not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it.
Actually, gecko does pass it. The problem is that firefox 2.0 won't use that revision of the gecko core, only 3.0 will use it.
Now, even if current Firefox and future firefox 2.0 are not passing it, they're NEAR of passing it. IE7 rendering does not even look like a smiley.
I think the rendering engine really is good enough
Yeah, the software company number 1 of the world should be proud of shipping a widely used browser (IE is the most used application in the world) whose rendering engine is the worst one in the world, but that is "enought" only because IE defines what is "enought". If Firefox had 80% of market share, web developers would use lots features that IE does not even dreams to support until they ship IE8 in a couple of years. And nobody would use IE, because their engine is NOT "enought".
This "trick" uses a hardware bug, not a sofware bug, to exploit Vista. It should affect other OSes like Linux, Solaris, BSDs, etc.
I'm not surprised that they focused on being able to break Vista. A nice marketing move for the "researcher" (like there're not papers that explain how virtualizing environments aren't 100% safe in the x86 architecture)
Well, many games use DirectX (direct3d) these days. So, other games may open their code, but if they user directx...you won't be able to compile them under linux. And I don't know if opengl is somewhat better or worse, but directx seems to work, and you can't blame companies for using something that works.
Cedega (wine & friends) are the one opensource directx implementation out there. The opensource world needs a opensource directx implementation, just like it has a opensource smb implementation (samba) or a opensource ntfs driver. So cedega & wine are still neccesary even with opensource-friendly companies.
Is not that Linus doesn't think that it should be that way. He just thinks that a sofware license is the wrong way to do it.
This issue is interesting. Could we also turn the GPL into a license that goes even beyond? Why not force the users of a wiki licensed under a GPLv3 license to license the text they write in their wiki under the FDL, just because the wiki software is GPL?
I think this is ridiculous. The GPL should not take into saying what hardware vendors can do. We need to get rid of DRM, but using the GPL for that is ridiculous - it goes beyond what software is.
He probably thinks that the entire community is contributing to GNU/Linux because they like him personally
"He probably thinks"? Wow. And you got moderated +4?
BTW, I find what Linus says completely reasonable. He says that GPL has no bussiness in forbiding vendors from locking you in a hardware platform. I completely agree. GPL is a SOFTWARE license. Getting the GPL to rule what hardware can do is very dangerous - losing support from hardware makers like IBM, Intel, HP, for example. And it's not that what the GPL tries to do is wrong, is just the WRONG way to do it.
If AMD were to go under tomorrow, this would be the last processor we can expect to see from Intel for at least 10 years. For this reason alone, I will continue to buy AMD.
If you continue buying AMD even if it has low-quality products, it will be AMD who won't research better CPUs. Only iff they start losing market share they'll improve. AMD isn't going out of bussiness, and if it went out of bussiness other company would replace it - it's easy to make money in a market owned by a single company, that's why people uses the crappy linux desktop. But keeping buying AMD, and they won't have any incentive to make better CPUs
I doubt many people is interested in a opensource Windows - why would I care to run a open copy of a operative systems if I'm going to need binary drivers anyway?
As I understand it, the goal of klibc is "replacing" and extending the idea of initrd. Yes, you can link userspace programs against it. It's a library used by userspace, not by the kernel. The kernel boots, then it runs kinit, which is a userspace program linked against klibc. From the documentation, It currently replaces the kernel's ipconfig and nfsroot code. It does all this before loading your root filesystem - in fact, it looks like it will be those userspace programs who mount your root filesystem, moving even more kernel code to userspace. I remember reading emails about moving things like ej: partition detection or volume discovery, or even scanning SCSI/IDE busses to klibc (so it can be done in parallel and bootup can be faster), but don't take my word seriously at all.
The "splice" system call seems to be an answer to one of Microsoft's bad ideas - serving web pages from the kernel. At one point, Microsoft was claiming that an "enterprise operating system" had to be able to do that. So now Linux has a comparable "zero copy" facility.
Splice is not about serving web pages from the kernel, the in-kernel web server was removed years ago. I don't know where did you get that idea...
...linux supports thousands of other devices that BSDs doesn't support. Seriously, why a "openbsd ahead of Linux" story written in this way? It looks like some people love to start flamewars between linux and BSD communities or what? Linux developers are just as interested in getting opensource drivers just as the next guy. We're all in the same ship.
However, since this survey is done monthly, the question is has it been credible in the past
If you read the link, the largest movement of sites from Apache to IIS was once again at Go Daddy, with over 1.6M hostnames moving from Apache to IIS this month. If you read netcraft news periodically, you'll find that in the past mont they said: The shift is driven by changes at domain registrar Go Daddy, which has just migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Go Daddy, which had been the world's largest Linux host, is now the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host, as measured by hostnames.
In other words, there's not a "trend". It's just that Go Daddy is switching to Windows.
If you continue reading, Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's Marketing Manager for Hosted Solutions, noted that Go Daddy's migration to Windows Server 2003 follows announcements of expanded relationships between Microsoft and several other major hosters,
In other words, IIS has convinced Go Daddy executives thanks to a whole Marketing Departament for Hosted Solutions. Meanwhile, many other sites are using Apache just because they like it, not because a Marketing departament is trying to convince their executives.
I've an alternative: Buy a fscking windows license (it'll keep checking daily if you've a pirated copy but it won't annoy you because it's _really_ a legal copy).
Just because it's Microsoft doesn't means people should pirate it. Why people goes crazy when a company closes the code from a "hello world" opensource project but nobody says anything about pirated users? And don't tell me "Microsoft allows pirated copies on purpose". I don't care, using a illegal copy of windows is illegal and Microsoft doesn't matters, period. In my opinion, Microsoft should release a update to pirated versions which formats their windows partition.
Intel's marketing monster caused more than one person to think that the Centrino was a CPU.
I like to call it Centrino. It's a better name.
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII
P4 was like it was for a reason. They clearly _wanted_ to be able to clock the P4 that high from the start. I'm sick of reading that P4 is crap - P4 "crappiness" is what has allowed Intel to continue selling CPUs. Indeed, P4 is crap compared with AMD but it'd be _much_ worse if intel wouldn't have designed it to be able to clock it at high speeds. A bad product it's much better than NO product, and P4 was designed from the start to use Ghz instead of good engineering as the way to get better performance.
You seem to think that Intel engineers were stupid and that they really believed that P4 could be fast and power efficient at 4Ghz and that Pentium M and Core Duo have made them see "the light" (thanks to AMD, of course). I have a different theory: You (and me) are more stupid than them, and they designed the P4 that way for a reason and they knew this before anyone else, but they didn't expected that AMD would do so well.
There's also no reason to think that Intel wanted to replace x86 with itanium, specially so fast. Itanium is a high-end CPU and I don't see how you'd get a desktop itanium cpu at competitive prices.
Strangely enought "modern intel" seems to own most of the laptop market - and not because of marketing, but because Centrino and Core Duo looked good, both on paper and on real-world performance a power consumption tests. Conroe also looks good on paper, and it pretty much seems to beat current AMD offerings in "real"-world (soon people will be able to benchmark Conroe everywhere). And without using (clever) tricks like integrating the memory in the CPU.
Just because Itanium was a failure and presscot was crappy it doesn't means that "modern intel" makes bad CPUs. The reason why Presscott existed at all was probably because something (my bet is x86-64) forced Intel to redo all their roadmap and forced them to get everything they could from their P4 architecture until their roadmap was on road again (that is, Conroe). Do you really think that Intel engineers didn't know that increasing P4 frequency wouldn't work forever and that Intel never planed a substitute for the netburst architecture? They got distracted with the Itanium, but they're not stupid.
Sure it deserves attention, but what's the point of using L4 to run.....a monolithic kernel?
When running Linux under L4 (like in L4Linux), when the Linux process dies because of a bug, the system DIES. Sure, you can restart it, but so can you do in linux when something oopses using Kexec.
L4 was written to run real microkernels on top of it. If you want to run Linux instances so that a crash of the kernel doesn't crash the system, you'd surprised to know that Linux already includes in it's heart a vm-ish/microkernel-ish approach: Xen.
He just wants to build a stable, reliable and fast operative system, like the microkernel guys and like veryone else. The difference is that microkernel guys think that the One Way to achieve that is to compartmentalize everything. Linus however seems to think that the microkernel model makes programming much harder (due to multiple separate address spaces, etc) and that a monolithic kernel makes programming so much easier, than in return you get a stabler, faster kernel.
Yes. Memory-safe languages running inside a VM is exactly the kind of languages that I'd choose to write antivirus software.
After all, antivirus are not the kind apps that make your computer to underperform by a great margin, and they don't eat too many resources. Absolutely everything in software is about the algorithms, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
not even everybody's darling, the Gecko browser family, passes it.
Actually, gecko does pass it. The problem is that firefox 2.0 won't use that revision of the gecko core, only 3.0 will use it.
Now, even if current Firefox and future firefox 2.0 are not passing it, they're NEAR of passing it. IE7 rendering does not even look like a smiley.
I think the rendering engine really is good enough
Yeah, the software company number 1 of the world should be proud of shipping a widely used browser (IE is the most used application in the world) whose rendering engine is the worst one in the world, but that is "enought" only because IE defines what is "enought". If Firefox had 80% of market share, web developers would use lots features that IE does not even dreams to support until they ship IE8 in a couple of years. And nobody would use IE, because their engine is NOT "enought".
Not in the page renderer - Safari uses khtml, aka "konqueror", written in C++.
This "trick" uses a hardware bug, not a sofware bug, to exploit Vista. It should affect other OSes like Linux, Solaris, BSDs, etc.
I'm not surprised that they focused on being able to break Vista. A nice marketing move for the "researcher" (like there're not papers that explain how virtualizing environments aren't 100% safe in the x86 architecture)
Well, many games use DirectX (direct3d) these days. So, other games may open their code, but if they user directx...you won't be able to compile them under linux. And I don't know if opengl is somewhat better or worse, but directx seems to work, and you can't blame companies for using something that works.
Cedega (wine & friends) are the one opensource directx implementation out there. The opensource world needs a opensource directx implementation, just like it has a opensource smb implementation (samba) or a opensource ntfs driver. So cedega & wine are still neccesary even with opensource-friendly companies.
This needs to be stopped. Now.
Is not that Linus doesn't think that it should be that way. He just thinks that a sofware license is the wrong way to do it.
This issue is interesting. Could we also turn the GPL into a license that goes even beyond? Why not force the users of a wiki licensed under a GPLv3 license to license the text they write in their wiki under the FDL, just because the wiki software is GPL?
I think this is ridiculous. The GPL should not take into saying what hardware vendors can do. We need to get rid of DRM, but using the GPL for that is ridiculous - it goes beyond what software is.
He probably thinks that the entire community is contributing to GNU/Linux because they like him personally
"He probably thinks"? Wow. And you got moderated +4?
BTW, I find what Linus says completely reasonable. He says that GPL has no bussiness in forbiding vendors from locking you in a hardware platform. I completely agree. GPL is a SOFTWARE license. Getting the GPL to rule what hardware can do is very dangerous - losing support from hardware makers like IBM, Intel, HP, for example. And it's not that what the GPL tries to do is wrong, is just the WRONG way to do it.
If AMD were to go under tomorrow, this would be the last processor we can expect to see from Intel for at least 10 years. For this reason alone, I will continue to buy AMD.
If you continue buying AMD even if it has low-quality products, it will be AMD who won't research better CPUs. Only iff they start losing market share they'll improve. AMD isn't going out of bussiness, and if it went out of bussiness other company would replace it - it's easy to make money in a market owned by a single company, that's why people uses the crappy linux desktop. But keeping buying AMD, and they won't have any incentive to make better CPUs
For all of those AMD fanboys: don't switch. If AMD goes out of business Intel will have no reason to innovate (or lower prices)
Uh? If AMD doesn't lose customers, it won't have any reason to innovate either. It's losing customers what makes companies do better things.
I doubt many people is interested in a opensource Windows - why would I care to run a open copy of a operative systems if I'm going to need binary drivers anyway?
and only God knows how this will affect to the chairs market
As I understand it, the goal of klibc is "replacing" and extending the idea of initrd. Yes, you can link userspace programs against it. It's a library used by userspace, not by the kernel. The kernel boots, then it runs kinit, which is a userspace program linked against klibc. From the documentation, It currently replaces the kernel's ipconfig and nfsroot code. It does all this before loading your root filesystem - in fact, it looks like it will be those userspace programs who mount your root filesystem, moving even more kernel code to userspace. I remember reading emails about moving things like ej: partition detection or volume discovery, or even scanning SCSI/IDE busses to klibc (so it can be done in parallel and bootup can be faster), but don't take my word seriously at all.
The "splice" system call seems to be an answer to one of Microsoft's bad ideas - serving web pages from the kernel. At one point, Microsoft was claiming that an "enterprise operating system" had to be able to do that. So now Linux has a comparable "zero copy" facility.
Splice is not about serving web pages from the kernel, the in-kernel web server was removed years ago. I don't know where did you get that idea...
...linux supports thousands of other devices that BSDs doesn't support. Seriously, why a "openbsd ahead of Linux" story written in this way? It looks like some people love to start flamewars between linux and BSD communities or what? Linux developers are just as interested in getting opensource drivers just as the next guy. We're all in the same ship.
However, since this survey is done monthly, the question is has it been credible in the past
If you read the link, the largest movement of sites from Apache to IIS was once again at Go Daddy, with over 1.6M hostnames moving from Apache to IIS this month. If you read netcraft news periodically, you'll find that in the past mont they said: The shift is driven by changes at domain registrar Go Daddy, which has just migrated more than 3.5 million hostnames from Linux to Windows. Go Daddy, which had been the world's largest Linux host, is now the world's largest Windows Server 2003 host, as measured by hostnames.
In other words, there's not a "trend". It's just that Go Daddy is switching to Windows.
If you continue reading, Michael van Dijken, Microsoft's Marketing Manager for Hosted Solutions, noted that Go Daddy's migration to Windows Server 2003 follows announcements of expanded relationships between Microsoft and several other major hosters,
In other words, IIS has convinced Go Daddy executives thanks to a whole Marketing Departament for Hosted Solutions. Meanwhile, many other sites are using Apache just because they like it, not because a Marketing departament is trying to convince their executives.
I've an alternative: Buy a fscking windows license (it'll keep checking daily if you've a pirated copy but it won't annoy you because it's _really_ a legal copy).
Just because it's Microsoft doesn't means people should pirate it. Why people goes crazy when a company closes the code from a "hello world" opensource project but nobody says anything about pirated users? And don't tell me "Microsoft allows pirated copies on purpose". I don't care, using a illegal copy of windows is illegal and Microsoft doesn't matters, period. In my opinion, Microsoft should release a update to pirated versions which formats their windows partition.
Intel's marketing monster caused more than one person to think that the Centrino was a CPU.
I like to call it Centrino. It's a better name.
Second the PentiumM and the CoreDuo are a step back to the PentiumIII
P4 was like it was for a reason. They clearly _wanted_ to be able to clock the P4 that high from the start. I'm sick of reading that P4 is crap - P4 "crappiness" is what has allowed Intel to continue selling CPUs. Indeed, P4 is crap compared with AMD but it'd be _much_ worse if intel wouldn't have designed it to be able to clock it at high speeds. A bad product it's much better than NO product, and P4 was designed from the start to use Ghz instead of good engineering as the way to get better performance.
You seem to think that Intel engineers were stupid and that they really believed that P4 could be fast and power efficient at 4Ghz and that Pentium M and Core Duo have made them see "the light" (thanks to AMD, of course). I have a different theory: You (and me) are more stupid than them, and they designed the P4 that way for a reason and they knew this before anyone else, but they didn't expected that AMD would do so well.
There's also no reason to think that Intel wanted to replace x86 with itanium, specially so fast. Itanium is a high-end CPU and I don't see how you'd get a desktop itanium cpu at competitive prices.
Strangely enought "modern intel" seems to own most of the laptop market - and not because of marketing, but because Centrino and Core Duo looked good, both on paper and on real-world performance a power consumption tests. Conroe also looks good on paper, and it pretty much seems to beat current AMD offerings in "real"-world (soon people will be able to benchmark Conroe everywhere). And without using (clever) tricks like integrating the memory in the CPU.
Just because Itanium was a failure and presscot was crappy it doesn't means that "modern intel" makes bad CPUs. The reason why Presscott existed at all was probably because something (my bet is x86-64) forced Intel to redo all their roadmap and forced them to get everything they could from their P4 architecture until their roadmap was on road again (that is, Conroe). Do you really think that Intel engineers didn't know that increasing P4 frequency wouldn't work forever and that Intel never planed a substitute for the netburst architecture? They got distracted with the Itanium, but they're not stupid.
I agree! Look the CSS'ed slashdot, it's so Web 2.0.....I want a HTML 3.X compatible page back!
Again, use Xen for that. It works today.
Implement a VFS, the full networking stack as microkernel subsystems and came back to tell me how many different IPC calls you have in your hands
Sure it deserves attention, but what's the point of using L4 to run.....a monolithic kernel?
When running Linux under L4 (like in L4Linux), when the Linux process dies because of a bug, the system DIES. Sure, you can restart it, but so can you do in linux when something oopses using Kexec.
L4 was written to run real microkernels on top of it. If you want to run Linux instances so that a crash of the kernel doesn't crash the system, you'd surprised to know that Linux already includes in it's heart a vm-ish/microkernel-ish approach: Xen.
He doesn't thinks microkernels are "crap".
He just wants to build a stable, reliable and fast operative system, like the microkernel guys and like veryone else. The difference is that microkernel guys think that the One Way to achieve that is to compartmentalize everything. Linus however seems to think that the microkernel model makes programming much harder (due to multiple separate address spaces, etc) and that a monolithic kernel makes programming so much easier, than in return you get a stabler, faster kernel.
It works for them.
Biggest complaint is the new location of the 'Read More...' link after stories
Indeed. I'd rather move it to left and I'd put the number of comentaries and section at right.
Yes. Memory-safe languages running inside a VM is exactly the kind of languages that I'd choose to write antivirus software.
After all, antivirus are not the kind apps that make your computer to underperform by a great margin, and they don't eat too many resources. Absolutely everything in software is about the algorithms, isn't it?