And it doesn't stop with cash. Mozilla had a private jet for "advocating" that the CEO used to travel. There are many perks associated with the job.
I get angry they have money for private jets and large salaries but won't support more operating systems and get more development going on the products. Don't tell me you don't have resources to officially support mobile or even larger OS projects when you can fly around the country in your own plane.
The sales numbers are irrelevant because you said "Microsoft continues to be the only vendor to sell stand-alone desktop operating systems that are not tied to hardware." This statement is false. There are also other products like ecomstation aka OS/2 Warp. It's still sold.
If anything, you've argued Microsoft has a monopoly in stand-alone desktop operating systems, but not that they're the only vendor. Google can say the same thing about tablets in the sense that they're not locking android down to one vendor but they don't really sell it.
As far as the GNU/Linux discussion, that gets down to what you consider an operating system by definition. Is it the kernel? The whole userland? Parts of it? Mac OS X contains GPL'd code as does all BSD projects. Nothing is pure.
I left sprint because they had no decent phones. I ended up going to AT&T for an iPhone but I was looking at Palm and Windows devices at the time. Sprint customer service was rude and they didn't seem to care to keep us. We're were planning on doing a big upgrade on our plans too.
Getting decent phones was a problem for them a few years ago. Their customer service was worse and if you didn't live in the right area the network was also a problem. I happened to live in a good sprint zone. Making a deal to get better phones was a good idea, but they should have started with customer service training and wanting to retain customers or it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter the deal was with Apple. It could have been samsung for an android line or something else. They badly need phones that people want. (diversity matters)
At this point, I've been with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. They all suck and for different reasons.
I wonder if this has to do with the US authority over the Internet. We've already seen.com TLD takeovers, but maybe they want to do it in every country for the RIAA and friends. I have a feeling this is related to some new power grab.
Terminal in OS X supports tabs. I don't have to use the dock that often to switch terminals. I'm in a terminal constantly and it doesn't get in the way. I'll agree that iOS is not a good desktop UI, but OS X has not (yet) turned into that. Apple hasn't made the Microsoft mistake yet.
I think the real problem is that many people who design user interfaces have given up on desktops prematurely. There will always be a need for a real desktop for development and several other tasks. it might be the minority, but it has a place. If you think about it for a minute, it's obvious why all these UI idiots are jumping at the bit for reinventing the wheel, it's something new. They can actually do something significant that might get them fame or credibility if it's a success. It's the biggest opportunity since the graphical user interface. Of course, the GUI never replaced everything and we still have terminals. When the tablet people realize that the traditional desktop isn't going away, maybe they'll get better at accommodating people like me who still want a desktop GUI and a terminal along with the touch interfaces in places it makes sense.
Trust me, you can't get reliability and consistency when productivity is zero. You need to care about productivity. If not, you're a terrible boss. It's a balancing act for sure, but it's important.
I've got a coworker that knits at work. Just because they're there doesn't mean they're actually working. I don't think your math makes sense.
You train them in the office before you let them telecommute. You have to know they're actually going to perform. I did it for ten months and it was the happiest I've been working. I actually got a lot more done than when I had to start coming into the office. I eventually managed a team for that company and it ended up that we got less done than I did alone at home. When you're there, you get sucked into meetings, office distractions, etc. When I telecommuted, I only had a meeting once a week. My boss could call me at any time if there was an issue and I was on Jabber all day. Most of the time, a boss just emails you anyway.
Re:Zend breakage technology strikes again
on
PHP 5.4 Released
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· Score: 1
My original point has been lost in this discussion and that's it doesn't have to be this way. Microsoft and Sun found a way to avoid this. It can be done. You seem to point at lack of proper planning for rollout but I see lack of proper planning at designing the language. Both are problems.
I said same major release. They'd be willing to install say 3.6.27 but not 9->10. Rendering changes don't usually happen during point releases.
Re:Zend breakage technology strikes again
on
PHP 5.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
This is ridiculous. You think every time a SECURITY update comes out I should modify my code for every app I've ever written. I don't think so.
See that's what this is, a security update. They don't support old versions of PHP so it's a forced upgrade. Thus backward compatibility is important. Yeah, there's only a few things here and there between individual releases, but consider someone hosting on CentOS and then a new CentOS comes out. Suddenly they're 2 major releases ahead. Nothing works.. the sysadmin didn't tell the programmers he was updating CentOS. Now the company website is down. You can put blame at various levels here. The sys admin who didn't test first. The programmers who used an API that Zend killed. The architect that made the mistake to use PHP to begin with. The shit storm comes down on the programmers because the site was down and they had to do things to fix it. That's just how the world works.
Btw Zend actually says "Zend: The PHP Company". They want to be known as PHP so I give it to them.
I had a professor write an economics text book. He barely lectured and used the exact same words as in the book. He couldn't describe anything differently than the book. If you didn't understand the book, he would just say "it's right there in print. You didn't read the book" He failed to accept his book had problems or that not everyone learns the same way.
it was a terrible class and I was happy to get through it. The entire class was based on a formula. he only defined the variables on the first day of class. Everything was explained by this formula. The trick to the exams was to put in several variations of the formula into a graphing calculator and just run through them. I didn't learn much.
Zend breakage technology strikes again
on
PHP 5.4 Released
·
· Score: 1
Can't they just release a new version of PHP that doesn't break backward compatibility. Microsoft was able to do this with classic ASP and for the most part.NET for many years now. Sun and Oracle figured out how to do it with Java. Why can't Zend do it?
I'm tired of having features disappear. Yeah, magic quotes and safe mode were stupid. Maybe if they actually designed the damn language rather than throw in crap all the time this wouldn't happen.
If your computer takes DDR3 RAM, it is cheap. Then again, some of us have older systems. My PC desktop is on DDR2 (4GB) but it's still a 6 core AMD Phenom II.
I don't agree with the premise that Firefox 3.6 uses less RAM and is more stable. I've had better luck with Firefox 8, 9 and 10 on that front. It's also much faster executing JavaScript. In fact, 3.6 is the worst version to date to try to get to compile. It's very picky about shared library versions and don't even both to build it without HTML5 features enabled.
The only complaint on newer Firefox releases is the ridiculous major version numbers for no reason. My employer won't update to a major release but once a year and we just moved to firefox 9. No security updates for a year. It sucks. Too much work to re-certify all our internal web apps on a newer release.
MidnightBSD currently has 2754 ports. Of those, 1194 are under some GNU license (gpl2, gpl3, lgpl variations). A good chunk of that is for GNOME, KDE or GNUStep. Only 127 are under GPLv3.
I believe them that GNU licenses are as popular as ever, but I doubt that GPLv3 will be the most popular for some time. Many projects have been downgrading their licensing to GPLv3 including core GNU projects, Samba, etc. There's still a lot of old code or code that hasn't been updated in awhile under GPLv2. Frankly, the linux kernel isn't even under GPLv3 which is huge.
Disclaimer on the stats.. the way our licensing framework works, anything that's dual licensed is unlikely to show up. Perl code is dual licensed under artistic and gplv1 and that's not in the stats. Also something like firefox is always under the superior MPL license. I avoid GPL when possible for accounting purposes. It's a defect in the system that it doesn't support multiple license types (and uses agg for that)
Outside of the GPL, I've seen a lot of new code coming in under the Apache 2 license. I think that's the most popular outside of GNU circles now and possible surpassing the BSDL.
Intel would have destroyed NVIDIA. They give up on graphics every few years and they only make enough for the lowend market. They similarly would have killed any progress with NVIDIA after a few years. It only would have caught them up for awhile.
Intel doesn't get graphics. It's so bad, I recommended an AMD A4 yesterday over an ATOM build because of the GPU.
Fair question. The problem with Wayland isn't the license, it's the forcefulness of the Linux community to kill off all GUI systems that aren't theirs. The entire point of Wayland (and newer X.org work to a lesser degree) is to kill backward compatibility in the name of progress. The rest of us don't have IBM money to reinvent half the kernel every few years when a new idea crops up.
I see an interesting convergence of some technologies happening. clang is on the roadmap for several BSDs and now is default on Minix. NetBSD tools were pulled in which are also used in part on several other systems. The Minix folks will probably upstream fixes to NetBSD as well as make improvements to llvm.
It's great to see alternatives to GNU tools gaining ground. It's the only logical choice for embedded systems due to licensing. We're going to need to step up our game and make our own tools with threats like Wayland coming.
If you're writing stories about DragonFly, then you want to cover all of it's distributed systems. The whole point of DragonFly is getting it ready for clustering. That's what Matt Dillon is into.
Some of the features of HAMMER & HAMMER2 are duplicated in other file systems, but most of them have much less friendly licenses. Even ZFS is under CDDL, which isn't terrible but precludes it from being used in Linux (the kernel). From my perspective, HAMMER could be the file system that everyone could use due to the license.
HAMMER is clearly the biggest feature of DragonFly that originated there. I think that constitutes coverage.
This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this
To prove they can make a slower chip than the Phenom II X6? I honestly don't know what they were thinking. AMD fanboys are tearing apart my comments and the funny part is that I have several AMD CPUs.. I want to like them, but I just can't approve of the new desktop parts.
Yeah, I've heard these crazy counter claims. They didn't duplicate everything so it's not a full 8 core chip.
Intel Atom chips have hyper threading technology; well at least the newer ones do. They may have made independent ALUs in the AMD parts, but it still performs like HTT on most operating systems. Unless schedulers are modified, an OS will not know how to efficiently schedule processes for these chips and they will never perform like they're supposed to. I consider that a design fail.
You guys are right about really old stuff, but it's not true now. The problem here is VIA. When building an AMD system, go all AMD. AMD bought ATI and got motherboard chipsets out of it.
I've got several AMD boxes in the house. Asus boards tend to work well and my wife built a box with a Gigabyte board that is tolerable (for windows). They're well supported in BSD and Linux.
Conversely, I had built a few K6-2 systems with VIA chipsets and they were all crap. However, if you look at modern AMD builds they're all AMD or NVIDIA chipsets which both work ok.
My rule of thumb is to go AMD if I'm on a budget and buy Intel if I can afford it.
This post looks like something from three years ago. Seriously, most apps are multithreaded now. Office is. Firefox is. Most Valve games are. WoW is. I could go on, but I don't think I need to. If one uses a Mac, most apps are multithreaded because of libdispatch/GCD.
AMD has their version of hyper threading. One can debate if it's better or worse than Intel's, but I'm not impressed by the benchmarks. By doing fusion and hyper threading, AMD has said they don't care about core count anymore. There's just not room on the die for it. AMD went from shipping 6 core chips to quad cores with their lame HTT and marketing them as 8 core. They're doing all the wrong things Intel did now. You can complain about performance, but not tactics.
Intel blows AMD out of the water in gaming benchmarks because their chips are faster. AMD doesn't want the performance market anymore. They want the lame consumer laptops people buy to use Facebook. Best Buy is full of them. AMD has a good product lineup for this market. Actually, if I were buying a cheap laptop I wouldn't even consider Intel because of the GPUs. AMD graphics are better for light gaming and video.
Slashdot Mirror
It was Mitchell Baker. I'm having trouble finding the article now. It was something I read on a mozilla blog some years ago.
And it doesn't stop with cash. Mozilla had a private jet for "advocating" that the CEO used to travel. There are many perks associated with the job.
I get angry they have money for private jets and large salaries but won't support more operating systems and get more development going on the products. Don't tell me you don't have resources to officially support mobile or even larger OS projects when you can fly around the country in your own plane.
The sales numbers are irrelevant because you said "Microsoft continues to be the only vendor to sell stand-alone desktop operating systems that are not tied to hardware." This statement is false. There are also other products like ecomstation aka OS/2 Warp. It's still sold.
If anything, you've argued Microsoft has a monopoly in stand-alone desktop operating systems, but not that they're the only vendor. Google can say the same thing about tablets in the sense that they're not locking android down to one vendor but they don't really sell it.
As far as the GNU/Linux discussion, that gets down to what you consider an operating system by definition. Is it the kernel? The whole userland? Parts of it? Mac OS X contains GPL'd code as does all BSD projects. Nothing is pure.
I left sprint because they had no decent phones. I ended up going to AT&T for an iPhone but I was looking at Palm and Windows devices at the time. Sprint customer service was rude and they didn't seem to care to keep us. We're were planning on doing a big upgrade on our plans too.
Getting decent phones was a problem for them a few years ago. Their customer service was worse and if you didn't live in the right area the network was also a problem. I happened to live in a good sprint zone. Making a deal to get better phones was a good idea, but they should have started with customer service training and wanting to retain customers or it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter the deal was with Apple. It could have been samsung for an android line or something else. They badly need phones that people want. (diversity matters)
At this point, I've been with Sprint, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. They all suck and for different reasons.
I wonder if this has to do with the US authority over the Internet. We've already seen .com TLD takeovers, but maybe they want to do it in every country for the RIAA and friends. I have a feeling this is related to some new power grab.
Terminal in OS X supports tabs. I don't have to use the dock that often to switch terminals. I'm in a terminal constantly and it doesn't get in the way. I'll agree that iOS is not a good desktop UI, but OS X has not (yet) turned into that. Apple hasn't made the Microsoft mistake yet.
I think the real problem is that many people who design user interfaces have given up on desktops prematurely. There will always be a need for a real desktop for development and several other tasks. it might be the minority, but it has a place. If you think about it for a minute, it's obvious why all these UI idiots are jumping at the bit for reinventing the wheel, it's something new. They can actually do something significant that might get them fame or credibility if it's a success. It's the biggest opportunity since the graphical user interface. Of course, the GUI never replaced everything and we still have terminals. When the tablet people realize that the traditional desktop isn't going away, maybe they'll get better at accommodating people like me who still want a desktop GUI and a terminal along with the touch interfaces in places it makes sense.
Trust me, you can't get reliability and consistency when productivity is zero. You need to care about productivity. If not, you're a terrible boss. It's a balancing act for sure, but it's important.
I've got a coworker that knits at work. Just because they're there doesn't mean they're actually working. I don't think your math makes sense.
You train them in the office before you let them telecommute. You have to know they're actually going to perform. I did it for ten months and it was the happiest I've been working. I actually got a lot more done than when I had to start coming into the office. I eventually managed a team for that company and it ended up that we got less done than I did alone at home. When you're there, you get sucked into meetings, office distractions, etc. When I telecommuted, I only had a meeting once a week. My boss could call me at any time if there was an issue and I was on Jabber all day. Most of the time, a boss just emails you anyway.
My original point has been lost in this discussion and that's it doesn't have to be this way. Microsoft and Sun found a way to avoid this. It can be done. You seem to point at lack of proper planning for rollout but I see lack of proper planning at designing the language. Both are problems.
I said same major release. They'd be willing to install say 3.6.27 but not 9->10. Rendering changes don't usually happen during point releases.
This is ridiculous. You think every time a SECURITY update comes out I should modify my code for every app I've ever written. I don't think so.
See that's what this is, a security update. They don't support old versions of PHP so it's a forced upgrade. Thus backward compatibility is important. Yeah, there's only a few things here and there between individual releases, but consider someone hosting on CentOS and then a new CentOS comes out. Suddenly they're 2 major releases ahead. Nothing works.. the sysadmin didn't tell the programmers he was updating CentOS. Now the company website is down. You can put blame at various levels here. The sys admin who didn't test first. The programmers who used an API that Zend killed. The architect that made the mistake to use PHP to begin with. The shit storm comes down on the programmers because the site was down and they had to do things to fix it. That's just how the world works.
Btw Zend actually says "Zend: The PHP Company". They want to be known as PHP so I give it to them.
I had a professor write an economics text book. He barely lectured and used the exact same words as in the book. He couldn't describe anything differently than the book. If you didn't understand the book, he would just say "it's right there in print. You didn't read the book" He failed to accept his book had problems or that not everyone learns the same way.
it was a terrible class and I was happy to get through it. The entire class was based on a formula. he only defined the variables on the first day of class. Everything was explained by this formula. The trick to the exams was to put in several variations of the formula into a graphing calculator and just run through them. I didn't learn much.
Can't they just release a new version of PHP that doesn't break backward compatibility. Microsoft was able to do this with classic ASP and for the most part .NET for many years now. Sun and Oracle figured out how to do it with Java. Why can't Zend do it?
I'm tired of having features disappear. Yeah, magic quotes and safe mode were stupid. Maybe if they actually designed the damn language rather than throw in crap all the time this wouldn't happen.
This is the single biggest issue I have with PHP.
If your computer takes DDR3 RAM, it is cheap. Then again, some of us have older systems. My PC desktop is on DDR2 (4GB) but it's still a 6 core AMD Phenom II.
I don't agree with the premise that Firefox 3.6 uses less RAM and is more stable. I've had better luck with Firefox 8, 9 and 10 on that front. It's also much faster executing JavaScript. In fact, 3.6 is the worst version to date to try to get to compile. It's very picky about shared library versions and don't even both to build it without HTML5 features enabled.
The only complaint on newer Firefox releases is the ridiculous major version numbers for no reason. My employer won't update to a major release but once a year and we just moved to firefox 9. No security updates for a year. It sucks. Too much work to re-certify all our internal web apps on a newer release.
MidnightBSD currently has 2754 ports. Of those, 1194 are under some GNU license (gpl2, gpl3, lgpl variations). A good chunk of that is for GNOME, KDE or GNUStep. Only 127 are under GPLv3.
I believe them that GNU licenses are as popular as ever, but I doubt that GPLv3 will be the most popular for some time. Many projects have been downgrading their licensing to GPLv3 including core GNU projects, Samba, etc. There's still a lot of old code or code that hasn't been updated in awhile under GPLv2. Frankly, the linux kernel isn't even under GPLv3 which is huge.
Disclaimer on the stats.. the way our licensing framework works, anything that's dual licensed is unlikely to show up. Perl code is dual licensed under artistic and gplv1 and that's not in the stats. Also something like firefox is always under the superior MPL license. I avoid GPL when possible for accounting purposes. It's a defect in the system that it doesn't support multiple license types (and uses agg for that)
Outside of the GPL, I've seen a lot of new code coming in under the Apache 2 license. I think that's the most popular outside of GNU circles now and possible surpassing the BSDL.
Intel would have destroyed NVIDIA. They give up on graphics every few years and they only make enough for the lowend market. They similarly would have killed any progress with NVIDIA after a few years. It only would have caught them up for awhile.
Intel doesn't get graphics. It's so bad, I recommended an AMD A4 yesterday over an ATOM build because of the GPU.
http://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Fair question. The problem with Wayland isn't the license, it's the forcefulness of the Linux community to kill off all GUI systems that aren't theirs. The entire point of Wayland (and newer X.org work to a lesser degree) is to kill backward compatibility in the name of progress. The rest of us don't have IBM money to reinvent half the kernel every few years when a new idea crops up.
I see an interesting convergence of some technologies happening. clang is on the roadmap for several BSDs and now is default on Minix. NetBSD tools were pulled in which are also used in part on several other systems. The Minix folks will probably upstream fixes to NetBSD as well as make improvements to llvm.
It's great to see alternatives to GNU tools gaining ground. It's the only logical choice for embedded systems due to licensing. We're going to need to step up our game and make our own tools with threats like Wayland coming.
If you're writing stories about DragonFly, then you want to cover all of it's distributed systems. The whole point of DragonFly is getting it ready for clustering. That's what Matt Dillon is into.
Some of the features of HAMMER & HAMMER2 are duplicated in other file systems, but most of them have much less friendly licenses. Even ZFS is under CDDL, which isn't terrible but precludes it from being used in Linux (the kernel). From my perspective, HAMMER could be the file system that everyone could use due to the license.
HAMMER is clearly the biggest feature of DragonFly that originated there. I think that constitutes coverage.
This release is interesting, but the rest of the year is dedicated to HAMMER2 and that will be the real story with DragonFly next. Most of the work on this release was incremental. Some interesting benchmarks were posted against FreeBSD in the last few months for PostgreSQL. There was some coverage on OSNews on this
http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved
To prove they can make a slower chip than the Phenom II X6? I honestly don't know what they were thinking. AMD fanboys are tearing apart my comments and the funny part is that I have several AMD CPUs.. I want to like them, but I just can't approve of the new desktop parts.
Yeah, I've heard these crazy counter claims. They didn't duplicate everything so it's not a full 8 core chip.
Intel Atom chips have hyper threading technology; well at least the newer ones do. They may have made independent ALUs in the AMD parts, but it still performs like HTT on most operating systems. Unless schedulers are modified, an OS will not know how to efficiently schedule processes for these chips and they will never perform like they're supposed to. I consider that a design fail.
You guys are right about really old stuff, but it's not true now. The problem here is VIA. When building an AMD system, go all AMD. AMD bought ATI and got motherboard chipsets out of it.
I've got several AMD boxes in the house. Asus boards tend to work well and my wife built a box with a Gigabyte board that is tolerable (for windows). They're well supported in BSD and Linux.
Conversely, I had built a few K6-2 systems with VIA chipsets and they were all crap. However, if you look at modern AMD builds they're all AMD or NVIDIA chipsets which both work ok.
My rule of thumb is to go AMD if I'm on a budget and buy Intel if I can afford it.
This post looks like something from three years ago. Seriously, most apps are multithreaded now. Office is. Firefox is. Most Valve games are. WoW is. I could go on, but I don't think I need to. If one uses a Mac, most apps are multithreaded because of libdispatch/GCD.
AMD has their version of hyper threading. One can debate if it's better or worse than Intel's, but I'm not impressed by the benchmarks. By doing fusion and hyper threading, AMD has said they don't care about core count anymore. There's just not room on the die for it. AMD went from shipping 6 core chips to quad cores with their lame HTT and marketing them as 8 core. They're doing all the wrong things Intel did now. You can complain about performance, but not tactics.
Intel blows AMD out of the water in gaming benchmarks because their chips are faster. AMD doesn't want the performance market anymore. They want the lame consumer laptops people buy to use Facebook. Best Buy is full of them. AMD has a good product lineup for this market. Actually, if I were buying a cheap laptop I wouldn't even consider Intel because of the GPUs. AMD graphics are better for light gaming and video.