Linux on small devices isn't a gimmick, it is widely used.
You can say the same thing about NetBSD. But frankly, who cares? You're talking about a wristwatch! No one cares what OS is on a wristwatch. Frankly, an Unix-like OS on a wristwatch is pretty strange to begin with. It's not like it has a shell or any other environment to interact with.
Again, Linux on mainframes is not a gimmick, it's a real and important product.
No, it's not a gimmick. But if you don't own a Z Series mainframe, who the hell cares? For 999 out of 1000 Linux users, Linux on a mainframe VM is nothing more than a bragging point. There's nothing wrong with bragging, but it's not a strike against any other operating system.
You don't find FreeBSD because it doesn't have the APPLICATIONS, not the salesmen.
They're ALL going to run under FreeBSD. They just won't be officially supported by their various closed source proprietary vendors.
FreeBSD holds the dubious distinction of being one of the few unixes that doesn't even have a version of Oracle available.
That's because FreeBSD is one of the few unices that isn't commercial. You'll notice that Oracle isn't officially supported for Debian either. Oracle WILL run under FreeBSD, it's just not supported.
OpenGL is essentially primitive shapes with bitmap textures. Okay, it can do a bit more, but that's the gist of it in a nutshell. If that's all you want, then stick with OpenGL.
Ray tracing, on the other hand, takes it strengh from real mathematically modelled textures. For example, can you get OpenGL to correctly model a pyramid of stacked mirrored spheres? In POV-Ray that's so simple it's cliche.
I haven't been running a single-processor system, workstation or server, since 1998.
You, sir, are part of the great clean scrubbed minority. Most people do not have SMP systems, and probably won't for another five to ten years. I do not have one, and have not ever had one. None of the workstations at my work are SMP.
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
This is just OpenBSD we're talking about here. Other BSDs have had SMP for quite some time. Did this news also bump FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly and Darwin up on your totempole?
The way my brain is wired, I just grokked it more readily.
And that's the whole crux of the matter, isn't it? Everyone's brains are wired differently. So why should we expect everyone to use their desktops identically?
I don't have a problem with spatial browsing, or with Nautilus implementing it, or with GNOME containing Nautilus. And I really don't object much to the "one size fits all" philosophy of GNOME. What really irks me is the attitude that the GNOME leadership has special access to "revealed wisdom". It's like they receive the word of God from on high regarding usability, and suddenly feel the need to go preach it to everyone.
because if I want to copy a folder in a browser-type file manager, I have to select the files/folders, press Ctrl-C, try to remember exactly how many times I need to press the 'Back' button to get back to the folder I want to copy the files into, and press Ctrl-V to past the files.
Did you ever consider opening up two windows and dragging between them?
For someone who doesn't know what the stick shift is for, then of course a manual transmission is an extremely inefficient model for a drive train...
Start asking: "Why isn't *BSD dominating the *nix world now?"
Simple, FreeBSD isn't commercial. It doesn't have battalions of salesmen promoting it to businesses every day. FreeBSD isn't dominating the *nix world for the same reason Debian isn't!
The nature of Linux encouraged commercialization. It was very painful to create a working Linux system from scratch, so that pre-packaged Linux distributions became salable products.
However, you won't see too many (or any) companies working on porting FreeBSD to wristwatches or big-iron supercomputers
1) I haven't seen any Linux wristwatches. While I'm sure there may be some out there, I seriously doubt they're anything more than cheap toys. But as for other small embedded devices, I have seen Free/NetBSD on consumer routers and bridges.
2) There is no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be put on a big-iron mainframe. But as far as I can tell, only IBM ever bothered to put Linux on a mainframe anyway. So it's a pointless argument.
Actually, as you said yourself early, Linux isn't representative of the corporate data center either. The only reason you find an occasional Redhat machine there is because Redhat has salesmen. Since FreeBSD is not commercial, it does not have salesmen.
That's because "heavy enterprise workloads" might not be what you think it is. In the computer industry, "enterprise" no longer means merely "business". But don't worry about FreeBSD's reputation. Most Linux distributions aren't ready for the enterprise either. Neither is Windows.
But how do you know that it's an accurate reference? When any random schmoe can go and redact in misinformation, personal ideology, or even outright bonehead errors, how can you trust it? Eventually someone will come along and fix it, hopefully, but in the meantime you cannot be sure it's accurate.
People laugh at Ken Brown because he uses emails for his references. But how is that worse than using the anonymous hearsay of wikipedia?
To take a better example, consider free software. No successful free software project that I am aware of allows anonymous committing by the general public. Only a team member can do this. You can, of course, send a patch to a team member, but that patch will be reviewed and tested before it is applied.
Microsoft has tried to do this to standards. But in every case where the standard was backed by free implementations or true standard specifications, they have failed. They tried it with HTML, but as soon as we got a free Mozilla, people started writing pages to the standard again. They tried to do it to Kerberos, but had to very quickly change back to the standard. They never even tried to change TCP/IP. The only places where they have succeeded in EnE is with proprietary standards.
I feel that all standards-implementing software *must* be GPLed before I'll trust it.
Then I guess you do not trust TCP/IP, Ogg/Vorbis or the X11 protocol. That last one is interesting, because people did try to make it proprietary. But like Microsoft, they did not succeed.
The fact that wikipedia has articles like this in it is bizarre. The fact that I can edit it anonymously without review is distressing. This isn't an encyclopedia, it's a freaking bulletin board with an alphabetized index.
Government paves a road. Private firm comes along and paints diamonds on one lane of that road....and tells you that you can no longer use the "SPECIAL LANE" without paying.
You know very well that that is not The case in software. A more appropriate analogy would be "government paves a road, private firm comes along and creates a driveway leading to a parking lot in front of their locked door."
A good example is the TCP/IP stack. It doesn't matter what Microsoft does to its copy of the TCP/IP stack, nor how much they charge for it, because the original is still there untouched and undamaged.
Yes, and so can I. But that is beside the point. All business are regulated, corporations or otherwise. But where corporations differ is in the special privileges the receive from government. That is why they can only be created by an act of government. In an anarchist society (of any variety) they cannot exist.
The primary privilege a corporation receives is a grant of personhood. While this is certainly convenient to the corporation, this legal fiction creates several major distortions in the working of the market. I'll only address two of these here.
The first is that is absolves the people within a company from the responsibility for their actions. Someone spews lethal chemicals from a plant in India, killing hundreds of people, but it is Union Carbide that is responsible, not the negligent perpetrator. Sure people got fired, and Union Carbide stock dropped, but what kind of justice is that? If it wasn't a corporation people would be in jail for manslaughter!
The second distortion is that legal personhood eliminates ownership. The business is not longer a property, but an investment. A shareholder may be a part owner in name, but that is it. The people who make the decisions for a company are not its owners, but a select few of its employees. For a small corporation, one shareholder might retain 51% of the stock, and thus be in nominal control. But by the time you get to large publicly traded corporations, the owners are so divorced from their property that they cannot exercise any control over it.
you're a representative of a corporation by virtue of being an evil shareholder
I might quibble over the term "evil", but I am indeed a shareholder via my retirement investments. But there's not much I can do about it. Hell, I don't even get shareholder voting rights, because I'm going through a investment fund!
I have to participate in corporatism if I wish to remain a part of this society. I may not like it, but I do have to live with it.
No, you're the one without a clue. Read his article. He is saying that it is useful to *learn* assembly, not that it is useful to use assembly for everything you write.
too many people focus on just one facet and ignore the others.
That is exactly the point! Programming in assembly is another of these facets, and just as important as all the others. Instead of shouting at each other, maybe you should recognize that you're both right!
Programming is like building a house. When you look at the best building contractors, you'll notice an odd thing. They all know how to use hammers and nails! Gasp! Only in programming do we cast aspersions upon those who know how to use hammers, saws and screwdrivers.
You don't have to currently program in assembly, C, or another low level language, but you are expected to know how.
an efficient algorithm coded in an inefficient way will always beat out an inefficient algorithm coded by hand in 100% optimized assembly.
Big fat hairy deal. An efficient Schwinn bicycle could outrace an inefficient Harley-Davidson motorcycle, given sufficient levels of efficiency, so what's your point?
The fact remains that an efficient algorithm coded in 100% assembly will still beat the same efficient algorithm coded in Javascript.
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Linux on small devices isn't a gimmick, it is widely used.
You can say the same thing about NetBSD. But frankly, who cares? You're talking about a wristwatch! No one cares what OS is on a wristwatch. Frankly, an Unix-like OS on a wristwatch is pretty strange to begin with. It's not like it has a shell or any other environment to interact with.
Again, Linux on mainframes is not a gimmick, it's a real and important product.
No, it's not a gimmick. But if you don't own a Z Series mainframe, who the hell cares? For 999 out of 1000 Linux users, Linux on a mainframe VM is nothing more than a bragging point. There's nothing wrong with bragging, but it's not a strike against any other operating system.
You don't find FreeBSD because it doesn't have the APPLICATIONS, not the salesmen.
They're ALL going to run under FreeBSD. They just won't be officially supported by their various closed source proprietary vendors.
FreeBSD holds the dubious distinction of being one of the few unixes that doesn't even have a version of Oracle available.
That's because FreeBSD is one of the few unices that isn't commercial. You'll notice that Oracle isn't officially supported for Debian either. Oracle WILL run under FreeBSD, it's just not supported.
OpenGL is essentially primitive shapes with bitmap textures. Okay, it can do a bit more, but that's the gist of it in a nutshell. If that's all you want, then stick with OpenGL.
Ray tracing, on the other hand, takes it strengh from real mathematically modelled textures. For example, can you get OpenGL to correctly model a pyramid of stacked mirrored spheres? In POV-Ray that's so simple it's cliche.
Remember the bad press Microsoft when they still ran hotmail.com on FreeBSD servers?
There are very strong rumours that they still do on the back end where no one on the outside can see them.
BSD had IPv6 before anyone else. But that shouldn't surprise anyone, because BSD had IPv4 before anyone else did either :-)
I haven't been running a single-processor system, workstation or server, since 1998.
You, sir, are part of the great clean scrubbed minority. Most people do not have SMP systems, and probably won't for another five to ten years. I do not have one, and have not ever had one. None of the workstations at my work are SMP.
The bigger news here, for me, is that Linux just jumped way up on my totem pole of respect.
This is just OpenBSD we're talking about here. Other BSDs have had SMP for quite some time. Did this news also bump FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly and Darwin up on your totempole?
Posted by Hemos on Monday June 14, @04:38AM
Maybe it's because everyone is asleep!
The way my brain is wired, I just grokked it more readily.
And that's the whole crux of the matter, isn't it? Everyone's brains are wired differently. So why should we expect everyone to use their desktops identically?
I don't have a problem with spatial browsing, or with Nautilus implementing it, or with GNOME containing Nautilus. And I really don't object much to the "one size fits all" philosophy of GNOME. What really irks me is the attitude that the GNOME leadership has special access to "revealed wisdom". It's like they receive the word of God from on high regarding usability, and suddenly feel the need to go preach it to everyone.
because if I want to copy a folder in a browser-type file manager, I have to select the files/folders, press Ctrl-C, try to remember exactly how many times I need to press the 'Back' button to get back to the folder I want to copy the files into, and press Ctrl-V to past the files.
Did you ever consider opening up two windows and dragging between them?
For someone who doesn't know what the stick shift is for, then of course a manual transmission is an extremely inefficient model for a drive train...
Start asking: "Why isn't *BSD dominating the *nix world now?"
Simple, FreeBSD isn't commercial. It doesn't have battalions of salesmen promoting it to businesses every day. FreeBSD isn't dominating the *nix world for the same reason Debian isn't!
The nature of Linux encouraged commercialization. It was very painful to create a working Linux system from scratch, so that pre-packaged Linux distributions became salable products.
Actually if you check the history, significant work was done by *GNU* to port glibc to Linux.
However, you won't see too many (or any) companies working on porting FreeBSD to wristwatches or big-iron supercomputers
1) I haven't seen any Linux wristwatches. While I'm sure there may be some out there, I seriously doubt they're anything more than cheap toys. But as for other small embedded devices, I have seen Free/NetBSD on consumer routers and bridges.
2) There is no reason why FreeBSD couldn't be put on a big-iron mainframe. But as far as I can tell, only IBM ever bothered to put Linux on a mainframe anyway. So it's a pointless argument.
Actually, as you said yourself early, Linux isn't representative of the corporate data center either. The only reason you find an occasional Redhat machine there is because Redhat has salesmen. Since FreeBSD is not commercial, it does not have salesmen.
That quote seems to imply that FreeBSD does not have a POSIX thread library. This is simply not true, and has not been true for years.
That's because "heavy enterprise workloads" might not be what you think it is. In the computer industry, "enterprise" no longer means merely "business". But don't worry about FreeBSD's reputation. Most Linux distributions aren't ready for the enterprise either. Neither is Windows.
But how do you know that it's an accurate reference? When any random schmoe can go and redact in misinformation, personal ideology, or even outright bonehead errors, how can you trust it? Eventually someone will come along and fix it, hopefully, but in the meantime you cannot be sure it's accurate.
People laugh at Ken Brown because he uses emails for his references. But how is that worse than using the anonymous hearsay of wikipedia?
To take a better example, consider free software. No successful free software project that I am aware of allows anonymous committing by the general public. Only a team member can do this. You can, of course, send a patch to a team member, but that patch will be reviewed and tested before it is applied.
Microsoft has tried to do this to standards. But in every case where the standard was backed by free implementations or true standard specifications, they have failed. They tried it with HTML, but as soon as we got a free Mozilla, people started writing pages to the standard again. They tried to do it to Kerberos, but had to very quickly change back to the standard. They never even tried to change TCP/IP. The only places where they have succeeded in EnE is with proprietary standards.
I feel that all standards-implementing software *must* be GPLed before I'll trust it.
Then I guess you do not trust TCP/IP, Ogg/Vorbis or the X11 protocol. That last one is interesting, because people did try to make it proprietary. But like Microsoft, they did not succeed.
The fact that wikipedia has articles like this in it is bizarre. The fact that I can edit it anonymously without review is distressing. This isn't an encyclopedia, it's a freaking bulletin board with an alphabetized index.
Government paves a road. Private firm comes along and paints diamonds on one lane of that road....and tells you that you can no longer use the "SPECIAL LANE" without paying.
You know very well that that is not The case in software. A more appropriate analogy would be "government paves a road, private firm comes along and creates a driveway leading to a parking lot in front of their locked door."
A good example is the TCP/IP stack. It doesn't matter what Microsoft does to its copy of the TCP/IP stack, nor how much they charge for it, because the original is still there untouched and undamaged.
Do you mean corporations looking to sell proprietary software such as Cisco & Microsoft, who pay no federal income tax?
"I'm sorry Fred, but since Bob doesn't pay any taxes I'm going to have to kill your cat..."
I can start a corporation tomorrow
Yes, and so can I. But that is beside the point. All business are regulated, corporations or otherwise. But where corporations differ is in the special privileges the receive from government. That is why they can only be created by an act of government. In an anarchist society (of any variety) they cannot exist.
The primary privilege a corporation receives is a grant of personhood. While this is certainly convenient to the corporation, this legal fiction creates several major distortions in the working of the market. I'll only address two of these here.
The first is that is absolves the people within a company from the responsibility for their actions. Someone spews lethal chemicals from a plant in India, killing hundreds of people, but it is Union Carbide that is responsible, not the negligent perpetrator. Sure people got fired, and Union Carbide stock dropped, but what kind of justice is that? If it wasn't a corporation people would be in jail for manslaughter!
The second distortion is that legal personhood eliminates ownership. The business is not longer a property, but an investment. A shareholder may be a part owner in name, but that is it. The people who make the decisions for a company are not its owners, but a select few of its employees. For a small corporation, one shareholder might retain 51% of the stock, and thus be in nominal control. But by the time you get to large publicly traded corporations, the owners are so divorced from their property that they cannot exercise any control over it.
you're a representative of a corporation by virtue of being an evil shareholder
I might quibble over the term "evil", but I am indeed a shareholder via my retirement investments. But there's not much I can do about it. Hell, I don't even get shareholder voting rights, because I'm going through a investment fund!
I have to participate in corporatism if I wish to remain a part of this society. I may not like it, but I do have to live with it.
No, you're the one without a clue. Read his article. He is saying that it is useful to *learn* assembly, not that it is useful to use assembly for everything you write.
too many people focus on just one facet and ignore the others.
That is exactly the point! Programming in assembly is another of these facets, and just as important as all the others. Instead of shouting at each other, maybe you should recognize that you're both right!
Programming is like building a house. When you look at the best building contractors, you'll notice an odd thing. They all know how to use hammers and nails! Gasp! Only in programming do we cast aspersions upon those who know how to use hammers, saws and screwdrivers.
You don't have to currently program in assembly, C, or another low level language, but you are expected to know how.
an efficient algorithm coded in an inefficient way will always beat out an inefficient algorithm coded by hand in 100% optimized assembly.
Big fat hairy deal. An efficient Schwinn bicycle could outrace an inefficient Harley-Davidson motorcycle, given sufficient levels of efficiency, so what's your point?
The fact remains that an efficient algorithm coded in 100% assembly will still beat the same efficient algorithm coded in Javascript.