The answer would probably not be "yes" or "not", but "how" and "when". "when" - gods knows when. And "how" - debian probably will force developers to continue supporting old init scripts and "let users choose".
We're lucky that ubuntu is doing the hard work anyway, debian will just need to merge it once it's done, doing what the upstart guys are doing in ubuntu from the scratch would be just impossible due to politics
Re:Upstart faster how?...
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"It still seems to be a serialised startup process"
It is. For Ubuntu edgy, a "compatibility layer" has been implemented to allow upstart run the old sysv/etc/init.d scripts
This is because changing everything in a single release was too much. For the next release, they'll replace the old scripts with true upstart scripts and then the switch will be complete (and still there'll be compatibility for the unported sysv scripts available in extra packages)
Most critical is that IE7 requiring XP or later is an opportunity for other browsers
Also notice that IE7 *requires* a legal copy of Windows XP, you need to run through this WGA thing. And even if it's possible to circunvent it, it's unlikely that most of the people (who doesn't have windows license) will do it. So it's possible that a big number of XP users *will* install firefox, just for not being left behind of the IE7 users and firefox users.
Humm, so you do agree that Micros~1 shouldn't have absolutely any restriction at all despite of owning more than 90% of the desktop market?
I certainly think that the EU shouldn't regulate video bloggers, because I'm all for liberalism and freedom. That's exactly the same reason that makes me think that the (obvious) Micros~1 monopoly should be broken in order to allow other companies to compete with them.
It's not that Micros~1 is a company that makes the best products on eart and the rest of companies of the world don't know how to compete or create good products. It's the M$ monopoly what stops them. Micros~1 in fact is a short of communist-like desktop-os leader who tells you what OS you must use, what protocols you must support in order to use computers, what standards are be used in the interweb.
Remember that even EEUU judgued Micros~1 for monopoly and that Micros~1 god rid of the lawsuits because they paid a big amount of $$$ to the companies suing them (which happened to accept the money because their financial situation was bad....because of the M$ monopoly) and that EEUU tried to break Micros~1 down into several parts but didn't managed to do it because Gates started to send lobbies everywhere. The fact that still almost 90% of people on the world are still using IE6 despite of the availability of much better products is a proof that there's a monopoly that needs to be broken down.
Actually, this is a good idea. The kernel-side binary blob that nvidia uses is used mostly for 3d operations: You don't really use it in your day-to-day desktop experience
The one "acceleration" that the X.org 2d desktops use is mostly render (for doing font AA, etc). But the X.org 2d drivers can provide that without using kernel drivers.
The propietary module provides you a alternative and propietary 2d driver, but's its possible to use the nv one, which was written also by nvidia i think. I don't know if it supports the render extension, but it certainly allows you to use your desktop without toouching the binary crap, even if it's a bit slower.
You know, many people thinks that this "plugin-based FS" idea is just pure and old overengineering.
The main reason why people doesn't even dares to look at reiser 4 is that it's awfully *complex* - and that's quite an achievement for filesystems, which are all of them already quite complex.
Yes, reiser4 is damn fast. I'm not surprised, since they had the invaluable oportunity of writting a filesystem from the scratch and they're already linux fs experts. I think that most of kernel hackers think, even if they don't say it, "we can build a filesystem that matchs reiser4 and that it actually can be understood, read or maintained"
No, this happens because it's the way XFS does journalling.
XFS journalling isn't as good as the one in ext3, from users' POV. Ext3 default journaling mode takes care of the relationship between metadata and the data associated to that metadata (and here let me remember that journalling/softupdates is a way to avoid corruption of the *metadata*, if you lose data because of a power cut that's fine, but it's not fine that the filesystem gets damaged and needs fsck because the metadata got corrupted)
IOW: when ext3 is going to write metadata to the disk, it looks first to the dirty data cached in the memory and writtes the data *before* it writes the metadata.
XFS journaling, in the other hand, does *not* care about writing the data before the metadata. Why? Well, because journalling is about keeping the metadata safe so you don't need fsck. This means that in case of a power cut, XFS may leave the contents of a "file" (metadata) unscycrhonized with its data. Because of that, the metadata may be pointing to random free zone of the disc with confidential information (passwords) which was deleted but it has not been overwritten, so XFS sets it to zero for safety. Ext3, on the other hand, will never left your data "unscychornised" with your metadata. The file may get corrupted because the program that was manipulating it was stopped in the power cut, but the relationship between the data and the metadata is always coherent.
Ext3 journaling mode may be considered an "extra", and it *does* pay a performance disadvantage because of this. If you want ext3 to behave like xfs (and get better performance), mount your fs with the mount option "data=writeback". Reiserfs in the other hand historically had a similar journaling method as XFS (just like JFS), but the suse guys created a journaling mode similar to the default one in ext3 which AFAIK is not enabled by default (at least on mainline) and gets enabled with "data=ordered"
Is the XFS journaling mode worse? Well, for desktop users, who would rather have syncronized their data and their metadata, clearly yes. This is why XFS is just not the best FS for desktops - its a wonderful FS, but just not "optimized" for desktops. NTFS journaling does the same that ext3 does, BTW, and it's for a reason.
Naturally, this work was done mostly by GNOME hackers...
Well. It was Gnome who was lacking a IPC system, not KDE. So yes, it find it sensible that the ones who didn't have it are who implemented it. In the same way, since they've lacked it for years it's reasonable that they have built a comparable competitor.
and it was built in such a way that there are no desktop dependencies. Had it been done by KDE hackers, it would have been tied to Qt
Bullshit. Dbus does depend on glib.
DBUS is heavily used in recent GNOMEs
Bullshit. Dbus usage in gnome is very light - which I find reasonable, since gnome hasn't had a IPC mechanism for most of its life. There're programs with thousand of lines of code that need to be DBUS-ified
KDE 4 in the other hand inherits apps which all of them used DCOP for years, so the DBUS usage in KDE 4 is actually much wider than in gnome. it does have sense: KDE has had a IPC mechanism for years, so the apps were ready for the idea, gnome apps wasn't so it will take some time until they catch up.
DCOP can already do amazing things, like opening and writing a koffice document (including commands to do things like ie: activate bold fonts and many other things)
Do you want to send the oputput of ls -l to your IM contact via Kopete? Just do "dcop kopete KopeteIface messageContact jabber.com "`ls -l `"
Those are the kind of things that make many people use KDE instead of Gnome BTW
There's no bussines model but....
on
Ballmer Sounds Off
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion
Why is that I suspect that Microsoft also tried to buy youtube?
Yes. But open source drivers are a BIG step ahead. I _wish_ that all hardware companies would release open source drivers without specs.
I mean, Theo has critized intel for not releasing specs and releasing instead just open source drivers for lots of their products. There're tons of companies that will even sue you if you try to reverse engineer their hardware devices but hey, because we're the OSS leaders and we've nothing better to do, let's critize the companies that do release opensource drivers and no specs, instead of wasting all your efforts into the ones that don't do even _that_.
...that Theo critizes OLPC & Red hat & friends for accepting to sign NDAS to write open source drivers.
I mean, isn't ironic that the guy that is saying this is the leader of a open source OS with a license that allows people to write propietary drivers not only without giving the specs, but without giving the source?
Theo, why don't you dont start changing the OpenBSD license? BSD is a great license, but if you want to be coherent you may aswell stop calling "OSS unfriendly" to the people that tries to provide open source drivers for some hardware. GPL drivers without NDA are better than nothing. Save your criticism for the company that does NOT release specs neither the source, not for the ones that give a step ahead and allow to write OSS drivers.
With this news, though, I can go back to writing real CSS! This will save me so much time!
No, it won't. IE7 doesn't improve CSS support that much. Yes, they fixed it a bit, but it's mostly the same.
IE7 = tabs + new UI
What I don't understand is why it took them so much time to release this crap. I guess that because IE is tied into XP and so many things depend on it they spent most of the time trying to track down regressions from crappy 3rd progarms
Intel's quad core system is going to run twice has hot and use twice the power of the Core2. Why? because it is two of them.
Applying your logic: "AMD's quad-core systems are going to run x4 hotter and use 4x the power of a single opteron core. Why? Because there're four of them".
As Intel Ceo said in the press sesion: "The initial (four-core chips) are multi-chip, but so what?" he said. "I think you guys are misreading the market (if you think customers care about that)."
First, the dual-die process takes more power
I will wait for their quad-core before judguing it. The first dual core Intel CPU was hot and slow because it was based in the presscot platform, not because it was dual-die. This "dual-die" quad core is based on the Core 2, which is a great platform, IMNSHO.
In other words: I don't really care if it's dual-die or quad-core. If it's fast and eats few power and it's not expensive, then my money is for Intel. The Core 2 platform looks good enought to make possible a dual-die quead core processor that beats the alternative from AMD - not because the dual-die design is better, but because the Core 2 is better. Additionally, this is just their first quad-core CPU - the rest of quad-core CPus will be real quad-core beasts.
For those that didn't see it (because my submission to slashdot was rejected, between other reasons), An Ode to GPLv2:
"One of the reasons I didn't end up signing the GPLv3 position statement that James posted (and others had signed up for), was that a few weeks ago I had signed up for writing another kind of statement entirely: not so much about why I dislike the GPLv3, but why I think the GPLv2 is so great.
Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
This hole topic is just not a problem. If you don't like big corporations using DRM to violate your rights (the way you percive them) then don't use their services
This works in theory and practice with itunes: You still can buy in other online music stores or even buy the CD
It's very different in the case of DVD, though. Because the companies who make movies are the same companies who control the "electronics" market, consumers didn't have a choice, they were imposed what format they should use, like if they were living on Russia when Communism was still there. I just don't understand why companies are allowed to be big enought that they control EVERYTHING on a given market. It's like the companies who make petrol would also make cars and would make their petrol compatible only with their engines, and if other company tried to build a car compatible with their petrol would get sued. IMO this is anti-liberal and goes against capitalism. Should people be allowed to create big enterprises that create jobs? Hell, yes. Should those companies be allowed to control the market and lock out competitors? Hell, NO.
Remember that the ONE reason why you can see DVD in Linux is because someone broke the DRM protection. In the case of Itunes, it's clear that its DRM isn't dangerous, since you can buy other players and use other music stores. But if itunes would got 99% of the online music market, it WOULD be a problem. So DRM can be both good and bad - it's up to the government to make laws to stop it from being bad.
As long as it's "good enought" it's good for yahoo - the main source of visits to yahoo servers is for mail (50% of their traffic). If they lose mail users against Gmail and hotmail (hotmail is also ajax now) they lose most of their users
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
Heh. He also has his own make version for some reason. Also, IIRC cdrecord doesn't (or didn't) support DVD recording except through a propietary program made by schilling. You needed to pay him money in order to get a license and a key. People had to code opens-source DVD extensions, and distros had to patch the cdrecord source with those extensions.
And then, there's the dev= issue. Schilling insist that the "right way" of using your burner is by passing the dev=1,2,3 argument, instead of dev=/dev/foo, and that the "right thing" to do is not to use a kernel interface to use the burner, but to let cdrecord internal libraries to access directly to the IDE/SCSI bus, like in the good old DOS days. When Suse patched their cdrecord version to use dev=/dev/foo directly, he wrote a linuxcheck() function that printks a warning when you're using a 2.6 kernel, and he "sub-licensed" that function with a GPL-incompatible statement: "you can't remove this function", just to try to force Suse and Redhat to include it.
"People should have to pass a test to get on the internet"
What an increidble bad idea. Internet doesn't kill people, wheres is my freedom if I'm not allowed to use Internet? Why not extend your "wonderful" idea to knifes, regulate the ability to have babies...and control every potencially dangeous aspect of your life? Why are people allowed to walk in the street? They may cause accidents!
Slashdot Mirror
The answer would probably not be "yes" or "not", but "how" and "when". "when" - gods knows when. And "how" - debian probably will force developers to continue supporting old init scripts and "let users choose".
We're lucky that ubuntu is doing the hard work anyway, debian will just need to merge it once it's done, doing what the upstart guys are doing in ubuntu from the scratch would be just impossible due to politics
"It still seems to be a serialised startup process"
/etc/init.d scripts
It is. For Ubuntu edgy, a "compatibility layer" has been implemented to allow upstart run the old sysv
This is because changing everything in a single release was too much. For the next release, they'll replace the old scripts with true upstart scripts and then the switch will be complete (and still there'll be compatibility for the unported sysv scripts available in extra packages)
Most critical is that IE7 requiring XP or later is an opportunity for other browsers
Also notice that IE7 *requires* a legal copy of Windows XP, you need to run through this WGA thing. And even if it's possible to circunvent it, it's unlikely that most of the people (who doesn't have windows license) will do it. So it's possible that a big number of XP users *will* install firefox, just for not being left behind of the IE7 users and firefox users.
A simple question: What are you planning to implement for the next IE version, be it IE 8 or IE 7.5 or whatever?
Humm, so you do agree that Micros~1 shouldn't have absolutely any restriction at all despite of owning more than 90% of the desktop market?
I certainly think that the EU shouldn't regulate video bloggers, because I'm all for liberalism and freedom. That's exactly the same reason that makes me think that the (obvious) Micros~1 monopoly should be broken in order to allow other companies to compete with them.
It's not that Micros~1 is a company that makes the best products on eart and the rest of companies of the world don't know how to compete or create good products. It's the M$ monopoly what stops them. Micros~1 in fact is a short of communist-like desktop-os leader who tells you what OS you must use, what protocols you must support in order to use computers, what standards are be used in the interweb.
Remember that even EEUU judgued Micros~1 for monopoly and that Micros~1 god rid of the lawsuits because they paid a big amount of $$$ to the companies suing them (which happened to accept the money because their financial situation was bad....because of the M$ monopoly) and that EEUU tried to break Micros~1 down into several parts but didn't managed to do it because Gates started to send lobbies everywhere. The fact that still almost 90% of people on the world are still using IE6 despite of the availability of much better products is a proof that there's a monopoly that needs to be broken down.
Actually, this is a good idea. The kernel-side binary blob that nvidia uses is used mostly for 3d operations: You don't really use it in your day-to-day desktop experience
The one "acceleration" that the X.org 2d desktops use is mostly render (for doing font AA, etc). But the X.org 2d drivers can provide that without using kernel drivers.
The propietary module provides you a alternative and propietary 2d driver, but's its possible to use the nv one, which was written also by nvidia i think. I don't know if it supports the render extension, but it certainly allows you to use your desktop without toouching the binary crap, even if it's a bit slower.
SUSE decided to change to ext3 BEFORE hans was arrested, and did it for technical reasons
What about plugins for arbitrary attributes?
You know, many people thinks that this "plugin-based FS" idea is just pure and old overengineering.
The main reason why people doesn't even dares to look at reiser 4 is that it's awfully *complex* - and that's quite an achievement for filesystems, which are all of them already quite complex.
Yes, reiser4 is damn fast. I'm not surprised, since they had the invaluable oportunity of writting a filesystem from the scratch and they're already linux fs experts. I think that most of kernel hackers think, even if they don't say it, "we can build a filesystem that matchs reiser4 and that it actually can be understood, read or maintained"
AFAIK this is a design flaw in XFS
No, this happens because it's the way XFS does journalling.
XFS journalling isn't as good as the one in ext3, from users' POV. Ext3 default journaling mode takes care of the relationship between metadata and the data associated to that metadata (and here let me remember that journalling/softupdates is a way to avoid corruption of the *metadata*, if you lose data because of a power cut that's fine, but it's not fine that the filesystem gets damaged and needs fsck because the metadata got corrupted)
IOW: when ext3 is going to write metadata to the disk, it looks first to the dirty data cached in the memory and writtes the data *before* it writes the metadata.
XFS journaling, in the other hand, does *not* care about writing the data before the metadata. Why? Well, because journalling is about keeping the metadata safe so you don't need fsck. This means that in case of a power cut, XFS may leave the contents of a "file" (metadata) unscycrhonized with its data. Because of that, the metadata may be pointing to random free zone of the disc with confidential information (passwords) which was deleted but it has not been overwritten, so XFS sets it to zero for safety. Ext3, on the other hand, will never left your data "unscychornised" with your metadata. The file may get corrupted because the program that was manipulating it was stopped in the power cut, but the relationship between the data and the metadata is always coherent.
Ext3 journaling mode may be considered an "extra", and it *does* pay a performance disadvantage because of this. If you want ext3 to behave like xfs (and get better performance), mount your fs with the mount option "data=writeback". Reiserfs in the other hand historically had a similar journaling method as XFS (just like JFS), but the suse guys created a journaling mode similar to the default one in ext3 which AFAIK is not enabled by default (at least on mainline) and gets enabled with "data=ordered"
Is the XFS journaling mode worse? Well, for desktop users, who would rather have syncronized their data and their metadata, clearly yes. This is why XFS is just not the best FS for desktops - its a wonderful FS, but just not "optimized" for desktops. NTFS journaling does the same that ext3 does, BTW, and it's for a reason.
Naturally, this work was done mostly by GNOME hackers...
Well. It was Gnome who was lacking a IPC system, not KDE. So yes, it find it sensible that the ones who didn't have it are who implemented it. In the same way, since they've lacked it for years it's reasonable that they have built a comparable competitor.
and it was built in such a way that there are no desktop dependencies. Had it been done by KDE hackers, it would have been tied to Qt
Bullshit. Dbus does depend on glib.
DBUS is heavily used in recent GNOMEs
Bullshit. Dbus usage in gnome is very light - which I find reasonable, since gnome hasn't had a IPC mechanism for most of its life. There're programs with thousand of lines of code that need to be DBUS-ified
KDE 4 in the other hand inherits apps which all of them used DCOP for years, so the DBUS usage in KDE 4 is actually much wider than in gnome. it does have sense: KDE has had a IPC mechanism for years, so the apps were ready for the idea, gnome apps wasn't so it will take some time until they catch up.
DCOP can already do amazing things, like opening and writing a koffice document (including commands to do things like ie: activate bold fonts and many other things)
Do you want to send the oputput of ls -l to your IM contact via Kopete? Just do "dcop kopete KopeteIface messageContact jabber.com "`ls -l `"
Those are the kind of things that make many people use KDE instead of Gnome BTW
Right now, there's no business model for YouTube that would justify $1.6 billion
Why is that I suspect that Microsoft also tried to buy youtube?
Yes. But open source drivers are a BIG step ahead. I _wish_ that all hardware companies would release open source drivers without specs.
I mean, Theo has critized intel for not releasing specs and releasing instead just open source drivers for lots of their products. There're tons of companies that will even sue you if you try to reverse engineer their hardware devices but hey, because we're the OSS leaders and we've nothing better to do, let's critize the companies that do release opensource drivers and no specs, instead of wasting all your efforts into the ones that don't do even _that_.
...that Theo critizes OLPC & Red hat & friends for accepting to sign NDAS to write open source drivers.
I mean, isn't ironic that the guy that is saying this is the leader of a open source OS with a license that allows people to write propietary drivers not only without giving the specs, but without giving the source?
Theo, why don't you dont start changing the OpenBSD license? BSD is a great license, but if you want to be coherent you may aswell stop calling "OSS unfriendly" to the people that tries to provide open source drivers for some hardware. GPL drivers without NDA are better than nothing. Save your criticism for the company that does NOT release specs neither the source, not for the ones that give a step ahead and allow to write OSS drivers.
With this news, though, I can go back to writing real CSS! This will save me so much time!
No, it won't. IE7 doesn't improve CSS support that much. Yes, they fixed it a bit, but it's mostly the same.
IE7 = tabs + new UI
What I don't understand is why it took them so much time to release this crap. I guess that because IE is tied into XP and so many things depend on it they spent most of the time trying to track down regressions from crappy 3rd progarms
Intel's quad core system is going to run twice has hot and use twice the power of the Core2. Why? because it is two of them.
Applying your logic: "AMD's quad-core systems are going to run x4 hotter and use 4x the power of a single opteron core. Why? Because there're four of them".
they're dual-die
As Intel Ceo said in the press sesion: "The initial (four-core chips) are multi-chip, but so what?" he said. "I think you guys are misreading the market (if you think customers care about that)."
First, the dual-die process takes more power
I will wait for their quad-core before judguing it. The first dual core Intel CPU was hot and slow because it was based in the presscot platform, not because it was dual-die. This "dual-die" quad core is based on the Core 2, which is a great platform, IMNSHO.
In other words: I don't really care if it's dual-die or quad-core. If it's fast and eats few power and it's not expensive, then my money is for Intel. The Core 2 platform looks good enought to make possible a dual-die quead core processor that beats the alternative from AMD - not because the dual-die design is better, but because the Core 2 is better. Additionally, this is just their first quad-core CPU - the rest of quad-core CPus will be real quad-core beasts.
For those that didn't see it (because my submission to slashdot was rejected, between other reasons), An Ode to GPLv2:
"One of the reasons I didn't end up signing the GPLv3 position statement that James posted (and others had signed up for), was that a few weeks ago I had signed up for writing another kind of statement entirely: not so much about why I dislike the GPLv3, but why I think the GPLv2 is so great.
Rest of the post
A new blog on the Internets.
Slow news day?
Agreed - editors are the one thing why sites like slashdot are worthwhile compared with digg. If you only want to read random shit written by monkeys digg is unbeatable, slashdot should be different
I'm literally sick of all this people who don't like being indexed. If you don't want to show up in google, adjust robots.txt so that google won't search it. This is not a problem of "companies entering into your house because you left the door opened". Web sites are supposed to be there to be visited, if you don't like being indexed use robots.txt
This hole topic is just not a problem. If you don't like big corporations using DRM to violate your rights (the way you percive them) then don't use their services
This works in theory and practice with itunes: You still can buy in other online music stores or even buy the CD
It's very different in the case of DVD, though. Because the companies who make movies are the same companies who control the "electronics" market, consumers didn't have a choice, they were imposed what format they should use, like if they were living on Russia when Communism was still there. I just don't understand why companies are allowed to be big enought that they control EVERYTHING on a given market. It's like the companies who make petrol would also make cars and would make their petrol compatible only with their engines, and if other company tried to build a car compatible with their petrol would get sued. IMO this is anti-liberal and goes against capitalism. Should people be allowed to create big enterprises that create jobs? Hell, yes. Should those companies be allowed to control the market and lock out competitors? Hell, NO.
Remember that the ONE reason why you can see DVD in Linux is because someone broke the DRM protection. In the case of Itunes, it's clear that its DRM isn't dangerous, since you can buy other players and use other music stores. But if itunes would got 99% of the online music market, it WOULD be a problem. So DRM can be both good and bad - it's up to the government to make laws to stop it from being bad.
As long as it's "good enought" it's good for yahoo - the main source of visits to yahoo servers is for mail (50% of their traffic). If they lose mail users against Gmail and hotmail (hotmail is also ajax now) they lose most of their users
None of this means that he is evil or incompetant, but it does give the impression of someone who is insistently idiosyncratic. I can easily imagine that he'd be difficult to deal with.
Heh. He also has his own make version for some reason. Also, IIRC cdrecord doesn't (or didn't) support DVD recording except through a propietary program made by schilling. You needed to pay him money in order to get a license and a key. People had to code opens-source DVD extensions, and distros had to patch the cdrecord source with those extensions.
And then, there's the dev= issue. Schilling insist that the "right way" of using your burner is by passing the dev=1,2,3 argument, instead of dev=/dev/foo, and that the "right thing" to do is not to use a kernel interface to use the burner, but to let cdrecord internal libraries to access directly to the IDE/SCSI bus, like in the good old DOS days. When Suse patched their cdrecord version to use dev=/dev/foo directly, he wrote a linuxcheck() function that printks a warning when you're using a 2.6 kernel, and he "sub-licensed" that function with a GPL-incompatible statement: "you can't remove this function", just to try to force Suse and Redhat to include it.
"People should have to pass a test to get on the internet"
What an increidble bad idea. Internet doesn't kill people, wheres is my freedom if I'm not allowed to use Internet? Why not extend your "wonderful" idea to knifes, regulate the ability to have babies...and control every potencially dangeous aspect of your life? Why are people allowed to walk in the street? They may cause accidents!