Just because a program will run using wine does not mean its ported to Linux
This is bullshit. A program compiled against wine and running wine is no different than other using QT. Wine can be seen as a sort of opensource cross-platform GUI framework that it happens to implement the windows API.
Sure, it's incomplete, but still. If you want my opinion, it'd be nice to see that wine completes its development - I could write programs using the Win32 API (no matter how ugly it is) and get a program that runs under windows, linux and other opensource OSes.
Wine is specially interesting for games. No matter how much you like OpenGL, thousand of games are using DirectX, and unlike it happens with desktop software I don't see opensource covering that hole with opensource alternatives soon. If you provide a DirectX opensource implementation you'd encourage game companies to support linux.
as Mr. Krakow points out, it's a Beta. Do we all know the concept of that word? It's still being tested.
The problem with Vista is that it's way more unstable than it should - all the long-time microsoft beta testers are saying that Vista is way more unstable than XP was in the same stage and that there's NO way that Vista can be released on schedule as "stable". XP was way more stable in the betas than vista, and look how much it took to fix all the bugs. Now, if XP was stable I can't imagine how a unstable release would be.
I don't think he thinks that of himself reading the interview
"KLS: Over the years, Linux has spawned other open technologies and even an open source spirit or open source philosophy. It has engendered stuff like Wikipedia, the online open source encyclopedia or even, some could argue, citizen journalism. What are your thoughts about that?"
LT: We shouldn't give credit to Linux per se. There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach. At the same time I don't think this whole "openness" notion is new. In fact I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do. So openness is not something new, it is something that actually has worked for a long time"
AMD isn't going to get 50% of the 4-way server by just making DELL use them. And Intel is releasing competitive products in a few months - one might say that they've already started so I don't think it's going to happen magically. They'll get a good share, sure, but so much? I don't think so.
If you keep track of the current offerings by Intel and AMD, you'll find that AMD chips are consistenly increasing their power consumption. Analyst mention "Presscot tendency" when they talk about this. Everybbody agrees it has to end - Intel is releasing a power-efficient arquitecture in a few months and while current AMD offerings are good, it just can't sit hpoing that intel isn't going to catch up, and it looks like the Core is that "catchup".
AMD has just released recently a low-power Athlon line - but it looks more like a patch than a semi-rearchitecture like the core is. This new low-power line will help AMD somewhat and the 65nm switch in december will help a bit too but they'll have to work hard if they don't want to became the "hell" in the humoristic comentaries in a few months.
so binary only drivers aren't a problem with stability
The only way to get stability is to fix them, and the easier way to do that is opensource them. Even if you have a 100% pure microkernel, a bad disk driver won't allow you to run your programs, a bad graphics driver won't allow you to use graphics. Stability is not just about hanging, and there's not magic that you can apply to make drivers not suck.
The only thing you can't do is make a bootable Darwin OS for x86 any more. And if you can explain to me why anyone would want to do that for any useful purpose, well, I'm all ears.
Like extremists need any help to make a plan to kill thousands of people.
If anything, the US Government could have let terrorist plan the 9/11 attack. Why do it or contribute themselves
BTW, I'm not paranoid, but if there was just a SINGLE camera taking care of the Dep. of Defense of the most powerful country in the world and it had a capture rate so slow that it couldn't grab the frame where the the 747 appeared, you'd need at least to fire somebody because it's insane.
they can rest now and let other people come up with the next ideas that will sell the phones next iteration.
If they do that, they'll fail. Open source really needs a community to work, ie: you've to give something. If they don't keep offering anything people will go elsewhere. They need to keep releasing new things and features to attract people. Then, other people will come and will start adding other things and helping in the development. But if they expect that people are going to do all the work for free and they're going to become rich by just doing that they're crazy bceause nobody will find a reason to do that.
Why would I want a laptop to have a great graphics card? To eat more power and give me less batery life? Do you really need to play doom 3 in a 13' laptop?
Seriously, that graphics card helps to lower the price and power consumption and is more than enought to decode any kind of DVD/video and play any game that doesn't requires too much graphic power. It even supports HDTV, and several acceleration capabilities (pixel shaders and all that crap).
If I have to choose between a cheap and power-savvy low-end card and a high-performance but expensive and power-hungry one, I choose the first. For 1.099 $ it's exactly what I want.
That Mac OS X is the most eyecandy OS in the world is a fact, not an opinion. No production OS today does such shadows, transparencies and animations in that way.
Well, in this case I'd say that having a close tab button on every tab has a lot of sense, just like you have a close button in every window, not a single button in the taskbar.
The people who support the Invasions of Privacy are those who are afraid of the Terrorists
Are those people aware that bad foreign politics have contributed quite a bit to make people attack america and that only good politics and not spying citiziens will fix it?
But as to your point about BSD in general beating Linux to the desktop with OS X, yeah, you're right
Maybe I'm being too dense today, but what makes Mac os x sexy for desktop is propietary software, not BSD-licensed software. That's like saying that the Linux nvidia driver makes Linux graphics stack great...
The "vow to compete" is a useless and sensationalist addition by the author
Specially considering that what really matters for desktop is gnome, kde,x.org...not the kernel. The kernel is involved in things hardware support, device and power management (suspend) etc, but what really matters is gnome and kde, nothing else. Gnome is not more usable under freebsd than in linux, neither the reverse.
getting most of the development effort in useless eye-candy
Mac os x is the best desktop operative system in the world. It's also the one who has more eyecandy than any other operative system. You don't like those "useless" drop shadows and transparencies? Well, here comes a newflash for you: Max os x added them first than anyone else.
I'm not a compiler guy, but IIRC PPC Mac OS X binaries are compiled with -Os (ie: optimized for size), or that was what people said. Is Apple using the same options for Intel, or are they even using the Intel compiler instead of gcc?
I've this personal conspiration theory that when Jobs realized that IBM was not going to care anymore about laptops and Apple in general CPUs anymore (the real reason why Jobs switched to Intel - read the second paragraph of this interview) he planned a swtich which would harm IBM and PPC as much as he could, and misoptimizing PPC binaries would be an option.
(of course this is just conspiration, Apple may have been using -Os precisely to get more performance)
"xnu is not a traditional microkernel as its Mach heritage might imply. Over the years various people have tried methods of speeding up microkernels, including collocation (MkLinux), and optimized messaging mechanisms (L4)[microperf]. Since Mac OS X was not intended to work as a multi-server, and a crash of a BSD server was equivalent to a system crash from a user perspective the advantages of protecting Mach from BSD were negligible. Rather than simple collocation, message passing was short circuited by having BSD directly call Mach functions. While the abstractions are maintained within the kernel at source level, the kernel is in fact monolithic. xnu exports both Mach 3.0 and BSD interfaces for userland applications to use. Use of the Mach interface is discouraged except for IPC, and if it is necessary to use a Mach API it should most likely be used indirectly through a system provided wrapper API."
Theoretically you are right. But in practice Linux 2.6 is 6 million lines of code and a typical microkernel is less than 10k.
Theorically you're right, but in practice a microkernel, because it's a microkernel will need separated processes to implement the thousand of drivers and the docens of architectures that Linux supports.
In practice, a microkernel implementing what Linux implements today would take.....6 millions of lines of code, give or take a couple of lines. Quoting Linus, The fact that each individual piece is simple and secure does not make the aggregate either simple or secure
Yes, in FUSE, and within kde and withing gnome. Zip archive != zip disk.
No, filesystem compression has been done in linux (but not merged, because anyway not many people seems to ask for it)
I guess that's why USB filesystem are implemented in user mode in linux, huh?
WTF? Filesystems used for USB disks are exactly the same used for typical hard disks, and all of them are in the kernel, if that's what you meant.
Earlier you said linux gets "all the advantages of a microkernel without any of the disadvantages" but yet it can't
NTFS has been reverse-engineered. You can't even write or create files. Why would I be surprised that it can't act as root filesystem? As far as I know, linux can use more filesystems as root device as any other operative systems, including microkernels.
Can you even imagine what would be involved in making a.zip filesystem in the linux kernel?
It's fun that you mention that, because such things have been already done.
Even a read-only one would require maybe 6 months of study for an average developer
"...data provided to you by 0XABAADC0DA research"
Is NTFS not performance critical?
No. Linux systems can't even boot on NTFS filesystems. Obviously, the main purpose of NTFS is compatibility. If FUSE had been there before, people probably would have used it to implement it, just like with the beos filesystem, etc.
The reality is that "performance critical" filesystem for a disk means that it has low fragmentation and few seeks for the index
The reality is that seeks and fragmentation matters....when things are not in cache. Real world does care about the real world, you know.
Notice any difference? In the kernel, everything is pretty much either some long-standing standard or developed by some large corporation
Yes I notice a difference: The filesystems in the kernel tree are general-purpose, performance-critical filesystems, meanwhile a fuseftp filesystem is quite the contrary.
Noticed how FUSE is a linux thing that allows people to write filesystems in userspace *despite of being a monolithic kernel*, giving users all the advantages of a microkernel without any of the disadvantages? Did you already noticed how this same approach is already used for some driver, like all the usb drivers implemented in userspace in top of libusb, X.org 2D drivers or CUPS printing drivers?
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Just because a program will run using wine does not mean its ported to Linux
This is bullshit. A program compiled against wine and running wine is no different than other using QT. Wine can be seen as a sort of opensource cross-platform GUI framework that it happens to implement the windows API.
Sure, it's incomplete, but still. If you want my opinion, it'd be nice to see that wine completes its development - I could write programs using the Win32 API (no matter how ugly it is) and get a program that runs under windows, linux and other opensource OSes.
Wine is specially interesting for games. No matter how much you like OpenGL, thousand of games are using DirectX, and unlike it happens with desktop software I don't see opensource covering that hole with opensource alternatives soon. If you provide a DirectX opensource implementation you'd encourage game companies to support linux.
And F-Spot. While it's nice to see Google supporting Linux, it'd be much nicer to get linux versions of the apps that we don't have a equivalent 8)
as Mr. Krakow points out, it's a Beta. Do we all know the concept of that word? It's still being tested.
The problem with Vista is that it's way more unstable than it should - all the long-time microsoft beta testers are saying that Vista is way more unstable than XP was in the same stage and that there's NO way that Vista can be released on schedule as "stable". XP was way more stable in the betas than vista, and look how much it took to fix all the bugs. Now, if XP was stable I can't imagine how a unstable release would be.
I don't think he thinks that of himself reading the interview
"KLS: Over the years, Linux has spawned other open technologies and even an open source spirit or open source philosophy. It has engendered stuff like Wikipedia, the online open source encyclopedia or even, some could argue, citizen journalism. What are your thoughts about that?"
LT: We shouldn't give credit to Linux per se. There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach. At the same time I don't think this whole "openness" notion is new. In fact I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today, and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do. So openness is not something new, it is something that actually has worked for a long time"
AMD isn't going to get 50% of the 4-way server by just making DELL use them. And Intel is releasing competitive products in a few months - one might say that they've already started so I don't think it's going to happen magically. They'll get a good share, sure, but so much? I don't think so.
If you keep track of the current offerings by Intel and AMD, you'll find that AMD chips are consistenly increasing their power consumption. Analyst mention "Presscot tendency" when they talk about this. Everybbody agrees it has to end - Intel is releasing a power-efficient arquitecture in a few months and while current AMD offerings are good, it just can't sit hpoing that intel isn't going to catch up, and it looks like the Core is that "catchup".
AMD has just released recently a low-power Athlon line - but it looks more like a patch than a semi-rearchitecture like the core is. This new low-power line will help AMD somewhat and the 65nm switch in december will help a bit too but they'll have to work hard if they don't want to became the "hell" in the humoristic comentaries in a few months.
so binary only drivers aren't a problem with stability
The only way to get stability is to fix them, and the easier way to do that is opensource them. Even if you have a 100% pure microkernel, a bad disk driver won't allow you to run your programs, a bad graphics driver won't allow you to use graphics. Stability is not just about hanging, and there's not magic that you can apply to make drivers not suck.
The only thing you can't do is make a bootable Darwin OS for x86 any more. And if you can explain to me why anyone would want to do that for any useful purpose, well, I'm all ears.
You're jocking, right?
(I'm being serious)
Like extremists need any help to make a plan to kill thousands of people.
If anything, the US Government could have let terrorist plan the 9/11 attack. Why do it or contribute themselves
BTW, I'm not paranoid, but if there was just a SINGLE camera taking care of the Dep. of Defense of the most powerful country in the world and it had a capture rate so slow that it couldn't grab the frame where the the 747 appeared, you'd need at least to fire somebody because it's insane.
they can rest now and let other people come up with the next ideas that will sell the phones next iteration.
If they do that, they'll fail. Open source really needs a community to work, ie: you've to give something. If they don't keep offering anything people will go elsewhere. They need to keep releasing new things and features to attract people. Then, other people will come and will start adding other things and helping in the development. But if they expect that people are going to do all the work for free and they're going to become rich by just doing that they're crazy bceause nobody will find a reason to do that.
Why would I want a laptop to have a great graphics card? To eat more power and give me less batery life? Do you really need to play doom 3 in a 13' laptop?
Seriously, that graphics card helps to lower the price and power consumption and is more than enought to decode any kind of DVD/video and play any game that doesn't requires too much graphic power. It even supports HDTV, and several acceleration capabilities (pixel shaders and all that crap).
If I have to choose between a cheap and power-savvy low-end card and a high-performance but expensive and power-hungry one, I choose the first. For 1.099 $ it's exactly what I want.
That Mac OS X is the most eyecandy OS in the world is a fact, not an opinion. No production OS today does such shadows, transparencies and animations in that way.
Well, in this case I'd say that having a close tab button on every tab has a lot of sense, just like you have a close button in every window, not a single button in the taskbar.
Don't apologize. Why should be America reponsible? It has been the EU who gave all the data to America, so it's EU who should apologize.
The people who support the Invasions of Privacy are those who are afraid of the Terrorists
Are those people aware that bad foreign politics have contributed quite a bit to make people attack america and that only good politics and not spying citiziens will fix it?
But as to your point about BSD in general beating Linux to the desktop with OS X, yeah, you're right
Maybe I'm being too dense today, but what makes Mac os x sexy for desktop is propietary software, not BSD-licensed software. That's like saying that the Linux nvidia driver makes Linux graphics stack great...
funny that these days obvious facts get modded as troll...
The "vow to compete" is a useless and sensationalist addition by the author
Specially considering that what really matters for desktop is gnome, kde,x.org...not the kernel. The kernel is involved in things hardware support, device and power management (suspend) etc, but what really matters is gnome and kde, nothing else. Gnome is not more usable under freebsd than in linux, neither the reverse.
getting most of the development effort in useless eye-candy
Mac os x is the best desktop operative system in the world. It's also the one who has more eyecandy than any other operative system. You don't like those "useless" drop shadows and transparencies? Well, here comes a newflash for you: Max os x added them first than anyone else.
I'm not a compiler guy, but IIRC PPC Mac OS X binaries are compiled with -Os (ie: optimized for size), or that was what people said. Is Apple using the same options for Intel, or are they even using the Intel compiler instead of gcc?
I've this personal conspiration theory that when Jobs realized that IBM was not going to care anymore about laptops and Apple in general CPUs anymore (the real reason why Jobs switched to Intel - read the second paragraph of this interview) he planned a swtich which would harm IBM and PPC as much as he could, and misoptimizing PPC binaries would be an option.
(of course this is just conspiration, Apple may have been using -Os precisely to get more performance)
Let's ask Apple what thinks about all this: "Advanced Synchronization in Mac OS X: Extending Unix to SMP and Real-Time":
"xnu is not a traditional microkernel as its Mach heritage might imply. Over the years various people have tried methods of speeding up microkernels, including collocation (MkLinux), and optimized messaging mechanisms (L4)[microperf]. Since Mac OS X was not intended to work as a multi-server, and a crash of a BSD server was equivalent to a system crash from a user perspective the advantages of protecting Mach from BSD were negligible. Rather than simple collocation, message passing was short circuited by having BSD directly call Mach functions. While the abstractions are maintained within the kernel at source level, the kernel is in fact monolithic. xnu exports both Mach 3.0 and BSD interfaces for userland applications to use. Use of the Mach interface is discouraged except for IPC, and if it is necessary to use a Mach API it should most likely be used indirectly through a system provided wrapper API."
Theoretically you are right. But in practice Linux 2.6 is 6 million lines of code and a typical microkernel is less than 10k.
Theorically you're right, but in practice a microkernel, because it's a microkernel will need separated processes to implement the thousand of drivers and the docens of architectures that Linux supports.
In practice, a microkernel implementing what Linux implements today would take.....6 millions of lines of code, give or take a couple of lines. Quoting Linus, The fact that each individual piece is simple and secure does not make the aggregate either simple or secure
Yes, in FUSE, and within kde and withing gnome. Zip archive != zip disk.
No, filesystem compression has been done in linux (but not merged, because anyway not many people seems to ask for it)
I guess that's why USB filesystem are implemented in user mode in linux, huh?
WTF? Filesystems used for USB disks are exactly the same used for typical hard disks, and all of them are in the kernel, if that's what you meant.
Earlier you said linux gets "all the advantages of a microkernel without any of the disadvantages" but yet it can't
NTFS has been reverse-engineered. You can't even write or create files. Why would I be surprised that it can't act as root filesystem? As far as I know, linux can use more filesystems as root device as any other operative systems, including microkernels.
Can you even imagine what would be involved in making a .zip filesystem in the linux kernel?
It's fun that you mention that, because such things have been already done.
Even a read-only one would require maybe 6 months of study for an average developer
"...data provided to you by 0XABAADC0DA research"
Is NTFS not performance critical?
No. Linux systems can't even boot on NTFS filesystems. Obviously, the main purpose of NTFS is compatibility. If FUSE had been there before, people probably would have used it to implement it, just like with the beos filesystem, etc.
The reality is that "performance critical" filesystem for a disk means that it has low fragmentation and few seeks for the index
The reality is that seeks and fragmentation matters....when things are not in cache. Real world does care about the real world, you know.
Notice any difference? In the kernel, everything is pretty much either some long-standing standard or developed by some large corporation
Yes I notice a difference: The filesystems in the kernel tree are general-purpose, performance-critical filesystems, meanwhile a fuseftp filesystem is quite the contrary.
Noticed how FUSE is a linux thing that allows people to write filesystems in userspace *despite of being a monolithic kernel*, giving users all the advantages of a microkernel without any of the disadvantages? Did you already noticed how this same approach is already used for some driver, like all the usb drivers implemented in userspace in top of libusb, X.org 2D drivers or CUPS printing drivers?