Hey, I can think of only one reason why it would take more than a year to port Chrome to any other platform besides Windows. They only thing I can think of is logic intertwined with UI code. Without nice logic and UI separation they can b*tch about Linux all they want, but any programmer worth his/her money wouldn't take a year to slap a UI on something as simple as a fscking web browser.
Thank you all for agreeing with me. when people use the term "commercial" when they mean "proprietary" it simply shows that they don't know what they are talking about.
Commercial open source companies (RedHat and all) don't sell software licenses. Sure, you can get a license to some additional add-on software here and there, but the bulk of the deal is a subscription to support in most cases.
Not software but the expertise knowledge on the open source software is what being sold.
The term "commercial" has no meaning when it pertains open source. Selling support on top of open source or closed source makes very little different. Most companies would claim that they are commercial.
That is very much true. However, that by itself leaves the door open for corporations like for example RedHat to select the good software from the bad. It's basically what most if not all the Linux distributions do.
And it is also what closed source software companies are increasingly doing as more and more open source software is included.
So you could say that the harder it is to find the nugget of gold in the mountain of open source dirt, the better it is for commercial open source companies.
Just because "most programs" are likely desktop applications in YOUR situation, that doesn't mean that this is the most important class of software around with respect to this discussion. Then again, it does explain the evolution in CPU design where CPUs not only need to be capable of releasing a lot of processing power, they also need to be able to lay low and consume as little of power as possible when needed.
Sorting in parallel can indeed be the faster option if you are CPU-bound as described in the example. The point of TFA was that programs are ill-adapted to a new multi-core reality and I have to agree that sorting on a single core is a prime example of that. The fact that there are slow disks and fast disks out there or that there is a thing like "I/O wait" is besides the point. It should be possible to do things in parallel.
All that being said, I have to violently agree with tftp above: some things just can't be made to run in parallel in a safe way.
Most of these threads and processes are consuming next to no CPU time so your reasoning would not hold up. That is, unless you have a huge number of tiny processes running. However, the context switching would then consume more time than the actual processing.
"People" come in various shapes and color and perform various tasks on their computer.
To install software on Ubuntu, you don't need to use a command line. You can use a file explorer (just like in Windows) or even easier the software repository where everything is nicely cataloged with icons, descriptions, the lot.
That being said, I wouldn't want to work on an operating system that doesn't have a powerful command line prompt. Power users like myself, administrators, developers of all sorts, web designers, etc are probably going to like dropping down to a command line. Not because they have to, because they *want* to and because they *can*.
The command line in Windows sucks and blows at the same time. That doesn't mean that people using other operating systems should be prevented from using one.
Very insightful, but I'm not convinced this blame is a general or unavoidable as you claim. I think some of this "upwind blame" behavior comes from dealing with closed source "black-box" companies for decades (or generations) on end. If you pay a lot of money, you have every right to kick blame upwind.
That being said, there are only so many upwind parties to detect here. Suppose I buy a laptop from Dell with Linux/Windows on it and there is something wrong with it, there is only one upwind party: Dell. I expect Dell to pass the blame further upwind too but I don't want to know.
If I buy a no-brand PC at my local PC store with all sorts of different components on and I install Ubuntu myself there are basically 2 involved parties: the PC store, myself and Ubuntu. However, if I'm not part of the Ubuntu community and if I didn't buy a support contract from Ubuntu, it's just down to myself and the PC store isn't it.
The point I'm trying to make here is that Linux for example can't really be blamed here. The organization/community that creates a distribution basically say: we created a sane collections of software for your ease of use. You trust the judgment of other people. Otherwise, IMHO, there is no point in having the distribution in the first place. They should handle the problem.
So all in all I have to disagree, it's not just some random upwind party, there are only so many responsible upwind parties in this case.
The confusion was unintentional I think. Perhaps the article was translated from Chinese?
It's nothing like that famous cockpit conversation between captain Clarence Oveur, co-pilot Roger Murdock and nagivator Victor Basta in the movie "Airplane!" :
Roger Murdock: Flight 2-0-9'er, you are cleared for take-off. Captain Oveur: Roger! Roger Murdock: Huh? Tower voice: L.A. departure frequency, 123 point 9'er. Captain Oveur: Roger! Roger Murdock: Huh? Victor Basta: Request vector, over. Captain Oveur: What? Tower voice: Flight 2-0-9'er cleared for vector 324. Roger Murdock: We have clearance, Clarence. Captain Oveur: Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor? Tower voice: Tower's radio clearance, over! Captain Oveur: That's Clarence Oveur. Over. Tower voice: Over. Captain Oveur: Roger. Roger Murdock: Huh? Tower voice: Roger, over! Roger Murdock: What? Captain Oveur: Huh? Victor Basta: Who?
If the core is not open, you restrict the "platform" (the core in this case) on which said software can run, effectively turning it into non-open source software. It's like the Microsoft Version of "open source" where you can only run the code on MS Windows. Sure you get the source code, but please don't call that sort of abomination Open Source, it's really not.
As far as closing source code is concerned... well... it would be the first time this was a reason to create a successful fork. IMHO it would be a serious gamble at best.
Ok, so most of the time it's a minute or so to boot up a computer. However, most of these PCs in the large corporations we're talking about are heavily customized beasts that drag all kinds of stuff from the network, set permissions, verify settings, update registry settings, start custom software, etc. That can takes one or two minutes as well. And then there is that situation where someone at the IT department sends an update to a few hundred PCs that all get their software updates from the same file server. Before you know it you're twiddling your thumbs for half an hour, doing another reboot, etc, etc. And finally there are situations where you PC is simply broken.
I've personally had all these happen to me in the past at a certain bank I used to work.
Now take that loss of time over the period of a year and you have ( 3 minutes x 2 per day x 220 days a year ) + ( 10 times a delay of 15 minutes of updates ) + ( 1 times of 2 hours downtime ). That adds up to more than 24 hours in total you're working and not getting paid. (3 days off folks:-))
If there are network problems over longer period of times, performance problems during "peak" hours, a slow server somewhere, this can increase that time even more.
Personally, I couldn't care less about all this, but I can see clearly why certain groups of people (unions, etc) might have a problem with it. I suppose they see hundreds of people in an organization losing 24 hours per year on a booting PC and they have themselves a nice case.
Yes, finally some common sense! Now that I haven't been a professional sysadmin for more than a decade, I tend to be even more careful. I'm not really that up-to-date on the latest skillz but I still remember the dangers and the blunders I made in the past.
Over time you learn to copy/move stuff in stead of simply removing it.
From the comments I guess there are a lot of wannabe sysadmins on Slashdot with trigger happy "rm -rf" fingers. Learning how to use an Ubuntu installer doesn't really qualify you I guess:-)
In a cloud setting, your application doesn't run on a single machine. It typically runs on a bunch of them. The first popular examples of these were applications like Seti@Home where thousands of machines (a cloud of machines) help search for ET. The variable number of machines is probably a typical trait of a cloud computing application. Typically, a lot of machines are available if you want them and in the case of Amazon they are even virtual machines, not real boxes.
I bet there are a lot of cases like yours. And it's always the same: IT is seen as a pure cost instead of a tool to support the business, to get an advantage over a competitor, etc. For a lot of companies, this is actually a good strategy: those that are in a a cash-cow phase benefit from cost preservation and from milking the customers. For others, this attitude means that they will at some point fall behind the competition or simply will lose their attraction to customers.
An economic crisis is not the same as a total collapse of society. Developers and community members come and go, live and die and even end up in jail all the time and yet the open source movement continues to thrive. The article is FUD, a troll. Nothing to see here, move along.
You are indeed correct AC, compilation is not a reason to use stored procedures and queries are indeed cached in all possible ways these days. These things are what databases do best, it's part of their explicit responsibilities. Executing stored procedures is IMHO not. In all fairness, there are things that Stored procedures do a good job on too.
They are great for: * Assuring vendor lock-in * Logic obfuscation * Programmer job security *...
They are bad for: * Execution speed * Scalability * Migration scenarios *...;-) Matt
This is all just FUD. Large amounts of data are not typical for a transactional database in the context of ORM. Maybe you're the type of person that writes reports on the source system in PL/SQL? (Are there still people like that left?)
Anyway, another limitation of stored procedures is in the lack of parallelism and the lack of scalability is a direct result of that. In a 3-tier environment, you can add more application servers (in a cluster for example) to improve performance. Stored procedures are exceptionally hard to run in parallel and even on Oracle you couldn't get it done in the days I still wasted time with PL/SQL. Finally, it's a question of responsibilities: a database server manages the data. An application server manages the application logic.
Sure, but the scalability arguments of the grand parent poster holds. Scripting languages like PL/SQL are not the most performing by definition and had me in a performance fix more than once I must admit. At the same time, object relational mapping technology (Hibernate and all) have advanced to such a state (even for.Net it seems) that it feels completely wrong to me to put too much application logic in the database. Database independence comes rather cheap these days.
Sure, I'm not an extremist, I can see the use-case for a trigger here and there and a well chosen stored procedure. However, do you really want to keep programming in hard-to-compile-elusive-error-message-generating-2nd-generation scripting languages? For me the answer is clearly "no!".
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with this violently.
Hey, I can think of only one reason why it would take more than a year to port Chrome to any other platform besides Windows. They only thing I can think of is logic intertwined with UI code.
Without nice logic and UI separation they can b*tch about Linux all they want, but any programmer worth his/her money wouldn't take a year to slap a UI on something as simple as a fscking web browser.
Thank you all for agreeing with me. when people use the term "commercial" when they mean "proprietary" it simply shows that they don't know what they are talking about.
Commercial open source companies (RedHat and all) don't sell software licenses. Sure, you can get a license to some additional add-on software here and there, but the bulk of the deal is a subscription to support in most cases.
Not software but the expertise knowledge on the open source software is what being sold.
The term "commercial" has no meaning when it pertains open source. Selling support on top of open source or closed source makes very little different. Most companies would claim that they are commercial.
That is very much true. However, that by itself leaves the door open for corporations like for example RedHat to select the good software from the bad. It's basically what most if not all the Linux distributions do.
And it is also what closed source software companies are increasingly doing as more and more open source software is included.
So you could say that the harder it is to find the nugget of gold in the mountain of open source dirt, the better it is for commercial open source companies.
Just because "most programs" are likely desktop applications in YOUR situation, that doesn't mean that this is the most important class of software around with respect to this discussion. Then again, it does explain the evolution in CPU design where CPUs not only need to be capable of releasing a lot of processing power, they also need to be able to lay low and consume as little of power as possible when needed.
Sorting in parallel can indeed be the faster option if you are CPU-bound as described in the example. The point of TFA was that programs are ill-adapted to a new multi-core reality and I have to agree that sorting on a single core is a prime example of that. The fact that there are slow disks and fast disks out there or that there is a thing like "I/O wait" is besides the point. It should be possible to do things in parallel.
All that being said, I have to violently agree with tftp above: some things just can't be made to run in parallel in a safe way.
Most of these threads and processes are consuming next to no CPU time so your reasoning would not hold up. That is, unless you have a huge number of tiny processes running. However, the context switching would then consume more time than the actual processing.
"People" come in various shapes and color and perform various tasks on their computer.
To install software on Ubuntu, you don't need to use a command line. You can use a file explorer (just like in Windows) or even easier the software repository where everything is nicely cataloged with icons, descriptions, the lot.
That being said, I wouldn't want to work on an operating system that doesn't have a powerful command line prompt. Power users like myself, administrators, developers of all sorts, web designers, etc are probably going to like dropping down to a command line. Not because they have to, because they *want* to and because they *can*.
The command line in Windows sucks and blows at the same time. That doesn't mean that people using other operating systems should be prevented from using one.
Matt
Very insightful, but I'm not convinced this blame is a general or unavoidable as you claim.
I think some of this "upwind blame" behavior comes from dealing with closed source "black-box" companies for decades (or generations) on end. If you pay a lot of money, you have every right to kick blame upwind.
That being said, there are only so many upwind parties to detect here.
Suppose I buy a laptop from Dell with Linux/Windows on it and there is something wrong with it, there is only one upwind party: Dell. I expect Dell to pass the blame further upwind too but I don't want to know.
If I buy a no-brand PC at my local PC store with all sorts of different components on and I install Ubuntu myself there are basically 2 involved parties: the PC store, myself and Ubuntu. However, if I'm not part of the Ubuntu community and if I didn't buy a support contract from Ubuntu, it's just down to myself and the PC store isn't it.
The point I'm trying to make here is that Linux for example can't really be blamed here. The organization/community that creates a distribution basically say: we created a sane collections of software for your ease of use. You trust the judgment of other people. Otherwise, IMHO, there is no point in having the distribution in the first place. They should handle the problem.
So all in all I have to disagree, it's not just some random upwind party, there are only so many responsible upwind parties in this case.
The confusion was unintentional I think. Perhaps the article was translated from Chinese?
It's nothing like that famous cockpit conversation between captain Clarence Oveur, co-pilot Roger Murdock and nagivator Victor Basta in the movie "Airplane!" :
Roger Murdock: Flight 2-0-9'er, you are cleared for take-off.
Captain Oveur: Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: L.A. departure frequency, 123 point 9'er.
Captain Oveur: Roger!
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Victor Basta: Request vector, over.
Captain Oveur: What?
Tower voice: Flight 2-0-9'er cleared for vector 324.
Roger Murdock: We have clearance, Clarence.
Captain Oveur: Roger, Roger. What's our vector, Victor?
Tower voice: Tower's radio clearance, over!
Captain Oveur: That's Clarence Oveur. Over.
Tower voice: Over.
Captain Oveur: Roger.
Roger Murdock: Huh?
Tower voice: Roger, over!
Roger Murdock: What?
Captain Oveur: Huh?
Victor Basta: Who?
If the core is not open, you restrict the "platform" (the core in this case) on which said software can run, effectively turning it into non-open source software.
It's like the Microsoft Version of "open source" where you can only run the code on MS Windows. Sure you get the source code, but please don't call that sort of abomination Open Source, it's really not.
As far as closing source code is concerned... well... it would be the first time this was a reason to create a successful fork. IMHO it would be a serious gamble at best.
Ok, so most of the time it's a minute or so to boot up a computer. However, most of these PCs in the large corporations we're talking about are heavily customized beasts that drag all kinds of stuff from the network, set permissions, verify settings, update registry settings, start custom software, etc. That can takes one or two minutes as well.
And then there is that situation where someone at the IT department sends an update to a few hundred PCs that all get their software updates from the same file server. Before you know it you're twiddling your thumbs for half an hour, doing another reboot, etc, etc.
And finally there are situations where you PC is simply broken.
I've personally had all these happen to me in the past at a certain bank I used to work.
Now take that loss of time over the period of a year and you have ( 3 minutes x 2 per day x 220 days a year ) + ( 10 times a delay of 15 minutes of updates ) + ( 1 times of 2 hours downtime ). :-))
That adds up to more than 24 hours in total you're working and not getting paid. (3 days off folks
If there are network problems over longer period of times, performance problems during "peak" hours, a slow server somewhere, this can increase that time even more.
Personally, I couldn't care less about all this, but I can see clearly why certain groups of people (unions, etc) might have a problem with it.
I suppose they see hundreds of people in an organization losing 24 hours per year on a booting PC and they have themselves a nice case.
Matt
Interesting, a cool laser ignition driven antimatter fusion combustion engine.
Yes, finally some common sense! Now that I haven't been a professional sysadmin for more than a decade, I tend to be even more careful. I'm not really that up-to-date on the latest skillz but I still remember the dangers and the blunders I made in the past.
Over time you learn to copy/move stuff in stead of simply removing it.
From the comments I guess there are a lot of wannabe sysadmins on Slashdot with trigger happy "rm -rf" fingers. Learning how to use an Ubuntu installer doesn't really qualify you I guess :-)
In a cloud setting, your application doesn't run on a single machine. It typically runs on a bunch of them.
The first popular examples of these were applications like Seti@Home where thousands of machines (a cloud of machines) help search for ET.
The variable number of machines is probably a typical trait of a cloud computing application.
Typically, a lot of machines are available if you want them and in the case of Amazon they are even virtual machines, not real boxes.
I bet there are a lot of cases like yours. And it's always the same: IT is seen as a pure cost instead of a tool to support the business, to get an advantage over a competitor, etc.
For a lot of companies, this is actually a good strategy: those that are in a a cash-cow phase benefit from cost preservation and from milking the customers.
For others, this attitude means that they will at some point fall behind the competition or simply will lose their attraction to customers.
An economic crisis is not the same as a total collapse of society. Developers and community members come and go, live and die and even end up in jail all the time and yet the open source movement continues to thrive.
The article is FUD, a troll. Nothing to see here, move along.
Amen! I bought a test-laptop with gloss by accident a few years ago. OK, it was cheap one, but I would never ever do it again.
You are indeed correct AC, compilation is not a reason to use stored procedures and queries are indeed cached in all possible ways these days.
These things are what databases do best, it's part of their explicit responsibilities.
Executing stored procedures is IMHO not.
In all fairness, there are things that Stored procedures do a good job on too.
They are great for: ...
* Assuring vendor lock-in
* Logic obfuscation
* Programmer job security
*
They are bad for: ... ;-)
* Execution speed
* Scalability
* Migration scenarios
*
Matt
This is all just FUD. Large amounts of data are not typical for a transactional database in the context of ORM.
Maybe you're the type of person that writes reports on the source system in PL/SQL? (Are there still people like that left?)
Anyway, another limitation of stored procedures is in the lack of parallelism and the lack of scalability is a direct result of that.
In a 3-tier environment, you can add more application servers (in a cluster for example) to improve performance.
Stored procedures are exceptionally hard to run in parallel and even on Oracle you couldn't get it done in the days I still wasted time with PL/SQL.
Finally, it's a question of responsibilities: a database server manages the data. An application server manages the application logic.
Sure, but the scalability arguments of the grand parent poster holds. .Net it seems) that it feels completely wrong to me to put too much application logic in the database. Database independence comes rather cheap these days.
Scripting languages like PL/SQL are not the most performing by definition and had me in a performance fix more than once I must admit.
At the same time, object relational mapping technology (Hibernate and all) have advanced to such a state (even for
Sure, I'm not an extremist, I can see the use-case for a trigger here and there and a well chosen stored procedure. However, do you really want to keep programming in hard-to-compile-elusive-error-message-generating-2nd-generation scripting languages? For me the answer is clearly "no!".
Woosh.
It was a Monty Python quote ("what have the Romans done for us") from The Life of Brian. You can all hand in your geek license at the door on your way out.
Well, TBH, .NET only runs on Windows. Picking on Windows and picking on the .NET choice is as such the same thing.
You're from the Netherlands? See, that would explain their behavior!