren't in TSB. Otherwise it the list of topics seems to be right out of the oreilly book.
I like BG because the missiles and guns are guided and actually hit stuff, rather than SG-1 and Star Trek where weapons shoot randomly and hope something hits (and they usually don't).
2.18 is gone from the/pub/mozilla.org/webtools. you have a 2.16.x stable release and a 2.19.1. no 2.18 except release candidates. the download link from the bugzilla webpage gives a 404
we have been building radar systems with embedded processors for 15 years.
for parts of our systems that require submillisecond timings, we use vxWorks (and before that pSOS) because we can easily get to bare metal and control exactly what is happening with interrupts and threads. We use the very basic kernel of vxworks. its very expensive but we are relatively content for that type of application. We can't screw around with these applications so we bite the bullet.
we also have parts of the system that are real time but don't have such tight requirements (user interfaces, communications multiplexing etc). We used to use vxworks on those but the development system and licensing expense is horrendous. Then w tried windows XPe based on the false assumption that the commonality of our development systems (XP) and the target (XPe) would give us some savings. but Xpe was very hard to configure and get our applications running. It took a lot of training to get where our programmers could deploy applications. The development system was cheap ($1k) and the runtime costs were much less than VxWorks. But the development effort required negated those savings. So we ditched that after one program.
then we started using Linux on Diamond Systems EBX and PC-104 boards. Diamond Systems provided a stripped down slackware based flashdisk image with a configured 2.6 kernel, glibc and the basic executables. It worked like a dream. We develop on Fedora 2 workstations, and the executables move right over. We have written a couple of character mode drivers for some special hardware and that was easy too. It isn't 'embedded' linux, its just plain old linux. it runs easily on a 128MB flashdisk and 128MB RAM with lots of space left over. So we were hooked.
(it turns out we always deliver source with our systems so the GPL is no problem for us and our customer doesn't care either because they don't redistribute)
an personally, I used Sun UNix in the 80's and switched to windows in the 90's. Going back to a unix-like development environment kicked ass. I had forgotten how productive it was.
The momentum in our company is to switch to Linux for any new applications that aren't completely hardcore.
On a different note, however, I have a complaint with the 'embedded linux' vendors about their sales model. They don't publish prices, you have to 'negotiate' a price. They are cagey about 'open source'. They try to tell you that you have to buy a 'seat' for every developer. Why do that when the development systems they provide are open source? The most valuable service they provide isn't real time extensions, but IMHO it is the creation of turn-key cross-development environments and board support for embedded systems. Thats worth a lot, but from my experience they are unpleasant to deal with (maybe because I am a introverted engineer) and the expense of their tools negates any advantage unless you are doing a product that is going to be produced in the millions so that the elimination of runtime licensing expense makes it worthwhile.
If WOW holds up, it also shatters the tired MMORPG design rule that says there needs to be a harsh penalty for death. Everquest pioneered this and others just tweaked it, seemingly never questioning it. WOW is much more fun without the agony of experience loss by death. The death penalty probably led many to stop playing other games, because it is so demoralizing.
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Once again Linus is the man. While I immediately flamed even though I really don't know much about the details, he comes out with a cool, rational explanation and has no hard feelings. Everyone who flames anything (including me) needs to think about how Linus handles these things, and realize he is where he is at for a reason.
If this is true, BitMover should expect a big financial hit.
BitKeeper's main claim to fame was that Linus and the kernel folks used it. That's the kind of endorsement that you can't buy for any amount of money. Without that, most people would never even know BitKeeper exists.
Its a really stupid move. An open source competitor might have taken some of their business, but most of the open source users would probably be using something else free anyway. 90% of corporate customers would rather pay for something. An open source clone would probably validate BitKeeper.
Not to mention the ill will they will generate.
I never saw Microsoft give away NT Server or Windows Server back in the day or now. The MS server OS's are pretty expensive, when you start counting client licenses. They pulled that freebie thing with Netscape but not Novell. Yes, they were cheaper than Novell but thats because Novell charged too much for Netware, not because MS was giving anything away in the server arena. And the core software they are selling now (Linux) is free to Novell. So they should be able to undercut Windows Server pretty effectively.
All the comments on how Netware was so great make me laff. Read "In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters"
by Merrill R. Chapman, to get a good feel for why Netware went by the wayside. Its wasn't the 'suits' that killed them, it was the engineers. They had a bunch of egotisical engineers who refused to build what the market wanted. Yes, it is/was a fast stable file server. But thats about it. You couldn't really run apps on it. And when the clients of the world are all running Windows, and Netware is expensive and difficult to use with Windows, there you go.
why would I want my browser to make OS calls?
maybe so it can access the network? Or read and write files? display things to the user?
There are two kinds of code examples.
1. simple examples that show exactly how to do one thing. keep it minimally sufficient.
2. complete examples that pull it all together.
Many Microsoft SDK sample sets include elaborate supporting infrastructure which means you have to figure the whole thing out in order to understand a single function. DirectX 9 SDK is a prime specimen. It has the type 2 examples, but no type 1 examples. You have to read hundreds of lines of code to learn how to do simple things. The directx 9 samples are an SDK on top of an SDK.
Comer's INternetworking with TCP/IP volume III is another one on a smaller scale. In the parts about setting up simple TCP and UDP sockets, it builds an infrastructure that combines TCP and UDP, rather than just showing the steps for each socket type. Yea, it all looks pretty simple when you have been doing it a while but its hard for a beginner.
I think its in the nature of programmers to fancier than they need to be, because thats the fun part. Sample code is one place you want to avoid that tendency.
man, you must really be hungry.
every experiment that suggests that with homeopathy 'something is going on' turns out to have errors in the experimental process.
Who has counted Sun out? How about the stock market? Anyone in this thread who really likes Sun should go buy some of their very cheap stock ($4.43, down from $60.00 in 2001) and make a zillion on their comeback.
put some of that in your social security personal account!
This kind of thing happens once in a while. When you have 100's of folks working on a system, sometimes things slip through that are local optimums that don't look so good from a global level.
Don't attribute inadvertent slip-ups to some nefarious high level strategy. Even when the culprit is Google or god forbid, Micro$oft.
I like that site, since I am a tired old C programmer so maybe I'll be able to keep a job for a while.
any sane programmer except maybe Kernighan and Ritchie who originated the K&R style
// code
if (...) {
}
cable box DVR is cheapest 5-10 a month, no up front
tivo is cheap in the short run. $100 up front plus 12.95 a month
MSFT media PC expensive $500+ up front. cheapest HP mcpc = $549 plus shipping, no ongoing cost for programming guide.
Myth TV sw no cost, hw expensive up front similar $500+ for computer, no ongoing fee.
read this for an old hands view. Basically you are sacrificing most of what is known about good design practice for a marginal benefit.
And it appears most of the 'it has to be free' crowd don't want to be the ones to pay. if you haven't made a dontation to wikipedia, then you need to shut up.
Wind River DID NOT do the Mars Rover software. JPL did. JPL only used Vxworks as the OS. Any mature real time OS would have worked. JPL did the hard part.
We are switching from PVCS to subversion. Besides being pretty crappy and expensive, PVCS uses the lock/modify/checkin paradigm. Every time when I convert a PVCS user to Subversion they are scared because of the edit/conflict/merge idea. "OHMYGOD I have to lock my files or anything can happen". (Because I am not articulate) I have a hard time conveying the benefit of the CVS/subversion way.
My rationale is that if two people need to modify a file the conflicts exist independent of the version control mechanism, its just that locking serializes modifications and and merging has you modifying in parallel and then fixing it all at once, which is more efficient than making someone wait. Not to mention the idiots who lock everything and then go on vacation.
I usually just say 'try it and you will see that subversion is way easier to use and the rare conflicts are easy to merge'.
Any recommendations?
The Subversion Book seems to have most of what you need to know and its free as in speech and beer.
from the review it does seem to have a couple of chapters about general project organization that aren't in TSB. Otherwise it the list of topics seems to be right out of the oreilly book.
I like BG because the missiles and guns are guided and actually hit stuff, rather than SG-1 and Star Trek where weapons shoot randomly and hope something hits (and they usually don't).
oh yeah, i forgot to mention UNR kicked SMU's ass in basketball last week.
2.18 is gone from the /pub/mozilla.org/webtools. you have a 2.16.x stable release and a 2.19.1. no 2.18 except release candidates. the download link from the bugzilla webpage gives a 404
we have been building radar systems with embedded processors for 15 years.
for parts of our systems that require submillisecond timings, we use vxWorks (and before that pSOS) because we can easily get to bare metal and control exactly what is happening with interrupts and threads. We use the very basic kernel of vxworks. its very expensive but we are relatively content for that type of application. We can't screw around with these applications so we bite the bullet.
we also have parts of the system that are real time but don't have such tight requirements (user interfaces, communications multiplexing etc). We used to use vxworks on those but the development system and licensing expense is horrendous. Then w tried windows XPe based on the false assumption that the commonality of our development systems (XP) and the target (XPe) would give us some savings. but Xpe was very hard to configure and get our applications running. It took a lot of training to get where our programmers could deploy applications. The development system was cheap ($1k) and the runtime costs were much less than VxWorks. But the development effort required negated those savings. So we ditched that after one program.
then we started using Linux on Diamond Systems EBX and PC-104 boards. Diamond Systems provided a stripped down slackware based flashdisk image with a configured 2.6 kernel, glibc and the basic executables. It worked like a dream. We develop on Fedora 2 workstations, and the executables move right over. We have written a couple of character mode drivers for some special hardware and that was easy too. It isn't 'embedded' linux, its just plain old linux. it runs easily on a 128MB flashdisk and 128MB RAM with lots of space left over. So we were hooked.
(it turns out we always deliver source with our systems so the GPL is no problem for us and our customer doesn't care either because they don't redistribute)
an personally, I used Sun UNix in the 80's and switched to windows in the 90's. Going back to a unix-like development environment kicked ass. I had forgotten how productive it was.
The momentum in our company is to switch to Linux for any new applications that aren't completely hardcore.
On a different note, however, I have a complaint with the 'embedded linux' vendors about their sales model. They don't publish prices, you have to 'negotiate' a price. They are cagey about 'open source'. They try to tell you that you have to buy a 'seat' for every developer. Why do that when the development systems they provide are open source? The most valuable service they provide isn't real time extensions, but IMHO it is the creation of turn-key cross-development environments and board support for embedded systems. Thats worth a lot, but from my experience they are unpleasant to deal with (maybe because I am a introverted engineer) and the expense of their tools negates any advantage unless you are doing a product that is going to be produced in the millions so that the elimination of runtime licensing expense makes it worthwhile.
whats a 'meter'?
If WOW holds up, it also shatters the tired MMORPG design rule that says there needs to be a harsh penalty for death. Everquest pioneered this and others just tweaked it, seemingly never questioning it.
WOW is much more fun without the agony of experience loss by death. The death penalty probably led many to stop playing other games, because it is so demoralizing.