Say what you want about kernel functionality, but what other major UNIX distribution will give you the 1977 version of awk (granted that nawk is the '85 version)?
I haven't looked in some time, but would Sun please:
Upgrade/bin/sh to ksh93
Turn on UFS journaling by default
Give us something better than patchchk
Overhaul the ancient packaging system
Adding gnome and ssh to this old cruft is like putting a bandaid on a corpse.
It is a real shame that Sun chose Linux for the Java Desktop System. Sun could have wrapped the Solaris kernel in a GNU userland, which would have been a much more interesting animal indeed.
If I was only sure VIA chipset-based boards were reliable and stable, I'd seriously consider buying one of those little fanless, power-saving things they make.
I don't know anything about the reliability, but this guy says that VIA chips are outperformed by AMD/Intel CPUs of equivalent power (and somewhat slower clock).
Humankind's challenge is to evolve into something that can cross interstellar distances and colonize other solar systems efficiently. How this is to be accomplished (biomechanoid, or some other exotic technologies which are beyond our understanding) is an exercise left for future generations. Arthur C. Clark thought the same in The City and the Stars (et al) with the massless mind "Vanamonde" and his peers.
If such a species had already evolved, and FTL was available to it, we would be a sitting duck (assuming that we had desirable resources). As it stands, there is a great deal of time that must pass for such a species to reach us (hopefully).
The time required for interstellar colonization is nature's way of forcing us to be thorough and consistent, and to make many of our errors early on, perhaps before the effects upon our survival become critical.
Of course, this outlook for our initial stages of colonization must span hundreds of thousands of years. We might end up wiping ourselves out due to our infantile handling of the global ecology long before then.
Just imagine if future versions of Apache came with a configuration directive "AnnoyIE Yes" that, upon detecting IE, would popup a window with the text:
You are using a browser that is both insecure and non-standards-conforming. Both CERT and The Department of Homeland Security have explicitly advised against using this browser, as it may reveal your confidential transactions and allow unauthorized third parties to take control of your computer. Please download a new browser
immediately.
A true scorched earth battle between MS and the free/open source community, fought with no rules, would leave MS bloodied and torn. There would be no winners of such a battle.
While I have little kernel development experience, the NT kernel design was lead by Dave Cutler, who had previously led development for the RSX-11 and VMS operating systems (VMS has an incredible reputation for security). Here is an interview with Cutler.
Security was an original objective with NT, and I imagine that, from the kernel code, this objective was met.
Where NT security has obviously failed is the userland, where Microsoft rushed to destroy Netscape (et al), and in doing so sacrificed security.
If only Microsoft had maintained a high standard in NT development, perhaps Cutler's claim that UNIX was "a junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s" might have held water.
Since I graduated in 1995, tuition at the University of Iowa has tripled. It has done so because the school has locked itself into a number of expensive construction projects and is not able to reduce its cash flow needs to match the decreasing state revenue.
From what I can tell, the quality of instruction has not tripled since my graduation. Even moreso, students that I have advised to pursue Oracle DBA certification as technical electives have been repeatedly refused, even though the university listed Oracle certification as for-credit courses.
The CS departments of most universities have been bought off by Microsoft to the extent that they already spend over a year teaching Visual Basic. They do not use open tools, and their administrative structure reflects this close-minded and obsolete path.
IMHO, State Universities are run in a cartel system that has seen its fair share of waste and corruption. Any ideas for a system that could effectively compete with the public university cartel would be welcome indeed.
Originally intended as an educational project, it is increasingly being used in long-lived production environments as a substitute for real systems.
Our VAX administrator is considering (what I consider to be) an excessive amount of cash for the commercial Charon VAX emulator. Will anyone support SIMH in a production role?
For example, Unix versions 1-4 appear to be irrevocably lost.
I see that Caldera/SCO's UNIX versions 5-7 are available. What happened to 1-4? How were 5-7 rescued?
As of this writing, there is still a timing problem in the MSCP driver for OpenBSD/VAX, although not for VMS, Ultrix, or BSD 4.3.
Have the OpenBSD/VAX developers been approached to patch their source? I see a kernel patch and a preinstalled disk image - hopefully this would be easy to do.
For those not in the know, Dave Cutler was originally a DEC employee. He was first behind the PDP-11 OS named RSX-11, then became the lead for the VMS operating system on the VAX.
Cutler was working on an i386 port of VMS that DEC decided to drop, so in 1988 he joined Microsoft and was the lead designer behind the NT kernel.
The article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.
However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.
You can also get free VMS licenses for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.
Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST, which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.
Tell me, which founding father repeatedly proposed a constitutional amendment allowing conscientious objectors to avoid military service on religous grounds?
Or an easy one, which founding father thought that the constitution would have to be scrapped after 50 years?
Or who exactly was involved in the famed "XYZ" affair?
Without French naval assistance at the battle of Yorktown, General Cornwallis would have escaped, and the Americans would not have inflicted a crushing blow against the Brittish occupation of the colonies. Indeed, the Brittish themselves would probably have slaughtered American resistance long before without money, arms, and supplies from king Louis VI.
While the U.S. has oftentimes been at odds with French policy, we must remember that the U.S. exists mostly due to the efforts of France.
So as my country celebrates the Star Spangled Banner today, perhaps we should spend a few moments listening to the Marseillaise as well.
...because they are a monopoly (in regard to the IE bugs and the DHS advisory).
They will be sued because they were willfully negligent in the maintenance a monopoly product, the sabotage of which inflicts material damage upon third parties in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Don't let your dislike of antitrust law cloud the real harm that this software has done. If Standard Oil had sold petroleum products that destroyed the engines of their customers during their monopoly breakup, would they still be liable for damages? Of course.
...quite easily. Examine Red Hat's errata list for AS3, then look at OpenBSD's errata. I assume that you will see a rather conspicuous difference in the quantity of changes?
Granted, this list is not entirely fair, as many ports and packages have bug fixes, which would push up OpenBSD's count. However, OpenBSD includes a great deal in the base distribution (SSH, Apache, Sendmail, etc.) that comprises what they assert to be audited, secure code.
To me, the ability to deploy a server and then spend minimal effort with security patches is more important than SMP. YMMV.
I use a 50MHz 486, bundled in a very old Compaq Contura laptop, to power my main home NAT gateway. It runs OpenBSD, and the power supply says it draws 27W (the LCD is disabled, so I assume it's much lower). What Centaur configuration beats this on power consumption?
While the gateway runs sendmail, httpd, and I use pine on it occasionally, it is still tolerably fast (bittorrent seems to slow down the NAT). However, I'm thinking of adding some WiFi components, and I fear that the 486's max performance will be quickly swamped. Most Pentium laptops are twice the wattage at least.
Other questions for Centaur:
AMD64 adds 16 General Purpose Registers in 64-bit mode. Can Centaur add these to 32-bit mode? If so, would their non-register-starved x86 have an instant speed advantage of perhaps a couple of hundred megahertz for an OS/app that utilizes it?
Likewise, is Centaur adding the NX bit for security? I understand that Transmeta has done so. My OpenBSD system's W^X would run faster with NX.
The mmap() system call, which allows you to treat a file as an area of memory and manipulate it with pointers in C, oftentimes copies (portions of) the file into swap.
Many systems, when you execute a binary obtained over NFS, will cache the binary in swap in hopes of preventing further transfers over the network.
UNIX kernels have assumed the availability of swap for nearly 35 years. You cannot remove this major architecutural feature without unintended side effects.
...that Valenti is dealing with a huge, capable, and determined audience that have extreme disagreements with the MPAA.
Everything that the MPAA has tried to do with respect to DRM has failed. In spite of the fact that several blatantly unconstitutional laws have been passed, I can copy a movie off of the internet quite easily.
Getting the MPAA to acknowledge the extent of the failure is the first step towards a mutually-engaged solution. To do this, there must be confrontation.
Still, I am astounded that Valenti practically hadn't even heard of Linux. I would imagine that he would know everything about "DVD Jon" - he must be a real technophile.
...as they already have a long-term commitment to privacy (just as you don't see information on your taxes divulged by the IRS).
The president should ask the census bureau to establish an informal "guide the president" website where everybody can vote on the same legislation that he is considering. That way, the president can see the mood of the nation.
As the system becomes more trustworthy, we can amend the constitution to add the census-bureau controlled up-or-down vote to the formal legislative process. This way, we can change our republic to be both a direct and a representative democracy.
The software should be open, and local states/municipalities should be able to either outsource their polling activities to the Census Bureau for a fee, or implement their own voting systems (which must meet the Census Bureau's quality standards).
What we as a nation are currently asking is that we have an electronic voting system entirely up and 100% operational immediately. This will never work - we need a nationwide "beta test" phase.
That's how it should be done. Probably won't be, though.
I would draw your attention to the awk programming language.
While awk is clear, expressive, and easy to learn, it does not allow direct access to many kernel system calls or other similar primitives. This makes awk rather portable - VMS and DOS versions of awk are easy to come by.
perl does allow this type of access, making perl programs less portable than awk programs between platforms. perl also supports a C API for extending the language, which is not implemented in awk.
Most enterprise J2EE applications are deployed on UNIX, but these same applications cannot directly access a number of important system calls (i.e. stat(), creat(), mkfifo(), signal(), ipc, etc.). In this way, Java is crippled on UNIX.
There is a time and a place for both approaches for access to system calls, but Java (mostly) chose the awk model for political/portability concerns. Whether this choice is ultimately a benefit or a hinderance remains to be seen, but I wish that a more creative solution had emerged.
Gambling is driven by greed, which is sometimes useful to society but is generally considered a vice.
I consider excessive greed to be a personality flaw; perhaps genetic or behavioral. I do not approve of an industry designed to prey upon this weakness. Compulsive gambling can destroy an individual and their families. Poverty, suicide, and despair may someday follow gambling into your life or the lives of your loved ones.
Gambling is simply a tax on people who don't understand statistics. In the end, the house always wins.
Someday, we will properly identify gambling as a manifestation of a mental illness. Until then, I have no interest in seeing foreign nations attacking the future of my friends and family.
Now if only my government would take a similar stand for the Clean Air Act.
Slashdot Mirror
Say what you want about kernel functionality, but what other major UNIX distribution will give you the 1977 version of awk (granted that nawk is the '85 version)?
I haven't looked in some time, but would Sun please:
Adding gnome and ssh to this old cruft is like putting a bandaid on a corpse.
It is a real shame that Sun chose Linux for the Java Desktop System. Sun could have wrapped the Solaris kernel in a GNU userland, which would have been a much more interesting animal indeed.
I don't know anything about the reliability, but this guy says that VIA chips are outperformed by AMD/Intel CPUs of equivalent power (and somewhat slower clock).
Humankind's challenge is to evolve into something that can cross interstellar distances and colonize other solar systems efficiently. How this is to be accomplished (biomechanoid, or some other exotic technologies which are beyond our understanding) is an exercise left for future generations. Arthur C. Clark thought the same in The City and the Stars (et al) with the massless mind "Vanamonde" and his peers.
If such a species had already evolved, and FTL was available to it, we would be a sitting duck (assuming that we had desirable resources). As it stands, there is a great deal of time that must pass for such a species to reach us (hopefully).
The time required for interstellar colonization is nature's way of forcing us to be thorough and consistent, and to make many of our errors early on, perhaps before the effects upon our survival become critical.
Of course, this outlook for our initial stages of colonization must span hundreds of thousands of years. We might end up wiping ourselves out due to our infantile handling of the global ecology long before then.
But it's nice to have goals.
Just imagine if future versions of Apache came with a configuration directive "AnnoyIE Yes" that, upon detecting IE, would popup a window with the text:
A true scorched earth battle between MS and the free/open source community, fought with no rules, would leave MS bloodied and torn. There would be no winners of such a battle.
While I have little kernel development experience, the NT kernel design was lead by Dave Cutler, who had previously led development for the RSX-11 and VMS operating systems (VMS has an incredible reputation for security). Here is an interview with Cutler.
Security was an original objective with NT, and I imagine that, from the kernel code, this objective was met.
Where NT security has obviously failed is the userland, where Microsoft rushed to destroy Netscape (et al), and in doing so sacrificed security.
If only Microsoft had maintained a high standard in NT development, perhaps Cutler's claim that UNIX was "a junk OS designed by a committee of Ph.D.s" might have held water.
Since I graduated in 1995, tuition at the University of Iowa has tripled. It has done so because the school has locked itself into a number of expensive construction projects and is not able to reduce its cash flow needs to match the decreasing state revenue.
From what I can tell, the quality of instruction has not tripled since my graduation. Even moreso, students that I have advised to pursue Oracle DBA certification as technical electives have been repeatedly refused, even though the university listed Oracle certification as for-credit courses.
The CS departments of most universities have been bought off by Microsoft to the extent that they already spend over a year teaching Visual Basic. They do not use open tools, and their administrative structure reflects this close-minded and obsolete path.
IMHO, State Universities are run in a cartel system that has seen its fair share of waste and corruption. Any ideas for a system that could effectively compete with the public university cartel would be welcome indeed.
Our VAX administrator is considering (what I consider to be) an excessive amount of cash for the commercial Charon VAX emulator. Will anyone support SIMH in a production role?
I see that Caldera/SCO's UNIX versions 5-7 are available. What happened to 1-4? How were 5-7 rescued?
Have the OpenBSD/VAX developers been approached to patch their source? I see a kernel patch and a preinstalled disk image - hopefully this would be easy to do.
Ash appears to consume large amounts of memory, and some people in BSD circles have serious objections to it.
See the discussion here (scroll down a bit into the postings). I don't have an opinion on the issue one way or another.
If only Novell would release CDE to open source. I would love to have dtksh everywhere.
For those not in the know, Dave Cutler was originally a DEC employee. He was first behind the PDP-11 OS named RSX-11, then became the lead for the VMS operating system on the VAX.
Cutler was working on an i386 port of VMS that DEC decided to drop, so in 1988 he joined Microsoft and was the lead designer behind the NT kernel.
He is now supposedly working on the AMD64 port.
Dave Cutler InfoThe article mentions SRI's Charon VAX. This is very expensive software that requires a USB dongle for licensing.
However, you can also run VAX VMS on a free i386 VAX emulator called SIMH. I don't seem to be able to get very good ethernet performance with SIMH. However, you can run NetBSD/VAX on it out of the box, and OpenBSD will run with a kernel patch. SIMH also has a PDP-11 emulator and includes images of the original UNIX V7 from AT&T (courtesy of SCaldera). SIMH is an interesting way to run both ancient and modern UNIXen without reformatting your PC.
You can also get free VMS licenses for SIMH/VAX. They must be renewed yearly.
Alpha VMS also supported a VAX binary emulator called VEST, which is mentioned in another post here. Support for VEST is dying, however (modern RDB releases have dropped it). The Charon VAX emulator also runs on Alpha VMS.
Tell me, which founding father repeatedly proposed a constitutional amendment allowing conscientious objectors to avoid military service on religous grounds?
Or an easy one, which founding father thought that the constitution would have to be scrapped after 50 years?
Or who exactly was involved in the famed "XYZ" affair?
Without French naval assistance at the battle of Yorktown, General Cornwallis would have escaped, and the Americans would not have inflicted a crushing blow against the Brittish occupation of the colonies. Indeed, the Brittish themselves would probably have slaughtered American resistance long before without money, arms, and supplies from king Louis VI.
While the U.S. has oftentimes been at odds with French policy, we must remember that the U.S. exists mostly due to the efforts of France.
So as my country celebrates the Star Spangled Banner today, perhaps we should spend a few moments listening to the Marseillaise as well.
...because they are a monopoly (in regard to the IE bugs and the DHS advisory).
They will be sued because they were willfully negligent in the maintenance a monopoly product, the sabotage of which inflicts material damage upon third parties in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Don't let your dislike of antitrust law cloud the real harm that this software has done. If Standard Oil had sold petroleum products that destroyed the engines of their customers during their monopoly breakup, would they still be liable for damages? Of course.
p.s. IANAL.
...in that it will work as a normal interactive client, but it can also download ftp and http URLs directly.
I don't know if the code is portable to other architectures.
... discussion for i386 and Sparc64. Not endorsed by OpenBSD.org.
...quite easily. Examine Red Hat's errata list for AS3, then look at OpenBSD's errata. I assume that you will see a rather conspicuous difference in the quantity of changes?
Granted, this list is not entirely fair, as many ports and packages have bug fixes, which would push up OpenBSD's count. However, OpenBSD includes a great deal in the base distribution (SSH, Apache, Sendmail, etc.) that comprises what they assert to be audited, secure code.
To me, the ability to deploy a server and then spend minimal effort with security patches is more important than SMP. YMMV.
I use a 50MHz 486, bundled in a very old Compaq Contura laptop, to power my main home NAT gateway. It runs OpenBSD, and the power supply says it draws 27W (the LCD is disabled, so I assume it's much lower). What Centaur configuration beats this on power consumption?
While the gateway runs sendmail, httpd, and I use pine on it occasionally, it is still tolerably fast (bittorrent seems to slow down the NAT). However, I'm thinking of adding some WiFi components, and I fear that the 486's max performance will be quickly swamped. Most Pentium laptops are twice the wattage at least.
Other questions for Centaur:
I don't know if Linux works this way, but...
UNIX kernels have assumed the availability of swap for nearly 35 years. You cannot remove this major architecutural feature without unintended side effects.
As I remember, the 5x86 fit into the same form factor as the Intel 486.
Cyrix later integrated VGA and sound onto the same die as the 5x86 and called it the "MediaGX" (I think).
Cyrix wasn't able to scale their 6x86 up beyond 400MHz (it was very CISCish in design). How were NS or AMD able to scale the inferior design so far?
You can fix it if you have the source. Alternately, you can pay someone else to fix it.
...that Valenti is dealing with a huge, capable, and determined audience that have extreme disagreements with the MPAA.
Everything that the MPAA has tried to do with respect to DRM has failed. In spite of the fact that several blatantly unconstitutional laws have been passed, I can copy a movie off of the internet quite easily.
Getting the MPAA to acknowledge the extent of the failure is the first step towards a mutually-engaged solution. To do this, there must be confrontation.
Still, I am astounded that Valenti practically hadn't even heard of Linux. I would imagine that he would know everything about "DVD Jon" - he must be a real technophile.
...as they already have a long-term commitment to privacy (just as you don't see information on your taxes divulged by the IRS).
The president should ask the census bureau to establish an informal "guide the president" website where everybody can vote on the same legislation that he is considering. That way, the president can see the mood of the nation.
As the system becomes more trustworthy, we can amend the constitution to add the census-bureau controlled up-or-down vote to the formal legislative process. This way, we can change our republic to be both a direct and a representative democracy.
The software should be open, and local states/municipalities should be able to either outsource their polling activities to the Census Bureau for a fee, or implement their own voting systems (which must meet the Census Bureau's quality standards).
What we as a nation are currently asking is that we have an electronic voting system entirely up and 100% operational immediately. This will never work - we need a nationwide "beta test" phase.
That's how it should be done. Probably won't be, though.
I would draw your attention to the awk programming language.
While awk is clear, expressive, and easy to learn, it does not allow direct access to many kernel system calls or other similar primitives. This makes awk rather portable - VMS and DOS versions of awk are easy to come by.
perl does allow this type of access, making perl programs less portable than awk programs between platforms. perl also supports a C API for extending the language, which is not implemented in awk.
Most enterprise J2EE applications are deployed on UNIX, but these same applications cannot directly access a number of important system calls (i.e. stat(), creat(), mkfifo(), signal(), ipc, etc.). In this way, Java is crippled on UNIX.
There is a time and a place for both approaches for access to system calls, but Java (mostly) chose the awk model for political/portability concerns. Whether this choice is ultimately a benefit or a hinderance remains to be seen, but I wish that a more creative solution had emerged.
I don't like gambling. I never have.
Gambling is driven by greed, which is sometimes useful to society but is generally considered a vice.
I consider excessive greed to be a personality flaw; perhaps genetic or behavioral. I do not approve of an industry designed to prey upon this weakness. Compulsive gambling can destroy an individual and their families. Poverty, suicide, and despair may someday follow gambling into your life or the lives of your loved ones.
Gambling is simply a tax on people who don't understand statistics. In the end, the house always wins.
Someday, we will properly identify gambling as a manifestation of a mental illness. Until then, I have no interest in seeing foreign nations attacking the future of my friends and family.
Now if only my government would take a similar stand for the Clean Air Act.