Thats exactly what Inferno (a plan 9 derived OS) does already.
Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent byte code which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. This means that any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.
So, they claim that they won't use red hat enterprise linux 4 because they want to analyze 12 months of data (RHEL 4 was released on february IIRC) adn they use red hat 3
I just stopped reading there. Just because red hat enterprise 4 has been there for 12 months doesn't means you've to make a unfair comparison
If you pay them for support maybe you get a less buggy version
Red Hat releases.rpms and.srpms for all their software. So they can't hide "special fixes". But sometimes mainstream developers doesn't want those fixes (and there's no reason why a OSS developer shouldn't be looking at the.srpms and check the patches to see if there's something interesting), or the fixes are not ready to be upstream. For example, redhat backported lots of 2.6 things to 2.4. 2.4 was not going to include those never, the same goes for the fixes for those extra features.
When a company has to generate money by basically, fixing bugs and/or some customization, I think you need to be skeptical
Red Hat generates money by being "red hat", having support, etc. It's not the quality of the software what matters for support, what matters is the fact that if you find a bug redhat will fix it. Once redhat has fixed it, they've no interest in keeping the fix only for them. From what I've seen, they're not interested in having to maintain thousand of extra patches and they try to avoid it as hard as possible.
Indeed it does, how would their scripts work if not?
It's a linux-based distro, feel free to install whatever you want. The main issue for me is the lack of keyboard - not neccesary to use it as a tabletpc but neccesary when I want to change something - but I think a USB keboard or a bluethoot one will (or should) do it
A resurgence in Intel-based machines after their push for increased performance per watt
Yeah. Intel still has to show one non-laptop (ie: servers and desktops) CPU which is not the n 1 power-hungry CPU in its class; and other companies are also (obviously) working in making their CPUs less power hungry (see: future versions of the amd cpus, the low-power PPCs), still Intel/Apple fanboys are already sure that Intel will be the best at performance per watt numbers
It's amazing what the Jobs' intel switch has been able to do to the Intel's public "face". They're WAY behind of amd and IBM still some people will think that that will change just because the intel ceo and Jobs said it. Maybe it will be true, but from the facts I (and anyone who looks at the facts) would say that it's AMD who is going to top the supercomputers list not intel.
This software was bought from another company so I'm not suprised at all that it doesn't scales how all the rest of google services (which unlike this service should be based in the "power" of the google cluster) do
surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
Because you may want to run a graphic animation while the phone is ringing, and without an OS you wouldn't be able to run two processes at the same time? Because having an OS doesn't means reponsiveness is poor? Because you need a filesystem? Because abstraction is not something bad? Because today's phones have plenty of ram & rom space and have enought CPU power to play MPGs?
After reviewing the GPL our lawyers advised us that any products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
What the hell are you talking about? Exactly what part of the GPL license makes your lawyers think that compiling code with gcc will force you to release the code under the GPL?
Either you need to change your lawyers or you're trolling. That stament is really, really stupid.
Wow, interesting. Does Linux have any form of prefetching for executables?
No. There're some hacks which will do it at boot time, but there's not any transparent prefetching mechanism as it exist on windows or mac os x. It's one of the missing pieces of the linux desktop - just my humble opinion....
A driver is just a specific program that enables the kernel, and hence programs, to interface with some esoteric piece of hardware
A driver is a kernel plugin which uses kernel internals to provide their services ej: it uses the VFS infrastructure if it's a filesystem, can also use the block infrastructure, alsa, etc. It uses linux kernel functionality (ej: you can't provide sysfs information without using the sysfs API)
The GPL forbids GPL-incompatible software using a "derivative work" of GPLed software. IOW: closed-sourced drivers are using a "derivative work" of the linux kernel to implement their functionality. Lots of closed drivers try to workaround this by using "wrappers", but the gpl doesn't explain what a "derivative work" is. Some people thinks that drivers ported from other OSes can't be considered "derivatives" because they weren't implemented on top of linux so they are not "derivatives" in the conceptual sense. Other people thinks that once you start using linux functionality you're already a "derivative" (FSF thinks this, I think, but it doesn't matter what FSF thinks but what the GPL text want to mean).
The truth is, the GPL is far from perfect, its wording is too complex and it's not clear at all how "derivative" it must be interpreted (which is important, because FSF may be a opinion on how it must be interpreted, but a judge or a developer may interpret other thing, which is why licenses should be as simple as possible). It's not clear at all, and different judges could interpret different things. The linux kernel makes a clear exception for syscalls in its license but drivers don't use syscalls.
Well, right, but my point is: Opensource drivers beat the microsoft "quality tests" at any time: You just can see what the driver is doing: while automated quality tests are nice, looking at what the driver is doing can help to identify the bugs (and fix them)
if the drivers are visibly unstable, people will stop buying the hardware and the company will go bust. Both NVidia and ATI hardware is rock solid with the latest drivers
Well, DUH. IIRC nvidia is know to be on the top 5 of "companies who make your box bluescren" according to some Microsoft MVP
IOW, you need to the write the parallel port support in the kernel, but you don't need to write the support for the device attached to the parallel port
"In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of the drivers.
Video drivers will do anything to outdo their competition. Everybody knows that they cheat benchmarks, for example. I remember one driver that ran the DirectX "3D Tunnel" demonstration program extremely fast, demonstrating how totally awesome their video card is. Except that if you renamed TUNNEL.EXE to FUNNEL.EXE, it ran slow again.
There was another one that checked if you were printing a specific string used by a popular benchmark program. If so, then it only drew the string a quarter of the time and merely returned without doing anything the other three quarters of the time. Bingo! Their benchmark numbers just quadrupled.
Anyway, similar shenanigans are not unheard of when submitting a driver to WHQL for certification. Some unscrupulous drivers will detect that they are being run by WHQL and disable various features so they pass certification. Of course, they also run dog slow in the WHQL lab, but that's okay, because WHQL is interested in whether the driver contains any bugs, not whether the driver has the fastest triangle fill rate in the industry.
The most common cheat I've seen is drivers which check for a secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch in the registry or some other place external to the driver itself. They take the driver and put it in an installer which does not turn the switch on and submit it to WHQL. When WHQL runs the driver through all its tests, the driver is running in "safe but slow" mode and passes certification with flying colors.
The vendor then takes that driver (now with the WHQL stamp of approval) and puts it inside an installer that enables the secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch. Now the driver sees the switch enabled and performs all sorts of dubious optimizations, none of which were tested by WHQL.
(IOW: it doesn't guarantee stability or quality at all. It's just a false sense of "stability")
What are his reasons for not putting video card drivers in the kernel, like other Unix operating systems?
Uh, what Unixes? AFAIK, other unixes run X aswell and run X's user-mode drivers. Now, what makes you think that it's linus who told the x people to do things like that?
In fact, since linux already implements 3d support (dri/drm) inside the kernel, you might explain us what the hell you're talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
This exploit exploits a vulnerability on a already found denial-of-service attack which Microsoft classified six months ago as "low-priority"...
Thats exactly what Inferno (a plan 9 derived OS) does already.
Limbo code is compiled into architecture independent byte code which is then interpreted (or compiled on the fly) on the target processor. This means that any Inferno application will run identically on all Inferno platforms.
has -> hasn't!
So, they claim that they won't use red hat enterprise linux 4 because they want to analyze 12 months of data (RHEL 4 was released on february IIRC) adn they use red hat 3
I just stopped reading there. Just because red hat enterprise 4 has been there for 12 months doesn't means you've to make a unfair comparison
Which is why FTP mirrors never should mirror MD5SUMS files
If you pay them for support maybe you get a less buggy version
.rpms and .srpms for all their software. So they can't hide "special fixes". But sometimes mainstream developers doesn't want those fixes (and there's no reason why a OSS developer shouldn't be looking at the .srpms and check the patches to see if there's something interesting), or the fixes are not ready to be upstream. For example, redhat backported lots of 2.6 things to 2.4. 2.4 was not going to include those never, the same goes for the fixes for those extra features.
Red Hat releases
When a company has to generate money by basically, fixing bugs and/or some customization, I think you need to be skeptical
Red Hat generates money by being "red hat", having support, etc. It's not the quality of the software what matters for support, what matters is the fact that if you find a bug redhat will fix it. Once redhat has fixed it, they've no interest in keeping the fix only for them. From what I've seen, they're not interested in having to maintain thousand of extra patches and they try to avoid it as hard as possible.
Redhat also sells because of their customization:
This nokia 770 has USB and bluetooth so you can but a usb/luethoot keyboard and install shh
Apparently your browser doesn't underline links in sentences like "It features a Debian-based distribution called Maemo ?
Just for completeness... http://repository.maemo.org/pool/maemo1.1rc6/free/ b/bash/
Indeed it does, how would their scripts work if not?
It's a linux-based distro, feel free to install whatever you want. The main issue for me is the lack of keyboard - not neccesary to use it as a tabletpc but neccesary when I want to change something - but I think a USB keboard or a bluethoot one will (or should) do it
They regularly lie about those numbers, too. They don't want to say it, it's just that. The google cluster is the real heart of google.
A resurgence in Intel-based machines after their push for increased performance per watt
Yeah. Intel still has to show one non-laptop (ie: servers and desktops) CPU which is not the n 1 power-hungry CPU in its class; and other companies are also (obviously) working in making their CPUs less power hungry (see: future versions of the amd cpus, the low-power PPCs), still Intel/Apple fanboys are already sure that Intel will be the best at performance per watt numbers
It's amazing what the Jobs' intel switch has been able to do to the Intel's public "face". They're WAY behind of amd and IBM still some people will think that that will change just because the intel ceo and Jobs said it. Maybe it will be true, but from the facts I (and anyone who looks at the facts) would say that it's AMD who is going to top the supercomputers list not intel.
Abstraction != bloat.
perhaps someone who can read Javashit scripting code can decipher it for us
This software was bought from another company so I'm not suprised at all that it doesn't scales how all the rest of google services (which unlike this service should be based in the "power" of the google cluster) do
surely the only program that is needed is a graphic front end for the hardware with a minimal filing system to look after ringtones and contact details? Why is an abstraction layer needed?
Because you may want to run a graphic animation while the phone is ringing, and without an OS you wouldn't be able to run two processes at the same time? Because having an OS doesn't means reponsiveness is poor? Because you need a filesystem? Because abstraction is not something bad? Because today's phones have plenty of ram & rom space and have enought CPU power to play MPGs?
After reviewing the GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable.
What the hell are you talking about? Exactly what part of the GPL license makes your lawyers think that compiling code with gcc will force you to release the code under the GPL?
Either you need to change your lawyers or you're trolling. That stament is really, really stupid.
Nintendo admits that revolution's graphics will not be as good as ps3 or xbox
So, what's the deal. Worse technology, better price. I don't see why people wouldn't buy it it the games are good...
Wow, interesting. Does Linux have any form of prefetching for executables?
No. There're some hacks which will do it at boot time, but there's not any transparent prefetching mechanism as it exist on windows or mac os x. It's one of the missing pieces of the linux desktop - just my humble opinion....
So you're saying that Sony's executives do even know what a rootkit it was and that it wasnt a engineer who suggested the idea?
A driver is just a specific program that enables the kernel, and hence programs, to interface with some esoteric piece of hardware
A driver is a kernel plugin which uses kernel internals to provide their services ej: it uses the VFS infrastructure if it's a filesystem, can also use the block infrastructure, alsa, etc. It uses linux kernel functionality (ej: you can't provide sysfs information without using the sysfs API)
The GPL forbids GPL-incompatible software using a "derivative work" of GPLed software. IOW: closed-sourced drivers are using a "derivative work" of the linux kernel to implement their functionality. Lots of closed drivers try to workaround this by using "wrappers", but the gpl doesn't explain what a "derivative work" is. Some people thinks that drivers ported from other OSes can't be considered "derivatives" because they weren't implemented on top of linux so they are not "derivatives" in the conceptual sense. Other people thinks that once you start using linux functionality you're already a "derivative" (FSF thinks this, I think, but it doesn't matter what FSF thinks but what the GPL text want to mean).
The truth is, the GPL is far from perfect, its wording is too complex and it's not clear at all how "derivative" it must be interpreted (which is important, because FSF may be a opinion on how it must be interpreted, but a judge or a developer may interpret other thing, which is why licenses should be as simple as possible). It's not clear at all, and different judges could interpret different things. The linux kernel makes a clear exception for syscalls in its license but drivers don't use syscalls.
Well, right, but my point is: Opensource drivers beat the microsoft "quality tests" at any time: You just can see what the driver is doing: while automated quality tests are nice, looking at what the driver is doing can help to identify the bugs (and fix them)
if the drivers are visibly unstable, people will stop buying the hardware and the company will go bust. Both NVidia and ATI hardware is rock solid with the latest drivers
Well, DUH. IIRC nvidia is know to be on the top 5 of "companies who make your box bluescren" according to some Microsoft MVP
IOW, you need to the write the parallel port support in the kernel, but you don't need to write the support for the device attached to the parallel port
Linux is actually much better at this than windows - you can see what the kernel does. Microsoft's test suite means nothing, as explained by a (great) microsoft programmer: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/03/ 05/84469.aspx
"In a comment to one of my earlier entries, someone mentioned a driver that bluescreened under normal conditions, but once you enabled the Driver Verifier (to try to catch the driver doing whatever bad thing it was doing), the problem went away. Another commenter bemoaned that WHQL certification didn't seem to improve the quality of the drivers.
Video drivers will do anything to outdo their competition. Everybody knows that they cheat benchmarks, for example. I remember one driver that ran the DirectX "3D Tunnel" demonstration program extremely fast, demonstrating how totally awesome their video card is. Except that if you renamed TUNNEL.EXE to FUNNEL.EXE, it ran slow again.
There was another one that checked if you were printing a specific string used by a popular benchmark program. If so, then it only drew the string a quarter of the time and merely returned without doing anything the other three quarters of the time. Bingo! Their benchmark numbers just quadrupled.
Anyway, similar shenanigans are not unheard of when submitting a driver to WHQL for certification. Some unscrupulous drivers will detect that they are being run by WHQL and disable various features so they pass certification. Of course, they also run dog slow in the WHQL lab, but that's okay, because WHQL is interested in whether the driver contains any bugs, not whether the driver has the fastest triangle fill rate in the industry.
The most common cheat I've seen is drivers which check for a secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch in the registry or some other place external to the driver itself. They take the driver and put it in an installer which does not turn the switch on and submit it to WHQL. When WHQL runs the driver through all its tests, the driver is running in "safe but slow" mode and passes certification with flying colors.
The vendor then takes that driver (now with the WHQL stamp of approval) and puts it inside an installer that enables the secret "Enable Dubious Optimizations" switch. Now the driver sees the switch enabled and performs all sorts of dubious optimizations, none of which were tested by WHQL.
(IOW: it doesn't guarantee stability or quality at all. It's just a false sense of "stability")
What are his reasons for not putting video card drivers in the kernel, like other Unix operating systems?
Uh, what Unixes? AFAIK, other unixes run X aswell and run X's user-mode drivers. Now, what makes you think that it's linus who told the x people to do things like that?
In fact, since linux already implements 3d support (dri/drm) inside the kernel, you might explain us what the hell you're talking about?