Agreed. We've bought something like 14 1U and 2U systems from VA, and the prices were great. Out of 14 we had one failure, a power supply that was replaced in 24 hours. Better still, when some systems they sold us wouldn't run Solaris (don't ask) as the ones we'd been buying had, they gave use free *upgrades* to the next-better systems that would run it. By comparison, we have about a 10% DOA rate on Gateway boxes, and replacement parts (which I've needed for 8 of our 22 systems) take 4-8 days to arrive - if I can convince the tech support weenie that yes I tried rebooting.
In short, VA's hardware and excellent service will be missed. If nothing else, the UPS-powered blinding blue LEDs helped illuiminate the machine room when the blackouts happened. Dammit, now I have to find another vendor...oh wait, no I don't; we don't have any money either...
Well, SGI and VA are in a race to see who will go under first. In this case I hardly think it will matter. SGI has more cash but is losing it much faster. Both companies made products whose quality was too high for the market. Neither will be around in 2004.
1000 Microserfs who'd rather be doing anything else but are addicted to the stock options
5000 Marketdroids, lawyers, and "visionaries" responsible for embracing, extending, extinguishing, buying, suing, and otherwise levelling the competition
1 would-be God
5 different names for slightly incompatible versions of the same code, most of which was written in 1980 and has never been significantly improved
1 obfuscated editor that includes most of what the GNU/Linux editors have plus the ability to execute macro viruses, minus the ability to actually save a plain text file using ISO standard characters.
1 application written with the express purpose of receiving, sending, and running viruses. It's based on patented VirusEngine technology.
1 standardized window system that you can't get rid of even on a server, which relies on hardware vendors to provide drivers of varying quality
Other device drivers with the same struggles. Microsoft themselves claim that much of the instability of their systems is due to third-party drivers, but presumably they can't marshal the resources to provide drivers for even the same hardware as your own 20 hardcore hackers.
200,000,000 rape victims with sore asses and pathological masochism.
You can moderate this down, but I challenge you to find proof that this situation is otherwise.
Windows community, sure. People who like to get together and talk about how great their OS is? Well, perhaps a small number. People who like to get together and share improvements they've made to their OS? Not outside the walls of Microsoft, that's for sure. As best I can determine, the "windows community" is made up of two groups: people who write Outlook viruses, and people who write low-quality binary-only "freeware."
If that's a community, it's the most dysfunctional one I've ever heard of. The "excellent free or shareware apps" are first and most importantly not Free at all in virtually all cases, and in my experience, of very poor quality. For every useful piece of software that functions as documented, there are 100 that bluescreen the system at startup - or never start up at all. It's ok not to be a professional hacker - I'm not one either. But there are professional amateurs and then there are amateurish amateurs. Almost without fail, the people who produce windows cruftware are in the second group. There are certainly enough of them writing Free software too, but I find far more from the first group in our community.
A small dot? I disagree. The point of this paper is that even if you define a community by sheer bulk, the Free Software community is a large one with serious resources. If you start to factor in things like quality and motivation, I would suggest that in fact the Microsoft community is a single trailer park full of dysfunctional trash next to our vibrant culture.
The verbiage also referred to an IIS number of 5137 - a little less than half of Tux. iPlanet has insignificant and declining market share and is thus fairly uninteresting. You would want to compare a new product with either the best-performing or most popular products on the market. The previously fastest product was Tux 1.0 (which has insignificant market share and was essentially experimental anyway), and Apache and IIS together hold something like 80% of the market, the bulk of which is Apache. So I don't really see any problems with the selection.
They weren't trying to put together a comprehensive view of the market, only show that Tux 2.0 is dramatically faster than the competition.
Nah, that's no fun. Better that you pick up the parts of the kernel you want in Missouri and then lose parts along the way.
You attempt to ford the river. You lose sparcaudio, two filesystems, and ffb_drm. sparcaudio pulls cs4231 into the river with it. You are out of filesystems.
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of being serious all the time? Fuck, people, it's supposed to be fun. You don't need Linux to be bored and frustrated; we have Windows for that.
Dammit, we're *not* professionals. This kind of thing reminds me of the Good Old Days Before Microsoft when hackers were hackers and did it for the fucking code and not to wipe out IBM or sell shit. Jesus H Christ, people, will you get over it? World Domination is a joke, it is not intended to be a holy war.
This kind of thing is the stuff that makes Unix worth using. It's the kind of stuff that makes us better than Microsoft. Not GNOME. Not KDE. Not GNU this or Open Source that. The freedom to implement what you like rather than what a focus group calls for is one of the fundamental advantages of Free Software and of the hacker tradition that preceded it by 20 years or more.
Rest assured, Bill Gates is not spending his time making campy "for the fun of it" user interfaces.
Fine. He runs a multi-billion-dollar company. He wears suits. He talks about "vision" and marketing and The Road Ahead. Is this really somebody you want to emulate?
You can't beat Bill Gates with geek subculture. And while you're doing that, Gates' army is charging, on a mission.
On the contrary, he can't be beaten without it. Give up the fun, you've given up one of the primary distinguishing features. It doesn't count as a victory if you end up the same as your enemy.
This is one of the best things I've seen in recent years. I couldn't be happier. If a stuffed suit decided not to use Open Source because of it, I think we're just that much better off. Nyah!
If you "derive" the work from the GPL hello.c, does this make your school work plagerism and / or illegal??
Whether it's illegal is a silly question in this day and age; everything is illegal. But it's only plagiarism if you don't give proper credit for the works of others. In traditional scholarship, whether using part of someone else's work is "illegal" is a silly question; it was simply assumed that any academic works were freely distributable. It was, and is still, dishonest to claim another's work as one's own...
Funny, in my experience it's been the opposite. The people with real skills are the ones looking for work and the buzzword-compliance staff are still going strong.
IBM had 90% market share, a giant marketing machine, and every PHB in the world. "Nobody gets fired for buying ___________" was first said about IBM. They had FAR more power than Microsoft ever has, and they fell on their heads. They've clawed their way back by giving people what they want.
...if the situation were reversed? Bad acts are not funny. If Verizon had deluged Covad with spam bug reports, you'd be all over them. Face facts, guys, this was wrong. I might not think much of Verizon either, but the place to win these wars is in the marketplace, by providing better products at better prices. I do hope they settle out of court; I'd hate to see a giant judgment sink Covad.
Linux usefulness starts to fall off at a certen point on the high end so sales of extreamly high end is likely to be Windows NT only.
It is true that the usefulness of Linux diminishes at the very high end. But in the realm we're talking about, nobody even thinks about NT. In fact, NT's usefulness is minimal (even by comparison with some NT "base") in midrange servers and nonexistent at the high end. The hardware NT (and x86 Linux) support tops out in the lower midrange of servers. A maximal 8-CPU peecee is a minnow in a school of sharks. At least Linux gives you an option to move beyond the limits of the peecee - an option NT once offered but no longer does.
No, toward the high end you see things like Irix and AIX and MVS and OS/400. Definitely not NT. But that doesn't mean the numbers aren't meaningless; they most certainly are.
Dear God, man. It's ok to point out that someone's wrong without being such an ass. Sure Apache runs on lots of different platforms - in fact, almost every major platform there is. It's also true that a large proportion of the sites using it are doing so on Linux. You probably figure they've been hyped into obvilion or that the low cost was attractive. The other poster probably just thinks that Linux is 31337.
So what? Linux is a very nice OS. It's unfortunate that it's mostly used on a decisively inferior hardware platform that effectively limits scalability, performance, and reliability to a few times that of the best Microsoft products. Can you do better than Linux on a peecee? Of course. Can you do better than $FOO on $BAR? Of course. You just have to spend more money. I've used all those "actual enterprise OSs" and I've adminned them, deployed them, and helped people make money with them. Frankly, I'm not real impressed. The only Unix I'd ever recommend over Linux is Irix, simply because nothing else will run on the beautiful purple monsters SGI makes. If you don't need those monsters, you can do just fine with a Sun running Linux. Choose the hardware you'd want if you were to run Solaris, then buy two models down for equal performance.
But I digress. Use what you like, but don't insult my choice of systems just because it's the same as that of someone who can't justify his.
There was no marketing of Free Software, nor Linux, and surely not "Open Source" before 1998 or so. Nada. Zilch. No multibillion-dollar IPOs. No bandwagony press releases from IBM, SGI, HP, or anyone. No bandwagon at all to speak of. And yet in 1997 Free Software was alive and kicking, doing well in spite of adversity and ignorance. Linux-based operating systems were beginning to take off. The FSF was as alive as ever, kicking out great amounts of high-quality software for all to use and enjoy. The various BSD projects were around, too, producing very much the same product they are today, and not of much less quality.
What's the point? The point is that this community was already a vibrant, rapidly expanding one well before anyone decided it was the Next Big Thing. Long before you could read about it in the New York Times. Long before Slashdot became what is is now. Long, long before would-be nerds pondered the latest market figures for Linux-based systems from the Gartner Group and IDG.
Let the PHBs be. The community will survive and prosper with or without them. If everyone who only uses Linux or Free Software altogether because of advertising, press releases, support of large corporations, or mainstream media attention stopped using it right now, what would we lose? Well, a few fine folks would lose their jobs. At least one or two more "Linux vendors" would probably close up shop - but that's likely to happen anyway as part of a much broader downturn. Our market, if we cared to measure it, might shrink by 30% or 40% or even 70%. The software would not vanish from FTP sites - at least, not from all of them. The sources would not go away or suddenly become closed. And if I had to wager, I'd suggest many of the people no longer paid to hack this stuff would still spend time on it. In short, things would - and will - go on as they always have. The bubble was just that. You'll see it years from now as a spike in the plot of market share with respect to time. But don't worry the spikes or the valleys, watch the long-term trend. That trend has been toward a very high-quality set of products enjoyed by more people for a long time.
Forget Gartner, forget IDG, and forget the silly people who think they matter. Step back and look at what you're running today, and enjoy the fact that, all the negative press notwithstanding, you've got Free licenses that never expire for some damn fine software. Relax, and go outside for a breath of fresh air, lest the flames ruin your good mood.
Ahh, this old thing... This would be a simple matter if all admins were of equal value. But that one experienced Unix admin can run a large department with nothing but cron and a tape monkey. And when something breaks, he'll solder together a magic doodad to make it all work again. The 5 monkey admins can read Microsoft's web site all day and all night, but there will always be serious limits on what they can really do. Some limits imposed by the OS itself, many more by their own lack of experience.
I don't know about you, but I would find it very difficult if not impossible to pick up meaningful experience in a world in which there is little relation between action and consequence. Two people can do the same thing on two identical Microsoft systems and get completely different results. More interestingly, you can do the same thing twice on the same box and get different results. Most maddening of all, you can do something, then reverse it, and end up in a different spot than the one at which you started. This kind of environment is not conducive to the type of learning that really good admins go through. There's actually a nicely similar situation discussed in Carl Sagan's Cosmos - he argues that if there were no rules of physics, science would be impossible because we could never learn by experimentation, and no experiment could ever be duplicated.
This entire idea, in fact, also skirts very closely the Monkey Rule. Specifically, a monkey can never be a good systems administrator. Sure, he can handle the common cases and push the right buttons if he's well enough trained, but the moment something out of the ordinary happens it's all over. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, I'd suggest that your 16-year-old sister most likely suffers from the exact same problem. So, no, I wouldn't likely pay her my salary for doing my job, and I'd hope no manager would either. It's not just that you need more admins to manage a dodgy infrastructure. It's back to Brooks: 5 people are not always better than one. Especially if those 5 people don't or can't contribute anything to the solution. Are there managers who've never read Brooks? Surely. They don't last long.
I won't address much of the standard rhetoric in your post, but this really stood out:
If [Gartner] produces poor quality research on a regular basis, people will stop subscribing or purchasing its reports.
Logically, in a marketplace of informed, intelligent consumers, this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, substitute "Microsoft" for "Gartner" and "software" for "research" and suddenly the apparently obvious, rational statement becomes a joke. I'm sure we can all name dozens more examples where obviously inferior products nevertheless generate substantial business.
I don't know whether Gartner's study or IDG's or Netcraft's or all or none are correct. And I really don't care. I don't choose my products based on market share. After all, isn't the whole point of Gartner that people will choose their research because they're well-known? If you apply the same standard to operating systems, what does that say about you?
Don't fret the small shit. Focus on quality. Every business that's successful over a long period of time worries about quality first. A company can succeed by raping customers for a limited length of time. Eventually it has to produce a product people actually want, or go away. IBM knows this all too well. Microsoft will learn it too. So move along, please; there's nothing to see here.
This is too complicated an issue to discard your entire argument out of hand, but when you say
Would you let an 11 year old run around in the worlds biggest porn shop with people who regularly abduct children and plenty of other nasty things? Of course not... the internet is the same thing.
you are missing an absolutely critical distinction: nobody can abduct, or even touch, your child via the network. A second distinction to be made is that not all of the net is pr0n. Comparing the net to a giant pr0n shop is like saying that the entire world is one because you could always walk from the public library to the red light district and buy yourself a dildo. Just as in meatspace, you have to go there of your own volition. It's just easier to get there, that's all.
Agreed, the whole exercise is pointless. Anybody who doesn't even know what kind of CPU and OS his or her computer is running is 99.99999% certainly using some DOS variant on a peecee. Anybody using a non-peecee can simply look at the label on the front. And it's not too hard to know what OS you're using - Unix users have a pretty good idea, as do mac users (at leasy they can say "macos"). DOS users can safely be assumed to support a certain subset of functionality, and so on.
Let's put this in perspective. People are generally capable of going out and downloading the appropriate binary for their system when presented with a list of options. It's not much of a leap from there to downloading an appropriate compiler for their platform. And typing "make" ain't too tough. Bottom line: Even inexperienced computer users are generally capable of reading and following simple directions.
To pick up the small shit, obviously. And to deal with systems that predate posix. Autoconf is not, fortunately, smart enough to make porting to Really Stupid systems possible.
Don't bother answering that one, anyone who has written "portable" software knows the Real Answer.
The implication that I haven't is false. The point is valid: the vast majority of non-mainframe vendors (even Apple, finally) are within some fairly small delta of POSIX; for sake of demonstration let's say 1 meter. On the same scale, Microsoft is somewhere near Mars. If they don't want to follow standards, there's no reason to bother developing software for their systems, since they've elected to make it unnecessarily difficult to do so. There's just no excuse for that. Be fucked its developers over and went bankrupt because the developers walked away. No reason the same thing won't happen to our favourite Keeper of Evil.
some of my friends and relatives (gasp!) DON'T EVEN HAVE A COMPILER INSTALLED ON THEIR COMPUTER!!!
Why not? High-quality compilers are available, with source if desired, at zero cost.
Your arguments regarding optimization also apply to distributing files as Java byte code, but the simple fact is, for most applications, nobody gives a damn about optimization anymore anyway!
People who love to brag about their leet computers think this. Anybody who actually has to do work on them does not. Java is suckass-slow to the point of uselessness, and there's no excuse for wasting CPU power just to be lazy.
For the few cases in which cycles are that critical, shouldn't the code be written in hand-optimized assembly and made available in system libraries anyway?
Of course. Unfortunately I believe, unlike you, that there are more shades of code than just "performance-critical" and "non-preformance-critical." The 90-10 rule is quite valid in most cases, and inner loops and such should be optimized, the best algorithms available used. But what about the parts of the application that aren't in the system libraries? What if my need for speed isn't just in strcmp(3) but also an AVL tree, an XML parser, and (insert foo here)? These should be written in a compiled high-performance language like C (never Java and almost never C++). It isn't any harder to do this right.
Have you tried lately to write a non-trivial application where the same source compiles on both Linux and Windows lately?
No, why would I? Dozens of vendors got together several years ago to define standard (heard of POSIX?) to make sure this could be done with a minimum of pain. I can't help it if Microsoft was too busy (drawing mustaches on Larry Ellison|calling Scott McNealy a liar|embracing and extending its mother) that week. Want to run useful code? Use a real OS; there are plenty to choose from.
Why would anyone want this? Insist on source-available applications and you'll never get burned by this. You can just rebuild your applications from source on whatever system you happen to be using, and as an added bonus you'll be using a compiler that understands the target platform rather than relying on hacks.
There is more information content in the original code for an optimizer to make use of then there is in a binary (or assembly). If this were not the case, would not optimizers run *after* the assembly translation is done? In fact, all reasonable compilers run the vast majority of their optimizations *before* the translation occurs, and only a few small peephole optimizations are done on translated or nearly-translated code. The unfortunate (for them) facts are that:
Optimizations done after translation has finished are of limited value and generally produce only very small performance gains
There is no reason to translate binaries, with all the difficulty this entails, when it's much easier to simply recompile.
In many cases simple binary translation is ineffective anyway, since other properties of the systems are likely to differ (for example, different operating systems use different system calls, syscall numbers, or calling conventions). This requires a great deal of effort (consider replacing one 5-instruction system call with 582 instructions to make 7 different syscalls and include a large chunk of compatibility code to substitute for a system call that the target lacks) to work around, and it's difficult to get it completely right.
The verdict: don't fall for this. Even if it works, and even if it has no effect on performance in the common case, there's no benefit. The only useful things that can come of this are the magic peephole optimizations they might be using, which should go into general-purpose compilers.
First, program all mail servers to reject attachments commonly used to transfer viruses. This will block 95% of them. If that's still not good enough, scan all systems for Outlook and remove it. It's a lot easier to remove Outlook than to remove a potentially large number of random viruses. This will get most of what's left. If that's *still* not enough, you can either forbid the use of Microsoft-based systems or use various scanners on the more important machines and tell the students that they're on their own.
Frankly, the technically easiest solution is to use operating systems that are not susceptible to viruses. People who insist on using inferior systems may do so, but may not attach to the network. Good luck implementing this, though; the people who set policy are all on the take from Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
In short, VA's hardware and excellent service will be missed. If nothing else, the UPS-powered blinding blue LEDs helped illuiminate the machine room when the blackouts happened. Dammit, now I have to find another vendor...oh wait, no I don't; we don't have any money either...
Well, SGI and VA are in a race to see who will go under first. In this case I hardly think it will matter. SGI has more cash but is losing it much faster. Both companies made products whose quality was too high for the market. Neither will be around in 2004.
Windows is made up of the following:
You can moderate this down, but I challenge you to find proof that this situation is otherwise.
If that's a community, it's the most dysfunctional one I've ever heard of. The "excellent free or shareware apps" are first and most importantly not Free at all in virtually all cases, and in my experience, of very poor quality. For every useful piece of software that functions as documented, there are 100 that bluescreen the system at startup - or never start up at all. It's ok not to be a professional hacker - I'm not one either. But there are professional amateurs and then there are amateurish amateurs. Almost without fail, the people who produce windows cruftware are in the second group. There are certainly enough of them writing Free software too, but I find far more from the first group in our community.
A small dot? I disagree. The point of this paper is that even if you define a community by sheer bulk, the Free Software community is a large one with serious resources. If you start to factor in things like quality and motivation, I would suggest that in fact the Microsoft community is a single trailer park full of dysfunctional trash next to our vibrant culture.
And why not? You don't give any reasons why doing so would put anyone at a disadvantage.
They weren't trying to put together a comprehensive view of the market, only show that Tux 2.0 is dramatically faster than the competition.
You attempt to ford the river. You lose sparcaudio, two filesystems, and ffb_drm. sparcaudio pulls cs4231 into the river with it. You are out of filesystems.
Man, OT was the best. :-)
Doesn't anyone ever get tired of being serious all the time? Fuck, people, it's supposed to be fun. You don't need Linux to be bored and frustrated; we have Windows for that.
This kind of thing is the stuff that makes Unix worth using. It's the kind of stuff that makes us better than Microsoft. Not GNOME. Not KDE. Not GNU this or Open Source that. The freedom to implement what you like rather than what a focus group calls for is one of the fundamental advantages of Free Software and of the hacker tradition that preceded it by 20 years or more.
Rest assured, Bill Gates is not spending his time making campy "for the fun of it" user interfaces.
Fine. He runs a multi-billion-dollar company. He wears suits. He talks about "vision" and marketing and The Road Ahead. Is this really somebody you want to emulate?
You can't beat Bill Gates with geek subculture. And while you're doing that, Gates' army is charging, on a mission.
On the contrary, he can't be beaten without it. Give up the fun, you've given up one of the primary distinguishing features. It doesn't count as a victory if you end up the same as your enemy.
This is one of the best things I've seen in recent years. I couldn't be happier. If a stuffed suit decided not to use Open Source because of it, I think we're just that much better off. Nyah!
Whether it's illegal is a silly question in this day and age; everything is illegal. But it's only plagiarism if you don't give proper credit for the works of others. In traditional scholarship, whether using part of someone else's work is "illegal" is a silly question; it was simply assumed that any academic works were freely distributable. It was, and is still, dishonest to claim another's work as one's own...
Funny, in my experience it's been the opposite. The people with real skills are the ones looking for work and the buzzword-compliance staff are still going strong.
IBM had 90% market share, a giant marketing machine, and every PHB in the world. "Nobody gets fired for buying ___________" was first said about IBM. They had FAR more power than Microsoft ever has, and they fell on their heads. They've clawed their way back by giving people what they want.
...if the situation were reversed? Bad acts are not funny. If Verizon had deluged Covad with spam bug reports, you'd be all over them. Face facts, guys, this was wrong. I might not think much of Verizon either, but the place to win these wars is in the marketplace, by providing better products at better prices. I do hope they settle out of court; I'd hate to see a giant judgment sink Covad.
It is true that the usefulness of Linux diminishes at the very high end. But in the realm we're talking about, nobody even thinks about NT. In fact, NT's usefulness is minimal (even by comparison with some NT "base") in midrange servers and nonexistent at the high end. The hardware NT (and x86 Linux) support tops out in the lower midrange of servers. A maximal 8-CPU peecee is a minnow in a school of sharks. At least Linux gives you an option to move beyond the limits of the peecee - an option NT once offered but no longer does.
No, toward the high end you see things like Irix and AIX and MVS and OS/400. Definitely not NT. But that doesn't mean the numbers aren't meaningless; they most certainly are.
Dear God, man. It's ok to point out that someone's wrong without being such an ass. Sure Apache runs on lots of different platforms - in fact, almost every major platform there is. It's also true that a large proportion of the sites using it are doing so on Linux. You probably figure they've been hyped into obvilion or that the low cost was attractive. The other poster probably just thinks that Linux is 31337.
So what? Linux is a very nice OS. It's unfortunate that it's mostly used on a decisively inferior hardware platform that effectively limits scalability, performance, and reliability to a few times that of the best Microsoft products. Can you do better than Linux on a peecee? Of course. Can you do better than $FOO on $BAR? Of course. You just have to spend more money. I've used all those "actual enterprise OSs" and I've adminned them, deployed them, and helped people make money with them. Frankly, I'm not real impressed. The only Unix I'd ever recommend over Linux is Irix, simply because nothing else will run on the beautiful purple monsters SGI makes. If you don't need those monsters, you can do just fine with a Sun running Linux. Choose the hardware you'd want if you were to run Solaris, then buy two models down for equal performance.
But I digress. Use what you like, but don't insult my choice of systems just because it's the same as that of someone who can't justify his.
What's the point? The point is that this community was already a vibrant, rapidly expanding one well before anyone decided it was the Next Big Thing. Long before you could read about it in the New York Times. Long before Slashdot became what is is now. Long, long before would-be nerds pondered the latest market figures for Linux-based systems from the Gartner Group and IDG.
Let the PHBs be. The community will survive and prosper with or without them. If everyone who only uses Linux or Free Software altogether because of advertising, press releases, support of large corporations, or mainstream media attention stopped using it right now, what would we lose? Well, a few fine folks would lose their jobs. At least one or two more "Linux vendors" would probably close up shop - but that's likely to happen anyway as part of a much broader downturn. Our market, if we cared to measure it, might shrink by 30% or 40% or even 70%. The software would not vanish from FTP sites - at least, not from all of them. The sources would not go away or suddenly become closed. And if I had to wager, I'd suggest many of the people no longer paid to hack this stuff would still spend time on it. In short, things would - and will - go on as they always have. The bubble was just that. You'll see it years from now as a spike in the plot of market share with respect to time. But don't worry the spikes or the valleys, watch the long-term trend. That trend has been toward a very high-quality set of products enjoyed by more people for a long time.
Forget Gartner, forget IDG, and forget the silly people who think they matter. Step back and look at what you're running today, and enjoy the fact that, all the negative press notwithstanding, you've got Free licenses that never expire for some damn fine software. Relax, and go outside for a breath of fresh air, lest the flames ruin your good mood.
I don't know about you, but I would find it very difficult if not impossible to pick up meaningful experience in a world in which there is little relation between action and consequence. Two people can do the same thing on two identical Microsoft systems and get completely different results. More interestingly, you can do the same thing twice on the same box and get different results. Most maddening of all, you can do something, then reverse it, and end up in a different spot than the one at which you started. This kind of environment is not conducive to the type of learning that really good admins go through. There's actually a nicely similar situation discussed in Carl Sagan's Cosmos - he argues that if there were no rules of physics, science would be impossible because we could never learn by experimentation, and no experiment could ever be duplicated.
This entire idea, in fact, also skirts very closely the Monkey Rule. Specifically, a monkey can never be a good systems administrator. Sure, he can handle the common cases and push the right buttons if he's well enough trained, but the moment something out of the ordinary happens it's all over. At the risk of sounding disrespectful, I'd suggest that your 16-year-old sister most likely suffers from the exact same problem. So, no, I wouldn't likely pay her my salary for doing my job, and I'd hope no manager would either. It's not just that you need more admins to manage a dodgy infrastructure. It's back to Brooks: 5 people are not always better than one. Especially if those 5 people don't or can't contribute anything to the solution. Are there managers who've never read Brooks? Surely. They don't last long.
If [Gartner] produces poor quality research on a regular basis, people will stop subscribing or purchasing its reports.
Logically, in a marketplace of informed, intelligent consumers, this makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, substitute "Microsoft" for "Gartner" and "software" for "research" and suddenly the apparently obvious, rational statement becomes a joke. I'm sure we can all name dozens more examples where obviously inferior products nevertheless generate substantial business.
I don't know whether Gartner's study or IDG's or Netcraft's or all or none are correct. And I really don't care. I don't choose my products based on market share. After all, isn't the whole point of Gartner that people will choose their research because they're well-known? If you apply the same standard to operating systems, what does that say about you?
Don't fret the small shit. Focus on quality. Every business that's successful over a long period of time worries about quality first. A company can succeed by raping customers for a limited length of time. Eventually it has to produce a product people actually want, or go away. IBM knows this all too well. Microsoft will learn it too. So move along, please; there's nothing to see here.
Would you let an 11 year old run around in the worlds biggest porn shop with people who regularly abduct children and plenty of other nasty things? Of course not... the internet is the same thing.
you are missing an absolutely critical distinction: nobody can abduct, or even touch, your child via the network. A second distinction to be made is that not all of the net is pr0n. Comparing the net to a giant pr0n shop is like saying that the entire world is one because you could always walk from the public library to the red light district and buy yourself a dildo. Just as in meatspace, you have to go there of your own volition. It's just easier to get there, that's all.
Let's put this in perspective. People are generally capable of going out and downloading the appropriate binary for their system when presented with a list of options. It's not much of a leap from there to downloading an appropriate compiler for their platform. And typing "make" ain't too tough. Bottom line: Even inexperienced computer users are generally capable of reading and following simple directions.
To pick up the small shit, obviously. And to deal with systems that predate posix. Autoconf is not, fortunately, smart enough to make porting to Really Stupid systems possible.
Don't bother answering that one, anyone who has written "portable" software knows the Real Answer.
The implication that I haven't is false. The point is valid: the vast majority of non-mainframe vendors (even Apple, finally) are within some fairly small delta of POSIX; for sake of demonstration let's say 1 meter. On the same scale, Microsoft is somewhere near Mars. If they don't want to follow standards, there's no reason to bother developing software for their systems, since they've elected to make it unnecessarily difficult to do so. There's just no excuse for that. Be fucked its developers over and went bankrupt because the developers walked away. No reason the same thing won't happen to our favourite Keeper of Evil.
Why not? High-quality compilers are available, with source if desired, at zero cost.
Your arguments regarding optimization also apply to distributing files as Java byte code, but the simple fact is, for most applications, nobody gives a damn about optimization anymore anyway!
People who love to brag about their leet computers think this. Anybody who actually has to do work on them does not. Java is suckass-slow to the point of uselessness, and there's no excuse for wasting CPU power just to be lazy.
For the few cases in which cycles are that critical, shouldn't the code be written in hand-optimized assembly and made available in system libraries anyway?
Of course. Unfortunately I believe, unlike you, that there are more shades of code than just "performance-critical" and "non-preformance-critical." The 90-10 rule is quite valid in most cases, and inner loops and such should be optimized, the best algorithms available used. But what about the parts of the application that aren't in the system libraries? What if my need for speed isn't just in strcmp(3) but also an AVL tree, an XML parser, and (insert foo here)? These should be written in a compiled high-performance language like C (never Java and almost never C++). It isn't any harder to do this right.
Have you tried lately to write a non-trivial application where the same source compiles on both Linux and Windows lately?
No, why would I? Dozens of vendors got together several years ago to define standard (heard of POSIX?) to make sure this could be done with a minimum of pain. I can't help it if Microsoft was too busy (drawing mustaches on Larry Ellison|calling Scott McNealy a liar|embracing and extending its mother) that week. Want to run useful code? Use a real OS; there are plenty to choose from.
There is more information content in the original code for an optimizer to make use of then there is in a binary (or assembly). If this were not the case, would not optimizers run *after* the assembly translation is done? In fact, all reasonable compilers run the vast majority of their optimizations *before* the translation occurs, and only a few small peephole optimizations are done on translated or nearly-translated code. The unfortunate (for them) facts are that:
The verdict: don't fall for this. Even if it works, and even if it has no effect on performance in the common case, there's no benefit. The only useful things that can come of this are the magic peephole optimizations they might be using, which should go into general-purpose compilers.
For my money, the old Logitech MouseMan (the sort of wedge shape with the thumb crater) is the best mouse around. Too bad it's not made any longer...
Frankly, the technically easiest solution is to use operating systems that are not susceptible to viruses. People who insist on using inferior systems may do so, but may not attach to the network. Good luck implementing this, though; the people who set policy are all on the take from Microsoft.