I use firefox, I love firefox, but I see no reason why we need to have 50% of the market share. If people want to continue to use Internet Explorer, an inferior product, they have every right to do so.
I don't agree. The main reason why firefox has succeed is not that it's a better browser (mozilla, opera haven't got the same attention). The reason has been "marketing": lots of noise around it. Lots of people encouraging friends to try it. And people liking it, I don't see why it's a bad idea. We don't force them.
(answering myself) - maybe lobbing to the windows 98 users? AFAIK people using windows 98 makes around 50% of the people who uses internet. Internet explorer 7 will not be released for windows 98 and in fact Microsoft should already have stopped updating it with security fixes (windows 98 is 7 years old)
May be we could use a catch phrase, say "the one secure option for windows 98/me/NT 4.0" "Microsoft forgot of your Windows 98 box? Try firefox". Or something like that.
What could we do to do firefox even more atractive? I mean, it has taken half of a year to steal a...5%?. If we *really* want to spread firefox we need to spread more quickly, at this rate it'd take years to have 50% of the market share.
China's government censores things. Why should google go against them?
I mean, China's government is a problem of chinese people. Google is a company fro USA. I can't find any reason why google should try to "free" chinese people, it's not their problem.
GCJ can compile java code for the platforms supported by GCC - way more than Sun's offerings or other propietary VMs. Red Hat is paying people to support OOo 2.0 with GCJ. And GCJ 4.0 is already quite good...
Indeed, the problem is big. Some BSDs don't have java, linux ppc users either. Right now Java's "portability" is a joke with Sun's VM, even if it was free as in speech.
That's why GNU classpath & GCJ is important. It will provide us with a free (as in speech & beer) java VM for those who doesn't want to use Sun's VM (linux users, basically). Redhat is putting lots programmers & money behind of GCJ and collaborating with tons of community-based projects - they really want a free java. In fact, Redhat has some people hacking on GCJ to support openoffice's java features.
Actually, GCJ 4 is one of the GCC 4.0 greatest features, here is an article about why it's so great. They've achieved almost all Java 1.4 important features and there's work ongoing to support 1.5.
And GCJ does support, in fact, MORE architectures and operative systems than Sun's propietary offerings - yes, more. It's what will make java truly palataform-independent. GCJ is part of GCC, so it supports the platforms that gcc supports - much more than Sun's VM or other propietary VMs
Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".
So, uh, do you have numbers around? AFAIK even some freebsd hackers admit that linux is kicking their asses in more than one field. It's not strange to see post from freebsd users benchmarking databases etc. against suse/redhat and getting better numbers with them. And let's not start talking about features.
So no, Freebsd is not "just better" and linux is not just about marketing. Sorry.
(It certainly is in some places like which fast forwading routing packets, but saying that freebsd is "probably better by any number of measures" and "linux is about marketing" having docens of paid IBM/SGI/redhat/suse programmers around making it fast and reliable...oh my)
I also like the way the submitter managed to completely invert the statement about how analysts _do_ _not_ believe this is takeover attempt.
I never said Dell is buying Redhat
Dell is fighting in hardware sales against sun/ibm/hp. Linux is growing faster than any other operative system out there. Red Hat is the most succesful linux distro in enterprise. Dell wants to sell lots of computers. See a trend?
So, I wouldn't say that investing in redhat is going to hurt dell. My guess is that Mr. Dell is interested in getting good linux support from redhat to their machines, so they can use that as marketing gun: "Our machines run great under red hat linux!"
In fact, Intel's dual core offerings are just for desktop, which is why it doesn't surprises me that AMD is faster here. I mean, CPUs for servers are supposed to be "faster", so I'm not suprised that Intel cpus are being slower here, there must be a reason why Intel dual core is much cheaper than AMD's. It's being sold for desktops, it's much cheaper, why everyone is "surprised" that it's slower?
The problem is that right now they don't have a decent server product, but they have 90%+ of market share in that area so they can't lose all that suddenly. Specially when the one decent chipset for AMDs is their AMD chipset (rare to found in motherboards, at least here in spain) while Intel has much better offerings, their "platform" is stronger, even if their CPUs are slower. In the server world many people wants reliability, quality etc, not a Nvidia chipset. AMD has a great CPU but it is going to take some time to everybody to build a "reputation" and more products (altough sun and HP seem to have done that already) - I guess Intel is trying to use that time to build a decent server product
Anyway, AFAIK Intel is preparing a "second generation" dual core CPU based in the Pentium centrino platform for 2006 or so. My opinion is that what Intel is selling is just something to stand up in front of amd for now, they're somewhat late in the dual core game (opteron was designed to support dual core from scratch they say, P4 not) so they're bringing a hack to have something to show, anything else.
(most of this is just speculation of course, except the centrino-based future dual core)
Name a company that can seriously put all of there resources together and pose a serious threat to Microsoft?
The problem with Microsoft is that they've become too big and they have way too many products.
There's not a single company who can fight with Microsoft. But all of them are fighting with them: Sony, Nintendo (xbox), Linux, mac os x, solaris (windows), mysql, postgresql, oracle, IBM DB2 (ms sql), firefox, opera (ie), google, yahoo (search engine, MSN), openoffice (office)
Microsoft just can't win. After having 95%+ of market share in desktops they need to search a way to grow even more to satisfy the stock buyers, so they fight in every market. And they can fight against a single or a few companies, but not against the whole IT industry
It doesn't checks all the time, but periodically. If you have a version different than the english one it won't display the update until your language's version is updated - which may take a while, for spanish it has taken more than a week some times.
Yes, but only because pthreads does this by creating a new process (that just happens to share some things with its parents, like address space). Ergo, creating threads is just as fast as creating processes because they are nearly the same thing.
It's still the same in 2.6 with NTPL. They started with M:N but they found that 1:1 solved all problems in a much easier way with much less complexity
Surprise, they enabled DisableLastAccesS on windows but did not mounted linux filesystems with noatime
noatime disables the update of the "last accesS" field of files, and improves the performance a lot for some workloads. If you check the latest article about the kernel.org servers, they found that they reduced the system load to the half by just using this option
Why people does care so much about creating buffer overflows. Just write programs in C/C++, you WILL create buffer overflows. It seems that most of programmers can't avoid them and "buffer-overflow vulnerabilities" are found all the time. Why not care instead about the methods created to fix (most of) them? The ones that many distros are still not shipping despite of being quite obvious that they're need more than the latest KDENOME shit?
Just check the debian security mailing list and look how many buffer overflow security bugs are there: Too many. Too many for something which is know to be (partially) fixable with kernel/compiler tricks. Did GCC 4.0 included finally that FORTIFY thing that includes both compile-time and run-time "buffer overflow protections" BTW? That is interesting, not learning how to create buffer overflows.
And why Microsoft wants to compete and kill google?
They're stupid. Why they need to compete with every succesful IT company? They used to do a fucking operative system, now they have the xbox, games, a server OS, server products, the xbox (!!), keyboards, mouses, msn....and now...a search engine. Can't them do something well instead of doing several things wrong? They just can't compete against the whole IT industry
On the contrary, I've never been able to use wine beyond calc.exe and things like that. I've never been able to run things like IE on XP - call me stupid, I've wasted hours trying to configure it and nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
I use firefox, I love firefox, but I see no reason why we need to have 50% of the market share. If people want to continue to use Internet Explorer, an inferior product, they have every right to do so.
I don't agree. The main reason why firefox has succeed is not that it's a better browser (mozilla, opera haven't got the same attention). The reason has been "marketing": lots of noise around it. Lots of people encouraging friends to try it. And people liking it, I don't see why it's a bad idea. We don't force them.
(answering myself) - maybe lobbing to the windows 98 users? AFAIK people using windows 98 makes around 50% of the people who uses internet. Internet explorer 7 will not be released for windows 98 and in fact Microsoft should already have stopped updating it with security fixes (windows 98 is 7 years old)
May be we could use a catch phrase, say "the one secure option for windows 98/me/NT 4.0" "Microsoft forgot of your Windows 98 box? Try firefox". Or something like that.
What could we do to do firefox even more atractive? I mean, it has taken half of a year to steal a...5%?. If we *really* want to spread firefox we need to spread more quickly, at this rate it'd take years to have 50% of the market share.
Linux recently added write barriers. I don't know if it helps but it looks like its related
Add linux distros to that - each distro downloads firefox a single time, but it spreads it to thousands of people.
"usability must be based in scientific facts, not in personal preferences"
So, I guess a usability expert can prove he's a usability expert by proving the ideas he proposes
We've previously reported on the frustration in the OSS community on this issue.
Then why is slashdot reporting *twice*? Dupes are normal in slashdot, but acknowledged dupes are insane
That's really a very selfish opinion. Do you accept censorship in general, or only if it happens in other countries?
So, what should google do, lobby bush to invade China?
China's government censores things. Why should google go against them?
I mean, China's government is a problem of chinese people. Google is a company fro USA. I can't find any reason why google should try to "free" chinese people, it's not their problem.
GCJ can compile java code for the platforms supported by GCC - way more than Sun's offerings or other propietary VMs.
Red Hat is paying people to support OOo 2.0 with GCJ. And GCJ 4.0 is already quite good...
Indeed, the problem is big. Some BSDs don't have java, linux ppc users either. Right now Java's "portability" is a joke with Sun's VM, even if it was free as in speech.
That's why GNU classpath & GCJ is important. It will provide us with a free (as in speech & beer) java VM for those who doesn't want to use Sun's VM (linux users, basically). Redhat is putting lots programmers & money behind of GCJ and collaborating with tons of community-based projects - they really want a free java. In fact, Redhat has some people hacking on GCJ to support openoffice's java features.
Actually, GCJ 4 is one of the GCC 4.0 greatest features, here is an article about why it's so great. They've achieved almost all Java 1.4 important features and there's work ongoing to support 1.5.
And GCJ does support, in fact, MORE architectures and operative systems than Sun's propietary offerings - yes, more. It's what will make java truly palataform-independent. GCJ is part of GCC, so it supports the platforms that gcc supports - much more than Sun's VM or other propietary VMs
Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".
So, uh, do you have numbers around? AFAIK even some freebsd hackers admit that linux is kicking their asses in more than one field. It's not strange to see post from freebsd users benchmarking databases etc. against suse/redhat and getting better numbers with them. And let's not start talking about features.
So no, Freebsd is not "just better" and linux is not just about marketing. Sorry.
(It certainly is in some places like which fast forwading routing packets, but saying that freebsd is "probably better by any number of measures" and "linux is about marketing" having docens of paid IBM/SGI/redhat/suse programmers around making it fast and reliable...oh my)
I also like the way the submitter managed to completely invert the statement about how analysts _do_ _not_ believe this is takeover attempt.
I never said Dell is buying Redhat
Dell is fighting in hardware sales against sun/ibm/hp. Linux is growing faster than any other operative system out there. Red Hat is the most succesful linux distro in enterprise. Dell wants to sell lots of computers. See a trend?
So, I wouldn't say that investing in redhat is going to hurt dell. My guess is that Mr. Dell is interested in getting good linux support from redhat to their machines, so they can use that as marketing gun: "Our machines run great under red hat linux!"
It was me who submitted that. Sorry, I assumed Slashdot editors read what and correct things before publishing them...how stupid I've been
In fact, Intel's dual core offerings are just for desktop, which is why it doesn't surprises me that AMD is faster here. I mean, CPUs for servers are supposed to be "faster", so I'm not suprised that Intel cpus are being slower here, there must be a reason why Intel dual core is much cheaper than AMD's. It's being sold for desktops, it's much cheaper, why everyone is "surprised" that it's slower?
The problem is that right now they don't have a decent server product, but they have 90%+ of market share in that area so they can't lose all that suddenly. Specially when the one decent chipset for AMDs is their AMD chipset (rare to found in motherboards, at least here in spain) while Intel has much better offerings, their "platform" is stronger, even if their CPUs are slower. In the server world many people wants reliability, quality etc, not a Nvidia chipset. AMD has a great CPU but it is going to take some time to everybody to build a "reputation" and more products (altough sun and HP seem to have done that already) - I guess Intel is trying to use that time to build a decent server product
Anyway, AFAIK Intel is preparing a "second generation" dual core CPU based in the Pentium centrino platform for 2006 or so. My opinion is that what Intel is selling is just something to stand up in front of amd for now, they're somewhat late in the dual core game (opteron was designed to support dual core from scratch they say, P4 not) so they're bringing a hack to have something to show, anything else.
(most of this is just speculation of course, except the centrino-based future dual core)
Name a company that can seriously put all of there resources together and pose a serious threat to Microsoft?
The problem with Microsoft is that they've become too big and they have way too many products.
There's not a single company who can fight with Microsoft. But all of them are fighting with them: Sony, Nintendo (xbox), Linux, mac os x, solaris (windows), mysql, postgresql, oracle, IBM DB2 (ms sql), firefox, opera (ie), google, yahoo (search engine, MSN), openoffice (office)
Microsoft just can't win. After having 95%+ of market share in desktops they need to search a way to grow even more to satisfy the stock buyers, so they fight in every market. And they can fight against a single or a few companies, but not against the whole IT industry
It doesn't checks all the time, but periodically. If you have a version different than the english one it won't display the update until your language's version is updated - which may take a while, for spanish it has taken more than a week some times.
People talks about a memory leak.
Yes, but only because pthreads does this by creating a new process (that just happens to share some things with its parents, like address space). Ergo, creating threads is just as fast as creating processes because they are nearly the same thing.
It's still the same in 2.6 with NTPL. They started with M:N but they found that 1:1 solved all problems in a much easier way with much less complexity
Surprise, they enabled DisableLastAccesS on windows but did not mounted linux filesystems with noatime
noatime disables the update of the "last accesS" field of files, and improves the performance a lot for some workloads. If you check the latest article about the kernel.org servers, they found that they reduced the system load to the half by just using this option
This analisys is biased. Who cares, anyway?
Microsoft wastes about 1 billion $ in "windows research". Linux is quite romatic compared with that, even if all the main kernel hackers are employed
Why people does care so much about creating buffer overflows. Just write programs in C/C++, you WILL create buffer overflows. It seems that most of programmers can't avoid them and "buffer-overflow vulnerabilities" are found all the time. Why not care instead about the methods created to fix (most of) them? The ones that many distros are still not shipping despite of being quite obvious that they're need more than the latest KDENOME shit?
Just check the debian security mailing list and look how many buffer overflow security bugs are there: Too many. Too many for something which is know to be (partially) fixable with kernel/compiler tricks. Did GCC 4.0 included finally that FORTIFY thing that includes both compile-time and run-time "buffer overflow protections" BTW? That is interesting, not learning how to create buffer overflows.
And why Microsoft wants to compete and kill google?
They're stupid. Why they need to compete with every succesful IT company? They used to do a fucking operative system, now they have the xbox, games, a server OS, server products, the xbox (!!), keyboards, mouses, msn....and now...a search engine. Can't them do something well instead of doing several things wrong? They just can't compete against the whole IT industry
On the contrary, I've never been able to use wine beyond calc.exe and things like that. I've never been able to run things like IE on XP - call me stupid, I've wasted hours trying to configure it and nothing.
you don't run a web server, a database server or other servers at your machine, do you?
Did I spelled "desktop" incorrectly or something?