But if it is still good enough, why change? Rewriting large apps will introduce new bugs and problems.
That's the problem. These system are so "legacy" that you have no other choice but to completely rewrite them to move into the 21st century.
If you go with the times and develop robust software you can gradually adapt and never have to rewrite anything. Also 20 years later you won't have to pay millions to get consultants to tell you that you have to wake up developers from their cryogenic sleep because nobody knows how to handle whatever your system uses anymore.
Please. You are misovergeneralizing. (is my neWspeak correct ? I'm just practicing for the day it becomes mandatory.)
I don't think so.
If FC 3 pisses you off, there are still plenty of voable options for the home/desktop user. Mepis Linux comes to mind, along with all the variations around Knoppix. And for a more complete distribution, check out Mandrake. And they are *very* easy to install -- installation flawless for most of them.
The installation of Fedora is *very* easy. That didn't stop it from not working as expected though. If it wasn't for me the guy I was installing this for would have to use TWM and live without internet and printer.
How do you guarantee that Mandrake will not crap up like Fedora did on that particular machine? If you can't how is the user supposed to know which distribution to choose? How am I "misovergeneralizing" when "installing linux" still works like a lottery (install and pray that it works)?
I was a bit shocked about the many bugs I immediately ran into after a clean install.
- If you deselect Gnome and select KDE instead when doing a custom install then Fedora will boot straight into TWM because/etc/sysconfig/desktop still says 'desktop="GNOME"'.
- If you deselect the graphics tools you'll not be able to print from OpenOffice (in some cases?). Fedora recognized the Epson C40UX printer but when you try to print nothing happens (not even an error dialog). After turning the CUPS log-level to debug I found that CUPS was trying run a script called "ijgimp..." (don't remember the exact name) but that script doesn't exists. Seeing the name I installed gimp plus all addon packages and now printing worked...kind of because the output was heavily distorted. Messages on the web say the printer works out of the box with the "stp" driver on older Fedora Core versions but "stp" is not selectable in CUPS anymore it seems so printing doesn't work for me now.
- ISDN is very broken. During the boot process I get a "failed" when Fedora tries to load the ISDN modules for the Fritzcard ISDN yet when I then call "/etc/init.d/isdn start" after login the modules load fine...except that I get a weird error in the log that says udev cannot find an appropriate sysfs class for ippp0. Also when I now configure a ISDN dialup connection using redhats tool and click "activate" the connection is up but the status in the tool still says "deactivated". There also doesn't seem to be a tool included that makes it possible to easily connect or disconnect from the system tray, I had to create my own icons on the desktop calling isdndial and isdnhangup.
- In a different case installing Fedora Core 3 on my Toshiba Satellite M30 requires the addition of a modeline in xorg.conf to make X11 work properly on the WXGA 1280x800 screen. Also I have to add "psmouse.rate=40" (again, I would have to go look to get the exact name) as bootparameter to make the touchpad work properly.
All of this was right after installation even before I was able to really use the system.
I've used RH since about 6.x and went through all the versions up to Core 3 but after installing that one I really feel like I've been kicked in the balls. I know that this is supposed to be the "hacker" version used as a testbed for RHEL but the outright shoddy level of QA suprises me. They had three test releases and a bug as grave and visible as the Gnome/KDE/TWM one doesn't get noticed? If anything Fedora Core 3 reminds me that Linux still has big (!) issues on the home desktop and is still very hard/impossible for the newbie to install.
Please somebody tell me that they will cooperate with the Beagle project on this and don't reinvent the wheel yet again. It would be a real pain in the ass to have too indexes wasting your hd space which basically do the same thing.
The files I play are stuttering even when they're local files and sometimes I have to hit my mouse button several time just to get a response from the app. Does anybody else see this and knows a workaround?
Does anybody know if attempts have been made to create an abstract interface for the basic configuration files of distributions? What I'm talking about is a set of scripts or a C/Perl/Whatever API that allows for example the distribution independent manipulation of the network interface configuration files (Debian:/etc/network/interfaces, Red Hat:/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) by saying let's say "superifcfg eth0 ip=192.168.0.1" and then let "superifcfg" figure out what to do for the respective distribution you are running the command on.
I've always wondered why there wasn't something in the OS to force this behaviour, Ie, making sure that App 2 access to the disk is queued until app 1 has finished.
There are two big problems with the OS making such a blunt decision:
1. The starvation problem: What if app 1 never finishes it's access? Then app 2 would never run and "starve" in the run queue.
2. The fairness problem: Both apps have been run in parallel so why should app 1 get all the IO resources? If they run with the same priority then they should also get the same fair share of the IO resources.
Schedulers *do* make fairness decisions but only on the lower levels as on the application level the behaviour is simply to diverse and it's hard to find out what could be considered fair in any given situation.
You can get RH 7.3/8/9/Fedora packages here: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net The 3.2 release isn't available yet but I'm sure it will be soon. (I'm running the last beta right now)
The fact that they are lying is really not a relevant point.
Oh yes it is. They have a contract with the customer promising unlimited capacity. The fact that they cannot realistically provide this doesn't matter. They *have* to fullfill their side of the contract. If they don't that is called fraud.
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims.
The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Think about it: In 2006 MS will release Longhorn and the new "revolutionary" WinFS which is based on NTFS and allows you to treat your entire network of devices as a single filesystem structure. None of the devices that still run FAT will work with this scheme. Sounds like the perfect way to "convince" people to switch their devices to (a subset of?) NTFS.
I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries.
You seem to be rather inexperienced when it comes to linux so why do you think you could configure a system from scratch? Do you realize that your "optimizations" might be the cause for you problems?
The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment.
Why exactly did the machines start swapping? Did you investigate the cause?
Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it.
Did you ever wonder why no one else seems to have the problems you describe? Why do so much more people use Apache instead of IIS when Apache is such an underperformer according to you?
Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability.
Linux supports all of the technologies you mention. How did you come up with that list?
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients.
Fine with me, unfortunate for your clients though. What are you going to tell them when they want a linux solution but you are one of the last consultants who cannot provide it?
I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
The Shared Source program and the GPL are completely different beasts. Are you allowed (or even able) to compile Windows from the sources? Are you able to sell your own modified versions of Windows?
I'm sorry but you don't sound like a professional consultant, more like a "wanna be". You obviously have no clue about linux and blame your problems on the technology because you don't understand it. Where is the evidence you promised? It sure isn't contained in your posting.
As much as I hate this whole patent issue I wonder if this might actually improve the whole browsing experience for the users. A lot of companies are going to remove many of their flash/activex/whatever plugins so that users will not get an anoying popup everytime they visit their site and instead replace them with proper html/dhtml. One example would be the flash banners appearing on many pages these days. They could all go back to simple gif/jpg/png again. Doesn't sound all that bad to me.
Seven astronauts died. How are you going to fix that? Missing optimizations only make your software slower, they don't break stuff so I don't see how that quote applies here.
Netscape/AOL is no longer supporting Mozilla, but Mozilla still exists.
This isn't correct. From the press release:
"To help launch the new organization, America Online has pledged $2 million in cash to the Mozilla Foundation over the next two years. AOL will also contribute additional resources through equipment, domain names and trademarks, and related intellectual property, as well as providing some transitional assistance for key personnel as they move into the new organization."
Looks like AOL is still supporting Mozilla quite a bit. In my eyes this is a good thing for the whole Mozilla project (Firebird, Thunderbird, etc.) as it gives the team more freedom to operate. I can't live without Mozilla Firebird anymore;)
While a lot of cards are listed as "supported" on the Alsa soundcard matrix that doesn't mean that it is actually fully functional. I bought an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card a while ago and Alsa doesn't seem to support it's midi capabilites and you cannot control the volume in a decent way. There is a tool available with Alsa that looks like the Windows version of the cards control panel but the routing seems to be broken and you can only control the volume for each individual analog channel and not both of them so if you want to turn up the volume you have to do so for the left and right channel individually. Luckily I was able to hack that tool so I can control both channels at the same time but I still cannot control the volume through e.g. mplayer or xmms.
Sadly I still have to do all my audio work on Windows because of that which is the only reason I still have Windows on my HD at all.
So if you plan to do audio stuff on Linux be very carefull what card you buy even if the card is known to be "supported".
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here. Welcome to Slashdot.
But if it is still good enough, why change? Rewriting large apps will introduce new bugs and problems.
That's the problem. These system are so "legacy" that you have no other choice but to completely rewrite them to move into the 21st century. If you go with the times and develop robust software you can gradually adapt and never have to rewrite anything. Also 20 years later you won't have to pay millions to get consultants to tell you that you have to wake up developers from their cryogenic sleep because nobody knows how to handle whatever your system uses anymore.
I was a bit shocked about the many bugs I immediately ran into after a clean install.
/etc/sysconfig/desktop still says 'desktop="GNOME"'.
- If you deselect Gnome and select KDE instead when doing a custom install then Fedora will boot straight into TWM because
- If you deselect the graphics tools you'll not be able to print from OpenOffice (in some cases?). Fedora recognized the Epson C40UX printer but when you try to print nothing happens (not even an error dialog). After turning the CUPS log-level to debug I found that CUPS was trying run a script called "ijgimp..." (don't remember the exact name) but that script doesn't exists. Seeing the name I installed gimp plus all addon packages and now printing worked...kind of because the output was heavily distorted. Messages on the web say the printer works out of the box with the "stp" driver on older Fedora Core versions but "stp" is not selectable in CUPS anymore it seems so printing doesn't work for me now.
- ISDN is very broken. During the boot process I get a "failed" when Fedora tries to load the ISDN modules for the Fritzcard ISDN yet when I then call "/etc/init.d/isdn start" after login the modules load fine...except that I get a weird error in the log that says udev cannot find an appropriate sysfs class for ippp0. Also when I now configure a ISDN dialup connection using redhats tool and click "activate" the connection is up but the status in the tool still says "deactivated". There also doesn't seem to be a tool included that makes it possible to easily connect or disconnect from the system tray, I had to create my own icons on the desktop calling isdndial and isdnhangup.
- In a different case installing Fedora Core 3 on my Toshiba Satellite M30 requires the addition of a modeline in xorg.conf to make X11 work properly on the WXGA 1280x800 screen. Also I have to add "psmouse.rate=40" (again, I would have to go look to get the exact name) as bootparameter to make the touchpad work properly.
All of this was right after installation even before I was able to really use the system.
I've used RH since about 6.x and went through all the versions up to Core 3 but after installing that one I really feel like I've been kicked in the balls. I know that this is supposed to be the "hacker" version used as a testbed for RHEL but the outright shoddy level of QA suprises me. They had three test releases and a bug as grave and visible as the Gnome/KDE/TWM one doesn't get noticed? If anything Fedora Core 3 reminds me that Linux still has big (!) issues on the home desktop and is still very hard/impossible for the newbie to install.
Please somebody tell me that they will cooperate with the Beagle project on this and don't reinvent the wheel yet again. It would be a real pain in the ass to have too indexes wasting your hd space which basically do the same thing.
The files I play are stuttering even when they're local files and sometimes I have to hit my mouse button several time just to get a response from the app. Does anybody else see this and knows a workaround?
Does anybody know if attempts have been made to create an abstract interface for the basic configuration files of distributions? What I'm talking about is a set of scripts or a C/Perl/Whatever API that allows for example the distribution independent manipulation of the network interface configuration files (Debian: /etc/network/interfaces, Red Hat: /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-*) by saying let's say "superifcfg eth0 ip=192.168.0.1" and then let "superifcfg" figure out what to do for the respective distribution you are running the command on.
1. The starvation problem: What if app 1 never finishes it's access? Then app 2 would never run and "starve" in the run queue.
2. The fairness problem: Both apps have been run in parallel so why should app 1 get all the IO resources? If they run with the same priority then they should also get the same fair share of the IO resources.
Schedulers *do* make fairness decisions but only on the lower levels as on the application level the behaviour is simply to diverse and it's hard to find out what could be considered fair in any given situation.
Maybe it will be so bad that the audience will run screaming for the exits.
You can get RH 7.3/8/9/Fedora packages here: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net
The 3.2 release isn't available yet but I'm sure it will be soon. (I'm running the last beta right now)
Sneak up on your victim and keep the plot but replace Natalie Portman with Ron Jeremy. 8P
No. They claim copyright violation so they have to prove it. Imagine if what you said was true then SCO simply would have to file lots of (bogus) complaints every year and the kernel-hackers would be tied up for the rest of their lives trying to counter the claims. The burden of proof is on SCOs side.
Think about it: In 2006 MS will release Longhorn and the new "revolutionary" WinFS which is based on NTFS and allows you to treat your entire network of devices as a single filesystem structure. None of the devices that still run FAT will work with this scheme. Sounds like the perfect way to "convince" people to switch their devices to (a subset of?) NTFS.
Right, and when the spammers get this the productivity of the internet-connected world will drop to zero.
Boss: Any important emails today? ... nope, just spam.
Employee: (checks) AHH! MMH! OOHH! YESSS!
Makes you wonder if all that "makes you penis bigger!" stuff from the daily spam would also work on harddrives :P
As much as I hate this whole patent issue I wonder if this might actually improve the whole browsing experience for the users. A lot of companies are going to remove many of their flash/activex/whatever plugins so that users will not get an anoying popup everytime they visit their site and instead replace them with proper html/dhtml. One example would be the flash banners appearing on many pages these days. They could all go back to simple gif/jpg/png again. Doesn't sound all that bad to me.
Seven astronauts died. How are you going to fix that? Missing optimizations only make your software slower, they don't break stuff so I don't see how that quote applies here.
"To help launch the new organization, America Online has pledged $2 million in cash to the Mozilla Foundation over the next two years. AOL will also contribute additional resources through equipment, domain names and trademarks, and related intellectual property, as well as providing some transitional assistance for key personnel as they move into the new organization."
Looks like AOL is still supporting Mozilla quite a bit. In my eyes this is a good thing for the whole Mozilla project (Firebird, Thunderbird, etc.) as it gives the team more freedom to operate. I can't live without Mozilla Firebird anymore ;)
Um...there is a bugfixed stable version for innocent users out there. It's called 1.4.
...Personality Transplant!
"When it's done." I think this is a good "guess" for two reasons:
a) it's 100% accurate.
b) It didn't cost me precious hours of my life to come up with this answer.
I'll now continue to invest my time in more important stuff...like reading slashdot.
(Hey! They say it's "Stuff that matters!")
The quaternary system would be perfectly suited for women:
0 = No
1 = Yes
2 = No (But I mean yes)
3 = Yes (But I mean no)
While a lot of cards are listed as "supported" on the Alsa soundcard matrix that doesn't mean that it is actually fully functional. I bought an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card a while ago and Alsa doesn't seem to support it's midi capabilites and you cannot control the volume in a decent way. There is a tool available with Alsa that looks like the Windows version of the cards control panel but the routing seems to be broken and you can only control the volume for each individual analog channel and not both of them so if you want to turn up the volume you have to do so for the left and right channel individually. Luckily I was able to hack that tool so I can control both channels at the same time but I still cannot control the volume through e.g. mplayer or xmms.
Sadly I still have to do all my audio work on Windows because of that which is the only reason I still have Windows on my HD at all.
So if you plan to do audio stuff on Linux be very carefull what card you buy even if the card is known to be "supported".