FreeBSD may be an excellent operating system, but it's lack of a good journaling file system is a major barrier to adoption. I don't think they can claim to be an excellent choice for SATA RAID arrays until this is addressed.
Although UFS2's background FSCK is a welcome improvement, it's not a solution.
It's good to see that there are projects to bring XFS and JFS support into FreeBSD, I suspect it will be a long time before they're production ready and you'll be able to boot FreeBSD on them.
The biggest problem facing Linux is the complete lack of integration between the different components. It's no single flaw, it's a collection of small problems, some which would require massive shifts in thinking to fix.
The biggest problems I see facing Linux are:
1. A lack of integration between desktop components, and between GUI world and Console/Kernel world.
X is to Linux as Win 3.1 was to Dos. The Linux console rules, even as a desktop operating system. While bootsplash vaguely attempts to hide startup messages from the user, they can still press Esc. But it's still there. And the SysV init procedure still asks questions of me - for example harddrake2 runs each time the machine starts. If it detects new hardware, woohoo, Console!
Then we have configuration. Configuration is handled almost always using plain text files on the filesystem. Every application handles its configuration differently, with most choosing a semi-structured format. XML may go some way towards solving this, but it's no registry. People also resist XML - it's easy to read, easy to tweak, but not as easy to manage by hand as semi-structured files are. However on the flip side, it's much easier to parse and edit.
Neither Mac OS X or Windows handles startup or configuration in the way Linux does. It would be an almost impossible task to write a GUI to manage all the disparate Linux components as elegantly as Mac OS X or Windows does.
Linux needs some integration, some elegance. Hardware detection should happen in the background, configuration should happen within a GUI. More of a Windows approach would be nice.
A device management framework is needed, to detect devices, manage hotplug events, store details of present hardware, and to fetch and store hardware configuration options. This should include graphics card options.
It should be trivial for a user on any Linux distribution to manage hardware.
Look to Mac OS X. Perhaps by adopting Launchd, and implementing a "Registry like" configuration system, may help. Here's a thought - make the configuration system have a "storage API" for storing/retrieving configuration data. Users can then select where the configuration data gets stored. XML Files. Database. You name it.
2. Developing on the Desktop
At present, there are simply too many widget toolkits and desktop environments present. Motif, GTK, QT, KDE, Gnome.. and none of these are strong enough for there to be a clear winner. They are all tied to X, and perhaps that in itself is a problem.
A single, unified, high quality toolkit is needed, that makes development on Linux as attractive as it is on Windows or Mac OS X. While choice is good, sometimes it can cause more problems than it solves. Perhaps a solution such as Y Windows (http://www.y-windows.org/) may help.
To emphasise the problems facing developers.. GTK looks terrible. QT is nice, but it's a fully blown development environment. Most OSS QT apps are KDE apps, which places a dependency on KDE, which is also undesirable. Developing GUI apps on Linux is far from ideal.
The Linux platform is excellent when developing non-gui based programs. It's an excellent server based platform. But as a desktop solution, it's weak. I use Linux every day, and I can tell you, I fully understand why people hesitate to adopt it - despite the fact it's free.
RSI was really beginning to affect my ability to type. I had experienced no symptoms, right up until about 6 months ago. I remember attending a lecture at University about RSI slightly beforehand by two students who had all but lost their ability to type due to RSI. I remember thinking "Thank god that'll never happen to me..". How wrong I was.
It just sort of happened - slight pain at first, but quickly got worse. The biggest pain was in my wrists where your arms meet your hands, with some slight pain in the lower arms. I don't believe it was related to the use of the mouse, although some days using the mouse did agrivate it.
I had tried giving typing a break - doing no typing for a few weeks. This didn't seem to help much.
However a month or so ago we decided to do up one of our houses, and I spent a week doing nothing but intense DIY. This involved using my hands a lot - lots of lifting, squeezing, twisting, etc. Each day I could feel the muscles in my hands ache - but was it RSI pain? Surprisingly, no! It was the same muscle pains I was getting all over, I was getting a real workout.
And the result? My RSI was temporarily cured.
It has started to get slightly worse, but not nearly as bad as it was. I intend to find ways to ensure I'm getting plenty of hand-based exercise. Infact, I just ordered some heat sensitive putty from http://www.puttyworld.com/:)
In conclusion - exercise your hands with a real workout. Build up your hand muscles. Hopefully it'll help you as much as it did I.
I think Frontier Elite 2 affected me more than any other game.
It captured my imagination more than anything - flying through the massive vastness of space. Frontier really made you feel like you were out there, all alone, far far away from anyone or anything.
I played it solidly for years, I'm still a fan now, although once you learn of the games limits it becomes a lot less interesting.
I'm seeing a lot of graphical first person shooters being mentioned - while scary, they never really "affected" me. Frontier did. There's nothing quite like landing on a planet and watching sunrise in a binary star system, or observing space stations orbiting moons orbiting planets orbiting stars. The accuracy of the game was astounding. I formed a real emotional bond to the game, and if star travel existed as it was portrayed in Frontier, that's what I'd want to be doing with my life.
I'm amazed no one has produced a spectacular modern day sequel. While Freelancer is graphically spectacular, it's missions are shallow and the universe is small and limited. Frontier's universe was infinite - while it was randomly generated, it did leave you wondering what was "out there".
I'm always surprised when Top 100 lists miss games like Frontier Elite 2, HalfLife, Civilization 2, Homeworld, etc. At the time, many of these games scored top marks, and were "Game of the Year".
I must admit, it's amazing that not a single "modern" Open-Ended Space Sim comes close to Frontier Elite 2 - Microsoft Freelancer is fun, but it's no way nere as "big" as the Frontier universe was. Or as open ended.
Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD may be an excellent operating system, but it's lack of a good journaling file system is a major barrier to adoption. I don't think they can claim to be an excellent choice for SATA RAID arrays until this is addressed.
Although UFS2's background FSCK is a welcome improvement, it's not a solution.
It's good to see that there are projects to bring XFS and JFS support into FreeBSD, I suspect it will be a long time before they're production ready and you'll be able to boot FreeBSD on them.
My reason for picking such a topic? I hate Apache :) I have to use it on a daily basis.
My main focus for Cookie Dough was dynamic configuration, not requiring a restart.
You can find the report and source code at http://cookiedough.rar.nu/
The biggest problem facing Linux is the complete lack of integration between the different components. It's no single flaw, it's a collection of small problems, some which would require massive shifts in thinking to fix.
The biggest problems I see facing Linux are:
1. A lack of integration between desktop components, and between GUI world and Console/Kernel world.
X is to Linux as Win 3.1 was to Dos. The Linux console rules, even as a desktop operating system. While bootsplash vaguely attempts to hide startup messages from the user, they can still press Esc. But it's still there. And the SysV init procedure still asks questions of me - for example harddrake2 runs each time the machine starts. If it detects new hardware, woohoo, Console!
Then we have configuration. Configuration is handled almost always using plain text files on the filesystem. Every application handles its configuration differently, with most choosing a semi-structured format. XML may go some way towards solving this, but it's no registry. People also resist XML - it's easy to read, easy to tweak, but not as easy to manage by hand as semi-structured files are. However on the flip side, it's much easier to parse and edit.
Neither Mac OS X or Windows handles startup or configuration in the way Linux does. It would be an almost impossible task to write a GUI to manage all the disparate Linux components as elegantly as Mac OS X or Windows does.
Linux needs some integration, some elegance. Hardware detection should happen in the background, configuration should happen within a GUI. More of a Windows approach would be nice.
A device management framework is needed, to detect devices, manage hotplug events, store details of present hardware, and to fetch and store hardware configuration options. This should include graphics card options.
It should be trivial for a user on any Linux distribution to manage hardware.
Look to Mac OS X. Perhaps by adopting Launchd, and implementing a "Registry like" configuration system, may help. Here's a thought - make the configuration system have a "storage API" for storing/retrieving configuration data. Users can then select where the configuration data gets stored. XML Files. Database. You name it.
2. Developing on the Desktop
At present, there are simply too many widget toolkits and desktop environments present. Motif, GTK, QT, KDE, Gnome.. and none of these are strong enough for there to be a clear winner. They are all tied to X, and perhaps that in itself is a problem.
A single, unified, high quality toolkit is needed, that makes development on Linux as attractive as it is on Windows or Mac OS X. While choice is good, sometimes it can cause more problems than it solves. Perhaps a solution such as Y Windows (http://www.y-windows.org/) may help.
To emphasise the problems facing developers.. GTK looks terrible. QT is nice, but it's a fully blown development environment. Most OSS QT apps are KDE apps, which places a dependency on KDE, which is also undesirable. Developing GUI apps on Linux is far from ideal.
The Linux platform is excellent when developing non-gui based programs. It's an excellent server based platform. But as a desktop solution, it's weak. I use Linux every day, and I can tell you, I fully understand why people hesitate to adopt it - despite the fact it's free.
RSI was really beginning to affect my ability to type. I had experienced no symptoms, right up until about 6 months ago. I remember attending a lecture at University about RSI slightly beforehand by two students who had all but lost their ability to type due to RSI. I remember thinking "Thank god that'll never happen to me..". How wrong I was.
:)
It just sort of happened - slight pain at first, but quickly got worse. The biggest pain was in my wrists where your arms meet your hands, with some slight pain in the lower arms. I don't believe it was related to the use of the mouse, although some days using the mouse did agrivate it.
I had tried giving typing a break - doing no typing for a few weeks. This didn't seem to help much.
However a month or so ago we decided to do up one of our houses, and I spent a week doing nothing but intense DIY. This involved using my hands a lot - lots of lifting, squeezing, twisting, etc. Each day I could feel the muscles in my hands ache - but was it RSI pain? Surprisingly, no! It was the same muscle pains I was getting all over, I was getting a real workout.
And the result? My RSI was temporarily cured.
It has started to get slightly worse, but not nearly as bad as it was. I intend to find ways to ensure I'm getting plenty of hand-based exercise. Infact, I just ordered some heat sensitive putty from http://www.puttyworld.com/
In conclusion - exercise your hands with a real workout. Build up your hand muscles. Hopefully it'll help you as much as it did I.
I think Frontier Elite 2 affected me more than any other game.
It captured my imagination more than anything - flying through the massive vastness of space. Frontier really made you feel like you were out there, all alone, far far away from anyone or anything.
I played it solidly for years, I'm still a fan now, although once you learn of the games limits it becomes a lot less interesting.
I'm seeing a lot of graphical first person shooters being mentioned - while scary, they never really "affected" me. Frontier did. There's nothing quite like landing on a planet and watching sunrise in a binary star system, or observing space stations orbiting moons orbiting planets orbiting stars. The accuracy of the game was astounding. I formed a real emotional bond to the game, and if star travel existed as it was portrayed in Frontier, that's what I'd want to be doing with my life.
I'm amazed no one has produced a spectacular modern day sequel. While Freelancer is graphically spectacular, it's missions are shallow and the universe is small and limited. Frontier's universe was infinite - while it was randomly generated, it did leave you wondering what was "out there".
I'm always surprised when Top 100 lists miss games like Frontier Elite 2, HalfLife, Civilization 2, Homeworld, etc. At the time, many of these games scored top marks, and were "Game of the Year". I must admit, it's amazing that not a single "modern" Open-Ended Space Sim comes close to Frontier Elite 2 - Microsoft Freelancer is fun, but it's no way nere as "big" as the Frontier universe was. Or as open ended.