Stability. Responsiveness under massive load. Support for older/non-Intel hardware.
On the flipside, if you want a much larger userbase (and correspondingly, greater web and usenet support) Linux is where it's at. Linux is large, and messy, and anarchic, whereas BSD (FreeBSD, anyway, which is the most mainstream of the BSDs) tends much more towards stability and 'correctness', sometimes to the point of near-absurdity. If you're an ISP, for example, and want a system that will laugh at massive loads, and barring hardware fatalities, never crash, then get thee a copy of BSD. You'll love it, at least if you're prepared to deal with a little less user-friendliness than you're used to.
Personally, I used to run Free on my toy server (c3po.futureconsortium.com) but switched to Debian after witnessing the power of apt. Now, I run Debian on Intel/AMD servers, Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora on desktops, and BSD on Alphas or older hardware.
The BSD VM system is a work of art, for example (read this for details), and I've seen this born out in practice. Of course, Linux is still very impressive, especially on very large systems.
And they had to fudge numbers to make it not as obvious as it should have been. See:
The fourth-quarter revenue included $14m from sales of Unix products and services, with an additional $10.3m from licensing agreements with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems signed earlier in the year.
The $9m charge for legal fees kept the company's fourth quarter in the red. The company reported a net loss of $1.6m but said it would have seen net income at $7.4m without the legal expenses.
The licensing agreements (which were one-time deals, I can assure you, and smell like protection money anyway) were signed before the last quarter. Which doesn't matter, anyway, but it makes the end of the year look especially bad. The fact that they are so brazen as to suggest that they would have been profitable without their legal schemery is fantastic - there's no chance Sun or MS would have been paying them off without the games they've been playing.
Read between the lines. They are barely in the black, and it won't last. In fact, it's over already.
No, I think you're approximately correct. I, for example, get close to zero face to face familial contact, and it's mostly by choice, and not because I don't have a family. The other factors you aren't mentioning are the breakdown of global barriers (as a citizen of the EU the ease at which I can travel through Europe amazes me) and a quickly leveling global professional playing field. My family is scattered over a large part of the world. Oh well.
And, no, we don't IM. The spread of global packet networks has made communication vastly quicker, and cheaper, though. I'm not complaining.
I'm fairly atypical, I think. The 'nuclear family' was always a fantasy, a dream of uniform niceness and cleanliness, invented by a post world war society infatuated with it's apparent wealth and progress, motivated by a combination of greed and religion.
Personally, I think what we have now is better. If relationships are formed, they have the chance of being real relationships, unrestrained by barriers of convention. The widespread abandonment of the right-wing republican ideal of family doesn't bother me at all.:]
I mean, really. Here's something that has it's value in a long history of high manufacturing standards and basic quality. Likewise, it would be ridiculous to allow imitators to simply label their products 'Scotch' regardless of their country of origin.
As far as I know, this is enforced internationally by... I'm not sure what. Intimidation? However, it works - you can tip back your glass of Balvenie assured that it does indeed contain snow from the mountains of Scotland.
I actually think that's a good thing. Huh, fancy that:p
from trojaned broadband users, is welcome with me. i have to deal with this stuff, and i know a lot of you do too.
wait - we all have to deal with this. the level of spam sent from trojaned users using exclusively microsoft's more modern (you may permit yourself a slight snicker at this point) operating systems is over 50%. that's more than half, for the numerically challenged.
this is a serious problem. microsoft's inattention to security has literally destabilized the fundamental mechanisms of the Net.
As a student at a major university, I was taught in at least two cases by professors that were the authors of the textbooks required for the class. Not only did they encourage us to buy last year's editions from the used bookstores (which would have netted them no royalties) but in at least one case they encouraged us to photocopy the relevant portions of the text rather than buy the entire book.
The royalties given to textbook authors may be slightly greater than those granted to big-label musicians, but not by much. What distinguishes the textbook case from music piracy (and I am talking about copying for personal use, not copying for resale, which is completely different) is that publishing a textbook may net far more in prestige than money can possibly buy.
As a writer, I would like to be compensated for my work. Why not? But there are many more aspects to the equation of IP 'piracy' than can be contained in a simple assertion of property rights. It is far too simplistic to assume that any one entity is completely responsible for the creation of any one thing, in this modern age. Those who would have you so believe are those with vested interests in your unquestioning belief, in order to further their own financial ends...
The Abit MAX series hasn't been the runaway favorite that Abit was hoping for. In fact, much of the community it targets - the high end case modders/gamers/geeks shun it because of the lack of older interfaces. After all, it costs nothing extra to get a different board that has just as many IDE controllers, USB ports, firewire, etc. and still has the legacy stuff on board. So why castrate yourself?
Improved speed. All that legacy hardware still needs to work, and the motherboard's BIOS still has to interface it to the OS. Without the constraints of the old interface standards, chipset manufacturers can eliminate a lot of circuitry, and corresponding hardware interrupts. Of course, this kind of performance penalty may be very slight, and difficult to quantify, and I don't claim to be a hardware guru by any means. However, the elimination of the legacy ISA slots on old 'crossover' motherboards netted a good 15% speed increase at the time. Don't see those anymore, that's for sure...
ATX motherboards may have serial ports still, but how long will that last? It's a bunch of hardware that very few use, and slashing costs and razor-thin margins dictate that un-needed components will eventually be eliminated.
Abits' new boards are a good example. Need a parallel port? Don't buy one. Need ps2 ports for keyboard and mouse? Hah!
Moreover, have you tried to buy a new laptop/notebook with serial lately? Uh-huh, that's right. They just don't come with serial anymore, which makes remote maintenance of headless machines something you'll only be doing with your trusty legacy notebook...
A domain request is anytime anyone types in.com or.net.
Not really. Even the most internet-unfriendly OS's these days perform DNS caching. Nevermind that your ISP (or inhouse servers) are also performing caching. For the most part, when you type something into your browser's location bar - especially google.com - it's not even getting to verisign.
What he's talking about are root level requests, and there's only a vague correlation between the frequency of these and the actual amount (or relevance) of internet traffic. I mean, how many bogus requests are performed every time a user opens a web-bugged or web-bombed UCE email with image tags? Every now and then I look through the cache of our nameservers (used by several hundred workstations, at least) and at least 75% of the lookups are completely frivolous.
True comprehension of Google's significance may require a slightly higher level of technical understanding, IMO.
deprogram@c3po:~$ python
Python 2.1.3 (#1, Sep 7 2002, 15:29:56)
[GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 34/0
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
>>>
Slashdot Mirror
Stability. Responsiveness under massive load. Support for older/non-Intel hardware.
On the flipside, if you want a much larger userbase (and correspondingly, greater web and usenet support) Linux is where it's at. Linux is large, and messy, and anarchic, whereas BSD (FreeBSD, anyway, which is the most mainstream of the BSDs) tends much more towards stability and 'correctness', sometimes to the point of near-absurdity. If you're an ISP, for example, and want a system that will laugh at massive loads, and barring hardware fatalities, never crash, then get thee a copy of BSD. You'll love it, at least if you're prepared to deal with a little less user-friendliness than you're used to.
Personally, I used to run Free on my toy server (c3po.futureconsortium.com) but switched to Debian after witnessing the power of apt. Now, I run Debian on Intel/AMD servers, Mandrake or SuSE or Fedora on desktops, and BSD on Alphas or older hardware.
The BSD VM system is a work of art, for example (read this for details), and I've seen this born out in practice. Of course, Linux is still very impressive, especially on very large systems.
And they had to fudge numbers to make it not as obvious as it should have been. See:
The fourth-quarter revenue included $14m from sales of Unix products and services, with an additional $10.3m from licensing agreements with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems signed earlier in the year.
The $9m charge for legal fees kept the company's fourth quarter in the red. The company reported a net loss of $1.6m but said it would have seen net income at $7.4m without the legal expenses.
The licensing agreements (which were one-time deals, I can assure you, and smell like protection money anyway) were signed before the last quarter. Which doesn't matter, anyway, but it makes the end of the year look especially bad. The fact that they are so brazen as to suggest that they would have been profitable without their legal schemery is fantastic - there's no chance Sun or MS would have been paying them off without the games they've been playing.
Read between the lines. They are barely in the black, and it won't last. In fact, it's over already.
No, I think you're approximately correct. I, for example, get close to zero face to face familial contact, and it's mostly by choice, and not because I don't have a family. The other factors you aren't mentioning are the breakdown of global barriers (as a citizen of the EU the ease at which I can travel through Europe amazes me) and a quickly leveling global professional playing field. My family is scattered over a large part of the world. Oh well.
:]
And, no, we don't IM. The spread of global packet networks has made communication vastly quicker, and cheaper, though. I'm not complaining.
I'm fairly atypical, I think. The 'nuclear family' was always a fantasy, a dream of uniform niceness and cleanliness, invented by a post world war society infatuated with it's apparent wealth and progress, motivated by a combination of greed and religion.
Personally, I think what we have now is better. If relationships are formed, they have the chance of being real relationships, unrestrained by barriers of convention. The widespread abandonment of the right-wing republican ideal of family doesn't bother me at all.
I mean, really. Here's something that has it's value in a long history of high manufacturing standards and basic quality. Likewise, it would be ridiculous to allow imitators to simply label their products 'Scotch' regardless of their country of origin.
:p
As far as I know, this is enforced internationally by... I'm not sure what. Intimidation? However, it works - you can tip back your glass of Balvenie assured that it does indeed contain snow from the mountains of Scotland.
I actually think that's a good thing. Huh, fancy that
from trojaned broadband users, is welcome with me. i have to deal with this stuff, and i know a lot of you do too.
:>
wait - we all have to deal with this. the level of spam sent from trojaned users using exclusively microsoft's more modern (you may permit yourself a slight snicker at this point) operating systems is over 50%. that's more than half, for the numerically challenged.
this is a serious problem. microsoft's inattention to security has literally destabilized the fundamental mechanisms of the Net.
ok, that's pretty dramatic. but whatever
As a student at a major university, I was taught in at least two cases by professors that were the authors of the textbooks required for the class. Not only did they encourage us to buy last year's editions from the used bookstores (which would have netted them no royalties) but in at least one case they encouraged us to photocopy the relevant portions of the text rather than buy the entire book.
The royalties given to textbook authors may be slightly greater than those granted to big-label musicians, but not by much. What distinguishes the textbook case from music piracy (and I am talking about copying for personal use, not copying for resale, which is completely different) is that publishing a textbook may net far more in prestige than money can possibly buy.
As a writer, I would like to be compensated for my work. Why not? But there are many more aspects to the equation of IP 'piracy' than can be contained in a simple assertion of property rights. It is far too simplistic to assume that any one entity is completely responsible for the creation of any one thing, in this modern age. Those who would have you so believe are those with vested interests in your unquestioning belief, in order to further their own financial ends...
I agree with what you're saying, but:
The Abit MAX series hasn't been the runaway favorite that Abit was hoping for. In fact, much of the community it targets - the high end case modders/gamers/geeks shun it because of the lack of older interfaces. After all, it costs nothing extra to get a different board that has just as many IDE controllers, USB ports, firewire, etc. and still has the legacy stuff on board. So why castrate yourself?
Improved speed. All that legacy hardware still needs to work, and the motherboard's BIOS still has to interface it to the OS. Without the constraints of the old interface standards, chipset manufacturers can eliminate a lot of circuitry, and corresponding hardware interrupts. Of course, this kind of performance penalty may be very slight, and difficult to quantify, and I don't claim to be a hardware guru by any means. However, the elimination of the legacy ISA slots on old 'crossover' motherboards netted a good 15% speed increase at the time. Don't see those anymore, that's for sure...
ATX motherboards may have serial ports still, but how long will that last? It's a bunch of hardware that very few use, and slashing costs and razor-thin margins dictate that un-needed components will eventually be eliminated.
Abits' new boards are a good example. Need a parallel port? Don't buy one. Need ps2 ports for keyboard and mouse? Hah!
Moreover, have you tried to buy a new laptop/notebook with serial lately? Uh-huh, that's right. They just don't come with serial anymore, which makes remote maintenance of headless machines something you'll only be doing with your trusty legacy notebook...
A domain request is anytime anyone types in .com or .net.
Not really. Even the most internet-unfriendly OS's these days perform DNS caching. Nevermind that your ISP (or inhouse servers) are also performing caching. For the most part, when you type something into your browser's location bar - especially google.com - it's not even getting to verisign.
What he's talking about are root level requests, and there's only a vague correlation between the frequency of these and the actual amount (or relevance) of internet traffic. I mean, how many bogus requests are performed every time a user opens a web-bugged or web-bombed UCE email with image tags? Every now and then I look through the cache of our nameservers (used by several hundred workstations, at least) and at least 75% of the lookups are completely frivolous.
True comprehension of Google's significance may require a slightly higher level of technical understanding, IMO.
deprogram@c3po:~$ python
:]
Python 2.1.3 (#1, Sep 7 2002, 15:29:56)
[GCC 2.95.4 20011002 (Debian prerelease)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> 34/0
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "", line 1, in ?
ZeroDivisionError: integer division or modulo by zero
>>>
Looks like it handles it pretty well