It doesn't really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you're celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement, without any holidays or friends, I bring you a tiding of great cheer: you can now download Linux-2.6.28, and compile it to your hearts content!
Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an all-new kernel - and I'm sure that if your computer could smile, it would have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.
In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they're asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all good boys and girls.
I recommend reading this link to get an idea of what's going on in the Linux graphics stack:
"So currently there is not one field where construction done but several. These are 2D Acceleration, Memory Management, 3D Acceleration and 2D Modesetting. And they are all being worked on at the same time to speed things up.
But the problem is that more or less all of these depend on proper Memory Management, which is also the hardest thing to get right.
Now lets look at how Xorg works today; every Xorg driver implements its own way of memory management and provides the DRI1 functionality when it comes to 3D. Furthermore it is responsible for modesetting, which is quite suboptimal, since some perliminary modesetting is already done in kernel, so it can output messages during bootup. The Xorg driver resets the hardware again when it is loaded.
Kernel Based Modesetting
In order to solve this duplication the modesetting code is about to be moved into the kernel, so the hardware can be setup once and for all. But since modesetting involves memory management which is not done properly yet too."
The same benefit you get from running a 3D game instead of a 2D one.
The fact is, desktop has never been 2D. It has always been 3D. The shadows under a button that make it look pushed or not are a 3d effect, even if it's implemented as a black shadow in a bitmap.
You can have top or botton windows. That's 3D aswell.
3D desktops will not be about having a "3D room" in your desktop. They will be normal desktops just like they're today. The difference will be that instead of drawing a bitmap with a black line to make a button look like it's pressed, you'll have a 3D engine and the toolkit will tell the 3D engine: "move the button x pixel in depth" - and the engine will move the button and will draw the shadows according to the surrounding objects.
IOW, you'll have a 3d engine powering your desktop, managing not just your windows (beryl can do that today), but also your widgets. Or icons. Icons won't be just a 2d bitmap/vector image, they will be a 3d object that will react to events with all kind of 3D effects - rotation, lighting, jumping, smoke...whatever
As expected, it seems that Apple has the lead. It's a shame that nobody in Linux is doing something similar. It's an oportunity to take lead in the desktop.
What's wrong with asking to reform the debt-based economy? The US stopped using the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971 just because it abused it and it was not possible to continue using it without devaluating dolar's value, not because it was a bad idea. Since then, the government and the FED has clearly abused of the system and created too many problems. Trying to fix it doesn't seem stupid to me.
The US may not want to fix it because it'd mean admitting that the dollar is way too overvalued. But there's no reason why countries that can get their goods by exchanging them for other goods instead loaning them should agree with the US.
It's also worth mentioning that Linux apps can choose between those different congestion controls with get/setsockopt(). So the applications ARE allowed (at least in linux) to choose a more efficient congestion control according to their needs. And if their needs aren't covered, they can submit a new congestion control implementation.
The CFQ IO scheduler has been able to link IO priority with process priority for ages. But there's a performance issue in the ext3 journaling code that has been affecting many people for some time....
ZFS has redefined the way future filesystems are going to be designed. But there is no way that it's going to be the "last" filesystem.
As shocking as it may seem to those who have drunk the marketing kool aid, we'll see more filesystems. Filesystem research is as alive as it always was. They'll try to copy the good ideas of ZFS and they will try to avoid the disadvantages (which every software has). So you are never going to have "1 unified filesystem". It's never going to happen. And it's a good thing.
In the past, Microsoft was able to catch up and kill Netscape -or any other competitor-, no matter how "complex" it was to build the software needed. Why they can't do it anymore is a mistery for me.
There's no way you can automatically run code on a Linux computer by inserting a USB flash drive. It's just not possible. Those virus happen only because of Yet Another Windows Design Mistake - autorun.inf files that run executables.
This has been a problem for years. Make a program that deletes all the files in a system. Put it into a CD along with a autorun.inf file. Burn the CD, don't write anything on it, and leave it near the office of someone you hate. At some point the guy will insert the CD just to check what's there. Boom. The virus will run automatically as soon as the CD is inserted.
And there're more posibilities, like making a virus executable have a carpet icon. Since Windows hides extensions by default, people will double click the virus because they will think it's a carpet.
These things can't happen in Linux (well, not really true, they can happen thanks to the shitty.desktop files that get "interpreted" by file managers even if they don't have execution +x permissions)
I don't know if it plans to replace the X11 standard, but it's certainly not "another implementation" of X11 at all right now. Look at the source code. You won't see X11, or even X, anywhere - it's X11 clean. It'd be neccesary to port Xlib to this API.
If I understand the article correctly, this is a new X server, not a new API or protocol. Programs would still compile against XLib and still access the server through TCP/IP or unix sockets. The only difference is that the rendering engine that interprets those commands has been swapped out.
Well, right now it only runs 4 custom programs - "background", "pointer", "window" and "flower". It doesn't appear to have XLib compatibility at all. It'd be neccesary to port XLib to this server. Or, rather, port GTK/QT directly to the API of this server (and also port XLib - for compatibility with other programs).
It's unsure that it's neccesary, though. It's the X people who is doing all this, and they're doing it to get rid of all the unneeded complexity. Long term, they want to make X.org work just like this server works, so in practice X.org will be just as good as this server. Maybe it won't be so shiny, but it will work.
Well, the plan in Linux is to allow distros to release their desktop kernels preconfigured for 4096 cpus with no measurable runtime costs even for dual core desktops.
The problem is that if those people who requires a minimum wage aren't capable of producing "goods" (warning: my english is ugly) whose value is equal or higher than the minimum wage...guess what is going to happen? Right. They aren't going to be hired. Anywhere. Oh, *you* may pay it, but not companies. And it's not that companies are "evil" - if they pay their workers more money than the workers are capable of produce, the company will need to close doors. It sucks, but it's how the economy works.
In other words, minimum wage only encourages unemployment. It may encourage some people to pay better wages, but overall it's not a effective measure.
I'd rather setup some public education program for that people (paid with taxes from people - it doesn't matters because it's a good investment), or just give them money, than setting up a minimum wage. Because those measures would help them to be richer, while minimum wage doesn't. I understand that people who are for a minimum wage ask for it because they want to make poor's life better, but a minimum wage isn't going to increase the productivity of those people, which is the REAL problem.
When I said "back references", I meant that some data structures have pointers back to their "parent" data structure, I wasn't talking about softupdates.
AFAIK, softupdates in practice never were better than journaling, and since these days filesystems like ZFS and btrfs avoid the problems that softupdates and journaling tries to solve by maintaining the on-disk data always in a consistent state, softupdates is just a useless source of complexity and overhead.
It's not like IE has not been a slow dog in javascript performance and standards adoption. Yeah, IE 7/8 are supposed to be an improvement, but since IE is years behind and their development cycles seem to be as slow as their javascript engine (probably due to compatibility) it's not like IE 8 or 9 is going to catchup with the rest of the browsers easily.
BTW, those benchmarks in TFA were probably run with the new tracemonkey javascript engine disabled (it need to be enabled manually in about:config). And my firefox nightly version passes 93/100 on the acid 3 test.
One of the differences I can find between btrfs and ZFS is that ZFS explicitely avoided a fsck utility, and btrfs is explicitely designed with features designed to make fsck even more powerful than it's on usual filesystems like ext3. In btrfs, data structures have "back references", and the fsck can be used while the filesystem is mounted.
IMO, this is a a btrfs advantage. ZFS has checksums and will find errors, but only will be able to self-heal the errors in a redundant configuration. On a single disk, ZFS will find the error thanks to checksums but will not be able to recover your data. Since ZFS was mainly designed for systems that will use redundant configurations, it may have sense there, but desktops are not never going to do such things. IMO the ZFS people were a bit elitist here - "let's going to build a filesystem so good that we won't need a fsck". But in the real world you _are_ going to need a fsck util. Only in excepcional and very rare cases, but you're going to need it.
Of course that doesn't makes ZFS a bad filesystem, but it's an advantage for btrfs and linux.
Maybe because other people actually releases stable code that other people can use. That plays a big role in getting fans - people being able to use your software. They don't care too much about you when you don't release anything.
E17 was awesome from the start, it made things that windows and os x didn't do at its time, and it's still very powerful. But, you know, while E is "technically ahead" of other graphic toolkits, some of the things it does have already been implemented, tested, released and perfectioned in other environments.
I no longer have faith in E. They're technically ahead in their development versions, but their stable versions are always behind of other environments. I can use features that E implemented first than anyone in stable environments others than E, but not in E, because, you know, they're too busy making it "perfect"
Well, people should not be surprised. It's not the first time Bush proposes a plan and uses FUD to approve it. It's exactly the same thing he did in Irak.
In 2003 the excuse was that Irak had MDW and had helped to plan the 11S. This time the excuse was "If you don't pass it we'll have financial panic".
It's the same Fear Strategy. And just like in Irak, everybody believes it and Democrats, with Obama leading (after all, this proves what he has been saying about too-free market being evil, doesn't it?), help him to pass it. This time even Europe, who is also very very happy to hear bush admit that capitalism is evil, supports Bush.
Slashdot Mirror
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/12/24/105
It doesn't really matter what day it is, or what holiday (if any) you're
celebrating, because even if you sit at home, alone in your dank basement,
without any holidays or friends, I bring you a tiding of great cheer: you
can now download Linux-2.6.28, and compile it to your hearts content!
Listen to the cheerful grinding of your harddisk as you reboot into an
all-new kernel - and I'm sure that if your computer could smile, it would
have a big silly grin on its non-existent face. So as you sit there in
your basement, give your computer the holiday cheer too.
In fact, even _if_ you have friends or family, leave them to their endless
toil over that christmas ham or turkey, and during the night, when they're
asleep, you can give them that magical present of a newly updated
computer. When they wake up tomorrow morning, tell them how you saw Santa
crawl down the chimney with his USB stick in hand, updating the OS of all
good boys and girls.
Ho, ho, ho,
Linus "almost Santa" Torvalds
I recommend reading this link to get an idea of what's going on in the Linux graphics stack:
"So currently there is not one field where construction done but several. These are 2D Acceleration, Memory Management, 3D Acceleration and 2D Modesetting. And they are all being worked on at the same time to speed things up.
But the problem is that more or less all of these depend on proper Memory Management, which is also the hardest thing to get right.
Now lets look at how Xorg works today; every Xorg driver implements its own way of memory management and provides the DRI1 functionality when it comes to 3D. Furthermore it is responsible for modesetting, which is quite suboptimal, since some perliminary modesetting is already done in kernel, so it can output messages during bootup. The Xorg driver resets the hardware again when it is loaded.
Kernel Based Modesetting
In order to solve this duplication the modesetting code is about to be moved into the kernel, so the hardware can be setup once and for all. But since modesetting involves memory management which is not done properly yet too."
The changelog is available aswell...you might aswell have waited a bit to the final release!
Take a look at the November 2008 TIOBE index top ten:
Position Position Programming Ratings Delta Nov
Nov 2008 Nov 2007 Language Nov 2008 2007
1 1 Java 20.299% -0.24%
2 2 C 15.276% +1.31%
3 4 C++ 10.357% +1.61%
4 3 (Visual) Basic 9.270% -0.96%
5 5 PHP 8.940% +0.25%
6 7 Python 5.140% +0.91%
7 8 C# 4.026% +0.11%
8 11 Delphi 4.006% +1.55%
9 6 Perl 3.876% -0.86%
10 10 JavaScript 2.925% 0.00%
You can read the rest of the article here...
The same benefit you get from running a 3D game instead of a 2D one.
The fact is, desktop has never been 2D. It has always been 3D. The shadows under a button that make it look pushed or not are a 3d effect, even if it's implemented as a black shadow in a bitmap.
You can have top or botton windows. That's 3D aswell.
3D desktops will not be about having a "3D room" in your desktop. They will be normal desktops just like they're today. The difference will be that instead of drawing a bitmap with a black line to make a button look like it's pressed, you'll have a 3D engine and the toolkit will tell the 3D engine: "move the button x pixel in depth" - and the engine will move the button and will draw the shadows according to the surrounding objects.
IOW, you'll have a 3d engine powering your desktop, managing not just your windows (beryl can do that today), but also your widgets. Or icons. Icons won't be just a 2d bitmap/vector image, they will be a 3d object that will react to events with all kind of 3D effects - rotation, lighting, jumping, smoke...whatever
As expected, it seems that Apple has the lead. It's a shame that nobody in Linux is doing something similar. It's an oportunity to take lead in the desktop.
What's wrong with asking to reform the debt-based economy? The US stopped using the Bretton Woods gold standard in 1971 just because it abused it and it was not possible to continue using it without devaluating dolar's value, not because it was a bad idea. Since then, the government and the FED has clearly abused of the system and created too many problems. Trying to fix it doesn't seem stupid to me.
The US may not want to fix it because it'd mean admitting that the dollar is way too overvalued. But there's no reason why countries that can get their goods by exchanging them for other goods instead loaning them should agree with the US.
Hey, ext4 actually speeds up fsck quite a lot, so maybe ext4 won't be around a lot of time ;)
It's also worth mentioning that Linux apps can choose between those different congestion controls with get/setsockopt(). So the applications ARE allowed (at least in linux) to choose a more efficient congestion control according to their needs. And if their needs aren't covered, they can submit a new congestion control implementation.
The CFQ IO scheduler has been able to link IO priority with process priority for ages. But there's a performance issue in the ext3 journaling code that has been affecting many people for some time....
ZFS has redefined the way future filesystems are going to be designed. But there is no way that it's going to be the "last" filesystem.
As shocking as it may seem to those who have drunk the marketing kool aid, we'll see more filesystems. Filesystem research is as alive as it always was. They'll try to copy the good ideas of ZFS and they will try to avoid the disadvantages (which every software has). So you are never going to have "1 unified filesystem". It's never going to happen. And it's a good thing.
Yeah, but Fedora is not Red Hat.
In the past, Microsoft was able to catch up and kill Netscape -or any other competitor-, no matter how "complex" it was to build the software needed. Why they can't do it anymore is a mistery for me.
d'oh, were I write "carpet" I obviously wanted to say "folder". "Folder" is translated to spanish as "carpeta", and I always confuse them.
There's no way you can automatically run code on a Linux computer by inserting a USB flash drive. It's just not possible. Those virus happen only because of Yet Another Windows Design Mistake - autorun.inf files that run executables.
This has been a problem for years. Make a program that deletes all the files in a system. Put it into a CD along with a autorun.inf file. Burn the CD, don't write anything on it, and leave it near the office of someone you hate. At some point the guy will insert the CD just to check what's there. Boom. The virus will run automatically as soon as the CD is inserted.
And there're more posibilities, like making a virus executable have a carpet icon. Since Windows hides extensions by default, people will double click the virus because they will think it's a carpet.
These things can't happen in Linux (well, not really true, they can happen thanks to the shitty .desktop files that get "interpreted" by file managers even if they don't have execution +x permissions)
I don't know if it plans to replace the X11 standard, but it's certainly not "another implementation" of X11 at all right now. Look at the source code. You won't see X11, or even X, anywhere - it's X11 clean. It'd be neccesary to port Xlib to this API.
If I understand the article correctly, this is a new X server, not a new API or protocol. Programs would still compile against XLib and still access the server through TCP/IP or unix sockets. The only difference is that the rendering engine that interprets those commands has been swapped out.
Well, right now it only runs 4 custom programs - "background", "pointer", "window" and "flower". It doesn't appear to have XLib compatibility at all. It'd be neccesary to port XLib to this server. Or, rather, port GTK/QT directly to the API of this server (and also port XLib - for compatibility with other programs).
It's unsure that it's neccesary, though. It's the X people who is doing all this, and they're doing it to get rid of all the unneeded complexity. Long term, they want to make X.org work just like this server works, so in practice X.org will be just as good as this server. Maybe it won't be so shiny, but it will work.
Well, the plan in Linux is to allow distros to release their desktop kernels preconfigured for 4096 cpus with no measurable runtime costs even for dual core desktops.
The problem is that if those people who requires a minimum wage aren't capable of producing "goods" (warning: my english is ugly) whose value is equal or higher than the minimum wage...guess what is going to happen? Right. They aren't going to be hired. Anywhere. Oh, *you* may pay it, but not companies. And it's not that companies are "evil" - if they pay their workers more money than the workers are capable of produce, the company will need to close doors. It sucks, but it's how the economy works.
In other words, minimum wage only encourages unemployment. It may encourage some people to pay better wages, but overall it's not a effective measure.
I'd rather setup some public education program for that people (paid with taxes from people - it doesn't matters because it's a good investment), or just give them money, than setting up a minimum wage. Because those measures would help them to be richer, while minimum wage doesn't. I understand that people who are for a minimum wage ask for it because they want to make poor's life better, but a minimum wage isn't going to increase the productivity of those people, which is the REAL problem.
Weird - I keep hearing people about unstability, but I'm using the nightlies with the JIT enabled and I've had no problems so far...
When I said "back references", I meant that some data structures have pointers back to their "parent" data structure, I wasn't talking about softupdates.
AFAIK, softupdates in practice never were better than journaling, and since these days filesystems like ZFS and btrfs avoid the problems that softupdates and journaling tries to solve by maintaining the on-disk data always in a consistent state, softupdates is just a useless source of complexity and overhead.
It's not like IE has not been a slow dog in javascript performance and standards adoption. Yeah, IE 7/8 are supposed to be an improvement, but since IE is years behind and their development cycles seem to be as slow as their javascript engine (probably due to compatibility) it's not like IE 8 or 9 is going to catchup with the rest of the browsers easily.
BTW, those benchmarks in TFA were probably run with the new tracemonkey javascript engine disabled (it need to be enabled manually in about:config). And my firefox nightly version passes 93/100 on the acid 3 test.
One of the differences I can find between btrfs and ZFS is that ZFS explicitely avoided a fsck utility, and btrfs is explicitely designed with features designed to make fsck even more powerful than it's on usual filesystems like ext3. In btrfs, data structures have "back references", and the fsck can be used while the filesystem is mounted.
IMO, this is a a btrfs advantage. ZFS has checksums and will find errors, but only will be able to self-heal the errors in a redundant configuration. On a single disk, ZFS will find the error thanks to checksums but will not be able to recover your data. Since ZFS was mainly designed for systems that will use redundant configurations, it may have sense there, but desktops are not never going to do such things. IMO the ZFS people were a bit elitist here - "let's going to build a filesystem so good that we won't need a fsck". But in the real world you _are_ going to need a fsck util. Only in excepcional and very rare cases, but you're going to need it.
Of course that doesn't makes ZFS a bad filesystem, but it's an advantage for btrfs and linux.
Maybe because other people actually releases stable code that other people can use. That plays a big role in getting fans - people being able to use your software. They don't care too much about you when you don't release anything.
E17 was awesome from the start, it made things that windows and os x didn't do at its time, and it's still very powerful. But, you know, while E is "technically ahead" of other graphic toolkits, some of the things it does have already been implemented, tested, released and perfectioned in other environments.
I no longer have faith in E. They're technically ahead in their development versions, but their stable versions are always behind of other environments. I can use features that E implemented first than anyone in stable environments others than E, but not in E, because, you know, they're too busy making it "perfect"
You mean without children, don't you?
Well, people should not be surprised. It's not the first time Bush proposes a plan and uses FUD to approve it. It's exactly the same thing he did in Irak.
In 2003 the excuse was that Irak had MDW and had helped to plan the 11S. This time the excuse was "If you don't pass it we'll have financial panic".
It's the same Fear Strategy. And just like in Irak, everybody believes it and Democrats, with Obama leading (after all, this proves what he has been saying about too-free market being evil, doesn't it?), help him to pass it. This time even Europe, who is also very very happy to hear bush admit that capitalism is evil, supports Bush.