But the benefit of a 15% performance increase is almost never going to be sufficient reason to pick one computing technology over another!
Unless it was Linux that recently edged ahead with a 15% increase, then every product manager with a Linux fanboy in his company would be indundated with demands to switch. I agree with your basic premise that one shouldn't blindly switch operating systems based on a few benchmarks. But I do have to disagree with your implication that only BSD user have ego problems.
And as a side benefit, your users don't have to be subjected to Flash! My platform won't run proprietary Flash, as it's not one of the three Macromedia-approved platforms. Having to reboot into Windows just to engage in ecommerce with you is not worth the hassle. So I take my business elsewhere.
You can use whatever damned software you want internally, but don't tell your users that they need to install new software, use a different browser, or reboot into Windows.
Someone explain a concept to me. I am not a kernel developer, so to my mind this is all black magic. How the frak do you get a managed code kernel? Is this a pure virtual machine? If not, then who the hell is managing the kernel? Who's running the environment that's running the kernel?
"If it loads non-GPL modules, it shouldn't be able to use GPLONLY symbols."/blockquote?
WTF? I've read the GPLv2 through dozens of times, and the GPLv3 at least twice. I've also read the unexpurgated Stallman commentaries and the Moglen Home Concordance. But NOWHERE do I find mention of a "GPLONLY symbol" in the license.
Nope, the simplest, fastest, cheapest way to make sure people aren't abusing surveillance... is to NOT DO THE SURVEILLING!
As the Bush years have demonstrated, is that you'll eventually get a government that will abuse its powers. Even if you like Bush, imagine Hillary in office with all of George's power and an equivalent lack of checks. Or maybe you think that four/eight years of Obama or McCain are easily doable, but what about after them? Eventually, within your lifetime, you will get an evil and corrupt administration. The more power we give the government, the worse it will be for all of us when that time comes.
We need to be diminishing goverment, not doubling its size every few years.
Oh, I am VERY familiar with the GPL. I just disagree with the philosophy underlying it. The purpose of a license is to allow you to threat people with lawsuits for violation. If you have no desire to threaten people with lawsuits, then use a significantly more permissive license than the GPL.
It's nice and warm and fuzzy that you are asking people nicely to keep your software open for the downstream. Don't corrupt that soft speaking with big legal sticks.
The tragedy of the commons always occurs in a true common, because there is no control over allocation of the property. People overgraze their sheep in the meadow because if they don't their neighbors will and then their sheep won't graze at all. In real life commons, you usually end up with authoritarian control over the common (such as the village lord, local commisar, faceless bureaucrat, etc).
The GPL is different, in that you cannot diminish the value of the good by overuse. Which actually makes the legal sticks in the license wholly unneccesary. Why should their be rules against overgrazing when it's impossible to overgraze? The only thing being "protected" are the author's fragile moral sensibilities. If he would only grow up we wouldn't need the GPL, we could get away with true public domain software.
p.s. No, the original poster didn't sue. But sending cease and desist letters from competent intellectual property lawyers is STILL a threat to sue. If you don't plan to sue, don't use a lawyer!
When you place something into a public commons, other people will take advantage of it without contributing back. That's the nature of reality. There's even an economic term for this: the tragedy of the commons. The core of the FSF's philosophy is that software should not be owned, but that it should be a public common. By using the GPL you are implicitly agreeing with this. That is fine, so long as you know what you are getting into. But to get all pissy after the fact that someone is taking advantage of what you have given away is pure arrogance.
If you don't want people abusing your software, then don't release it into the commons. Be honest with yourself and keep it proprietary. But if you do release it as Free Software, then don't start suing people of trivial legal details. Save the lawyers for the truly egregious stuff.
Do they have raytracing down fast enough to be useful in real time animation? If not, then stick to pre-rendered pximaps. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be.
It doesn't solve the "wait hours for fsck after unclean unmount"
et me be blunt: The reason journaling is so popular under Linux, is because it is so damned necessary! Waiting for fsck isn't a huge problem if you never have to fsck. But I have found with Linux 2.6.x, regardless of distro, that I get kernel panics and hangs at least once a week. Maybe it's just my laptop, and maybe it's the fault of third party drivers and not Linux itself. But no matter, without journaling I would have long ago thrown my laptop through the window.
But with the high popularity of journaling, I suspect that I'm not the only one who would otherwise have to sit through frequent fscks.
p.s. FreeBSD has background fsck, do you don't have to "wait hours". Your system is usable in just a few minutes, albeit at a temporary performance penalty.
The rule of thumb is to give each OS its own primary partition, and each can divide that up as they please. FreeBSD chose to use the BSD scheme (duh) while Linux used the Microsoft scheme of extended/virtual partitions. This definitely made it easier for Linux to coexist with DOS/Windows. But it does make it frustrating trying to squeeze in room for FreeBSD (or Solaris).
Just remember, save a primary partition for FreeBSD when you format your new harddrive. You can always use it as a backup partition in the meantime.
- I found the same sysinstall that I saw 4+years ago when I last tried installing Freebsd.
What's the problem, does sysinstall not work for you? I've never had a problem with it. If you fear the sight of plain text, then FreeBSD will not be for you. While FreeBSD makes a damned awesome desktop system, that is not its goal. It is not designed for Aunt Tillie.
- I found that the official way to configure is to generate the config file template using 'Xorg -configure' and then hand editing the xorg.conf config file!!!!
That is because that's how X.org comes. Talk to the X.org developers about a better configuration tool. It's not FreeBSD's job to fix their shortcomings. I agree with you that this is a pain, but from FreeBSD's perspective, X.org is just another third party software project.
- I found that the standard install still installs TWM and doesn't even ask for KDE/GNOME (I know you need to install the packages *after* the install, and yes I know I can use sysinstall) and you are dropped to a text login after install.
You DO have an option to install KDE/GNOME during installation, if you continue on to the post-install configuration page of sysinstall.
p.s. It's about this time in your complaint list when most people start telling you about PC-BSD...
- I found that my amd64 cpu with the nvidia integrated card doesn't have an nvidia driver. And the default nv driver can't make use out of DDC to configure my brand new widescreen LCD monitor.
Talk to NVidia. They're the ones who insist on a proprietary binary blob and top secret chip specs. I can't run FreeBSD on my laptop because of an ATI driver with no (workable) Open Source driver available(*). If we ever get together, we can have a beer and curse the bastard proprietary video card manufacturers.
- I found that my mouse pointer is invisible in X.
Got no clue. Never seen that one before. Even when I had an NVidia card (curse them!), I still had a mouse pointer. I bet there's some weird ass hardware mouse option in your xorg.conf file.
(*) Actually, I can use the VESA driver, and it's damned fast and snappy. But it without multi-head support, it is a major pain doing presentations on the laptop.
Looks like what's bad for Sony may be good for the consumer."
Here's the big cluestick for Sony: What's good for the consumer is almost always bad for the producer. This is not, contrary to neo-socialists, because there is an inherent antagonism between producers and consumers. It's because the producer only exists to serve the consumer. Of course, that means that the "good" and "bad" in the quote above is relative. Don't take economic aphorisms literally. What's good for the consumer isn't detrimental to the producer, rather it means that consumers benefit more than do the producers. Sony doesn't produce laptops just because it's bored, it produces laptops because it is expecting monetary benefits from the consumers that are demanding them.
Economic progress benefits consumers by making producers constantly play catchup with their competitors. This is why so many companies go crying to government for special privileges and industry regulations (to keep out the upstart startups). But even if they manage to get a monopoly, or create a cartel, they still have to worry about consumers switching to alternatives.
The economy does not operate in stasis. The more you shake it up moribund producers, the better off we all are.
But a good process is just as hard to find as a good engineer. A process increases software quality, but at the expense of productivity. You have to find a working balance. There are way too many people in uppper management who do not understand this, and will institute overwhelming processes that do nothing more than kill projects. These managers never get fired for their decisions and the layoffs happen at the bottom.
When you start focusing on the paperwork and collecting signatures, you've gone too far. The focus needs to always be on writing the software. The highest quality software is the software that is never written. How can there be bugs with no code? But that way lies madness.
In my last job, we were bought out by a company who went insane on processes. In three years we did not release a new product, and only managed three cosmetic releases for two existing products. Before the buyout we were number one in the field, but at the end we were dead last. That's what the process did to us. But it was a magnificent process!
I've been ready for years. So has my ISP. All they need to do is flip a switch. But until everyone else switches to IPv6, it's less hassle to stick with IPv4. It's sort of like HDTV. It won't take off until a sufficient number of people are capable of it.
p.s. And heaven forbid Congress go mandating IPv6 like they did with HDTV. Those guys can barely find their asses to wipe them, let alone make technical networking decisions for anyone else. The market will work this one out. The technology is ready and waiting, it just needs the demand to flip it on.
I'm normally a very peaceful person. But when I see stories like this, I just want to beat the shit out of people like this! Just because they are unable to live their own lives without constant supervision doesn't mean the rest of us can't cope with the vagaries of existance.
1) Abolish the TSA. The economy would be much better off giving these guys welfare instead of this boondoggle of a make-work program for the otherwise unemployable.
2) Have the airports provide their own security. They're the ones with the incentive to make the lines fast and hassle free.
3) Let the airlines arm their flight crew. But a pistol in the cabin and train the crew in its use.
4) Stop treating everyone like potential terrorists. Let me keep my shoes, 4 oz. tube of toothpaste, and the nail clippers I accidentally left in my pocket.
No need to go that far. I am extremely pro-gun, but handing them out to people untrained in their use is nuts. A far simpler solution is to train the flight crew, then have them carry the guns. Bring back sky marshalls as well. One gun in the cabin would have stopped 9/11 in its tracks.
Nah, the real reason Linux use isn't spreading is that Windows (and Mac) are "just good enough". If all you want is to check email and surf the web, there's no reason to learn an entirely new system. This is the real reason why Windows is maintaining its market share, and also the reason Vista went over like a lead balloon.
p.s. Of course, Linux and *BSD ARE spreading! Just because it's not on your grandmother's desktop does not mean it's languishing. *NIX dominates the server market, and is making significant inroads into business desktop for small to medium firms.
Where is the capital? No capital, no capitalism. Please do not confuse markets with capitalism. Markets have been around since the first caveman learned to chip flint.
You will need it because it will take far more than porn downloads to fill up the harddrives of tomorrow. Indexed links between every word in every file to every other word in every file will take care of that nagging empty space.
Maybe you "environmentalists" ought to start thinking about denouncing those who claim to speak for you. Your "brand" has become so diluted that most people mistake you for neo-luddites. I also notice that the term "conservationist" is coming back in style. SOME people are abandoning the tainted environmentalist label.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless it was Linux that recently edged ahead with a 15% increase, then every product manager with a Linux fanboy in his company would be indundated with demands to switch. I agree with your basic premise that one shouldn't blindly switch operating systems based on a few benchmarks. But I do have to disagree with your implication that only BSD user have ego problems.
And as a side benefit, your users don't have to be subjected to Flash! My platform won't run proprietary Flash, as it's not one of the three Macromedia-approved platforms. Having to reboot into Windows just to engage in ecommerce with you is not worth the hassle. So I take my business elsewhere.
You can use whatever damned software you want internally, but don't tell your users that they need to install new software, use a different browser, or reboot into Windows.
</rant>
Someone explain a concept to me. I am not a kernel developer, so to my mind this is all black magic. How the frak do you get a managed code kernel? Is this a pure virtual machine? If not, then who the hell is managing the kernel? Who's running the environment that's running the kernel?
Nope, the simplest, fastest, cheapest way to make sure people aren't abusing surveillance... is to NOT DO THE SURVEILLING!
As the Bush years have demonstrated, is that you'll eventually get a government that will abuse its powers. Even if you like Bush, imagine Hillary in office with all of George's power and an equivalent lack of checks. Or maybe you think that four/eight years of Obama or McCain are easily doable, but what about after them? Eventually, within your lifetime, you will get an evil and corrupt administration. The more power we give the government, the worse it will be for all of us when that time comes.
We need to be diminishing goverment, not doubling its size every few years.
Oh, I am VERY familiar with the GPL. I just disagree with the philosophy underlying it. The purpose of a license is to allow you to threat people with lawsuits for violation. If you have no desire to threaten people with lawsuits, then use a significantly more permissive license than the GPL.
It's nice and warm and fuzzy that you are asking people nicely to keep your software open for the downstream. Don't corrupt that soft speaking with big legal sticks.
The tragedy of the commons always occurs in a true common, because there is no control over allocation of the property. People overgraze their sheep in the meadow because if they don't their neighbors will and then their sheep won't graze at all. In real life commons, you usually end up with authoritarian control over the common (such as the village lord, local commisar, faceless bureaucrat, etc).
The GPL is different, in that you cannot diminish the value of the good by overuse. Which actually makes the legal sticks in the license wholly unneccesary. Why should their be rules against overgrazing when it's impossible to overgraze? The only thing being "protected" are the author's fragile moral sensibilities. If he would only grow up we wouldn't need the GPL, we could get away with true public domain software.
p.s. No, the original poster didn't sue. But sending cease and desist letters from competent intellectual property lawyers is STILL a threat to sue. If you don't plan to sue, don't use a lawyer!
When you place something into a public commons, other people will take advantage of it without contributing back. That's the nature of reality. There's even an economic term for this: the tragedy of the commons. The core of the FSF's philosophy is that software should not be owned, but that it should be a public common. By using the GPL you are implicitly agreeing with this. That is fine, so long as you know what you are getting into. But to get all pissy after the fact that someone is taking advantage of what you have given away is pure arrogance.
If you don't want people abusing your software, then don't release it into the commons. Be honest with yourself and keep it proprietary. But if you do release it as Free Software, then don't start suing people of trivial legal details. Save the lawyers for the truly egregious stuff.
Life is too short for lawsuits.
Do they have raytracing down fast enough to be useful in real time animation? If not, then stick to pre-rendered pximaps. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it should be.
et me be blunt: The reason journaling is so popular under Linux, is because it is so damned necessary! Waiting for fsck isn't a huge problem if you never have to fsck. But I have found with Linux 2.6.x, regardless of distro, that I get kernel panics and hangs at least once a week. Maybe it's just my laptop, and maybe it's the fault of third party drivers and not Linux itself. But no matter, without journaling I would have long ago thrown my laptop through the window.
But with the high popularity of journaling, I suspect that I'm not the only one who would otherwise have to sit through frequent fscks.
p.s. FreeBSD has background fsck, do you don't have to "wait hours". Your system is usable in just a few minutes, albeit at a temporary performance penalty.
Sounds cool.
The rule of thumb is to give each OS its own primary partition, and each can divide that up as they please. FreeBSD chose to use the BSD scheme (duh) while Linux used the Microsoft scheme of extended/virtual partitions. This definitely made it easier for Linux to coexist with DOS/Windows. But it does make it frustrating trying to squeeze in room for FreeBSD (or Solaris).
Just remember, save a primary partition for FreeBSD when you format your new harddrive. You can always use it as a backup partition in the meantime.
What's the problem, does sysinstall not work for you? I've never had a problem with it. If you fear the sight of plain text, then FreeBSD will not be for you. While FreeBSD makes a damned awesome desktop system, that is not its goal. It is not designed for Aunt Tillie.
That is because that's how X.org comes. Talk to the X.org developers about a better configuration tool. It's not FreeBSD's job to fix their shortcomings. I agree with you that this is a pain, but from FreeBSD's perspective, X.org is just another third party software project.
You DO have an option to install KDE/GNOME during installation, if you continue on to the post-install configuration page of sysinstall.
p.s. It's about this time in your complaint list when most people start telling you about PC-BSD...
Talk to NVidia. They're the ones who insist on a proprietary binary blob and top secret chip specs. I can't run FreeBSD on my laptop because of an ATI driver with no (workable) Open Source driver available(*). If we ever get together, we can have a beer and curse the bastard proprietary video card manufacturers.
Got no clue. Never seen that one before. Even when I had an NVidia card (curse them!), I still had a mouse pointer. I bet there's some weird ass hardware mouse option in your xorg.conf file.
(*) Actually, I can use the VESA driver, and it's damned fast and snappy. But it without multi-head support, it is a major pain doing presentations on the laptop.
Here's the big cluestick for Sony: What's good for the consumer is almost always bad for the producer. This is not, contrary to neo-socialists, because there is an inherent antagonism between producers and consumers. It's because the producer only exists to serve the consumer. Of course, that means that the "good" and "bad" in the quote above is relative. Don't take economic aphorisms literally. What's good for the consumer isn't detrimental to the producer, rather it means that consumers benefit more than do the producers. Sony doesn't produce laptops just because it's bored, it produces laptops because it is expecting monetary benefits from the consumers that are demanding them.
Economic progress benefits consumers by making producers constantly play catchup with their competitors. This is why so many companies go crying to government for special privileges and industry regulations (to keep out the upstart startups). But even if they manage to get a monopoly, or create a cartel, they still have to worry about consumers switching to alternatives.
The economy does not operate in stasis. The more you shake it up moribund producers, the better off we all are.
But a good process is just as hard to find as a good engineer. A process increases software quality, but at the expense of productivity. You have to find a working balance. There are way too many people in uppper management who do not understand this, and will institute overwhelming processes that do nothing more than kill projects. These managers never get fired for their decisions and the layoffs happen at the bottom.
When you start focusing on the paperwork and collecting signatures, you've gone too far. The focus needs to always be on writing the software. The highest quality software is the software that is never written. How can there be bugs with no code? But that way lies madness.
In my last job, we were bought out by a company who went insane on processes. In three years we did not release a new product, and only managed three cosmetic releases for two existing products. Before the buyout we were number one in the field, but at the end we were dead last. That's what the process did to us. But it was a magnificent process!
That reminds me of the Model T. You get your choice of color so long as it's black.
I've been ready for years. So has my ISP. All they need to do is flip a switch. But until everyone else switches to IPv6, it's less hassle to stick with IPv4. It's sort of like HDTV. It won't take off until a sufficient number of people are capable of it.
p.s. And heaven forbid Congress go mandating IPv6 like they did with HDTV. Those guys can barely find their asses to wipe them, let alone make technical networking decisions for anyone else. The market will work this one out. The technology is ready and waiting, it just needs the demand to flip it on.
I'm normally a very peaceful person. But when I see stories like this, I just want to beat the shit out of people like this! Just because they are unable to live their own lives without constant supervision doesn't mean the rest of us can't cope with the vagaries of existance.
1) Abolish the TSA. The economy would be much better off giving these guys welfare instead of this boondoggle of a make-work program for the otherwise unemployable.
2) Have the airports provide their own security. They're the ones with the incentive to make the lines fast and hassle free.
3) Let the airlines arm their flight crew. But a pistol in the cabin and train the crew in its use.
4) Stop treating everyone like potential terrorists. Let me keep my shoes, 4 oz. tube of toothpaste, and the nail clippers I accidentally left in my pocket.
5) Profit!
No need to go that far. I am extremely pro-gun, but handing them out to people untrained in their use is nuts. A far simpler solution is to train the flight crew, then have them carry the guns. Bring back sky marshalls as well. One gun in the cabin would have stopped 9/11 in its tracks.
Nah, the real reason Linux use isn't spreading is that Windows (and Mac) are "just good enough". If all you want is to check email and surf the web, there's no reason to learn an entirely new system. This is the real reason why Windows is maintaining its market share, and also the reason Vista went over like a lead balloon.
p.s. Of course, Linux and *BSD ARE spreading! Just because it's not on your grandmother's desktop does not mean it's languishing. *NIX dominates the server market, and is making significant inroads into business desktop for small to medium firms.
Where is the capital? No capital, no capitalism. Please do not confuse markets with capitalism. Markets have been around since the first caveman learned to chip flint.
Thank you. While we can argue over the ethics and legality of blackmail, trying to define capitalism as the foundation of blackmail is ludicrous.
You will need it because it will take far more than porn downloads to fill up the harddrives of tomorrow. Indexed links between every word in every file to every other word in every file will take care of that nagging empty space.
Maybe you "environmentalists" ought to start thinking about denouncing those who claim to speak for you. Your "brand" has become so diluted that most people mistake you for neo-luddites. I also notice that the term "conservationist" is coming back in style. SOME people are abandoning the tainted environmentalist label.
You seem absolutely convinced that the sin of delusional, self-serving thinking is committed exclusively by your opponents.
Nonsense, I know full well what my limitations are. That's the biggest difference between me and my opponents!