Which is precisely why there's an ongoing jihad between vi and emacs users. vi is the UNIX editor, emacs was designed for another system. But at the beginning, emacs was tiny. But it's been around so long that Zawinski's Law demanded it expand until it could real mail.
Whether you can or cannot is irrelevant, since OpenOffice is a direct descendent of an application designed for Windows. Yes, Windows. That fact that it because most popular under UNIX doesn't change its heritage.
Now if OpenOffice were designed with all of his other design principles, then it would be a piece of cake to script.
As a systems programmer, I'm supposed to have a lot of in depth OS knowledge. Which is why I'm currently taking sysadmin classes, to get a better knowledge of it.
Every systems programmer I work with uses Linux or FreeBSD at work or at home (though maybe not as their primary syste). Most hardware engineers here do as well. But none of the application developers do. I don't know if this is the industry norm, but it is at my work.
When I have a code review, the systems programmers want to know why I used vfork() instead of execve(). The applications programmers want to know why I used a visitor pattern instead of a mediator.
You've misunderstood the nature of the actuarial industry. Actuarians place a monetary value on risk, not on life. Granted, government "fixes" to health care insurance have severely distorted the actuarial functioning, but the concept is still there. If an insurance company doesn't pay out, it's commiting fraud and breaking the law. But if a government or public financed health plan doesn't pay out, it's perfectly "legal".
If you want the drug delivered to your stomache or duodenum, then I guess this works. But it's hardly optimal.
My company is working with "contrast destruction agents", which is a way to use ultrasound to precisely deliver an agent to the heart at a precise time. The agent (drug) is encapsulated in microscopic bubbles that get disintegrated at a specific ultrasound frequency. Target the area with ultrasound, press a button to briefly change the frequency, and you get delivery where you want it. Apply this same technology to chemotherapy and you have an amazing innovation in cancer treatment. The process already out there, and once the research and approval hurdles are met, it will become a routine application in many areas of medicine.
Yes, it is quite selfish to divert $100,000s of dollars to keeping the heart beating in a braindead human
In the current case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, the money is her own. She has $750,000 of her own money, from a malpractice suit, to keep her alive. But her husband and legal guardian wants it, so he got a court to order her death. Oh, and she's not even brain dead. Not even close.
That's selfishness.
I refuse to place a monetary price on human life, because what has a price can be sold, discounted and liquidated.
Or you may be thinking of a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order.
No, I'm thinking of the cases where plugs are "pulled" on those that are not "brain dead". Fortunately it's rare, but only because the legal obstacles that must be hurdled. The UK may be different, but in the US it happens. One reference to a current case is Terri Schindler-Schiavo. Terri may not be competent enough now to make legal decisions, but she is most certainly not brain dead.
Is the thought of being branded a member of the "religious right" too high a price to pay for defending a person's right to live?
Terri is brain damaged, but she is not brain dead. She is still a living human being in every definition of the phrase. The only "life support" she received was a feeding tube. But the courts have ruled, and enforced with police, that she may no longer be fed, not even by her closest relatives. A priest was even prevented by police from administering communion because the host was considered "food". Terri's is being executed by the government for the crime of being inconvenient to her legal guardian.
They're simply the decision makers. CEOs, CTOs, CIOs. They assume that their personal needs are duplicated across the corporation. In my company we replaced a working Netscape server with Exchange SOLELY because Netscape Calendar didn't have the feature set of Outlook Calendar. The new Exchange server is down for "maintenance" about once a week. They replaced five UNIX sysadmins with fifty MCSEs. Ain't progress wonderful?
...the US that are still debating whether or not a human fetus is alive and whether its life should be protected from abortion.
Apparently that's the hard question, because it's apparently okay to "pull the plug" on convalescents merely because they're a drain on their children's bank accounts. In modern society, your right to life is predicated on your being "wanted" by your family.
I'm guessing that it's because the people that need the Outlook feature set are precisely those people that won't ever consider anything but Microsoft. You know, the people that will send your jobs overseas to save money, but mandate Outlook/Exchange even though they can easily get by with something else that's cheaper or even free.
We use MO drives at work (it's a DICOM standard while CDROM is not). Not blazingly fast, but good enough that you can boot an OS off of it and not care much. Handy as a floppy, roomier than a zip, handy for backups (before the days of the huge harddrives), etc.
What went wrong? Hard to say. But one can compare with zip drives to see what the difference was. You had parallel port zip drives, handy in the days of sneaker net, but I've never seen a parallel port MO drive. You could get IDE zip drives, but MOs tended to stick to SCSI. Until recently, the few IDE MO drives out there were crap. There were some OEMs including zip drives in their systems, but I'm not aware of any that include removable MO drives.
But I think they're dead altogether now that flash memory devices are common. Which is a shame because there are places where MO still makes sense. But specialized applications and hardware still dances to the tune of the desktop user. Sad.
I'm not really surprised at the results. FreeBSD has never seemed faster than Linux
Linux 2.6 is significantly faster than 2.4, yet FreeBSD continually beats 2.4 in these benchmarks. If FreeBSD has never seemed faster than Linux, it must be because you started Linux with 2.6.
Beware subjectivity! I remember rebuilding all of Slackware with "-O3 -athlon" because everyone told me that it was 10% to 15% faster than the default 386 code. After two days of compiling in the background while working on the desktop in the foreground, when I was done Slackware subjectively seemed magnitudes faster! Guess why? Duh! Speaking of Slackware, it has always seemed subjectively faster than Mandrake. Yet they use the same kernel and libc. Why? Guess. In the end, to me, FreeBSD seems faster than Linux. But that's my subjective opinion.
Beware benchmarks! These benchmarks were focused on network related system calls. If you're running a web server it makes sense to pay attention to them. But if you're running a development workstation or corporate desktop, they're meaningless. Who is going to have 4000 copies of emacs running at the same time? As an aside, I just love it when Tom's Hardware has benchmarks of cases. And not just cooling benchmarks, which might make sense, but 3D video benchmarks. Huh? This makes no sense to me at all, but the benchmarks are there, and people use them to buy cases.
In short, look at those benchmarks again. In most cases Linux wins, but by an insignificant amount, considering that both Linux and FreeBSD have the same Big O performances. What makes Linux 2.6 faster than 2.4 is not some tweaks or hand coded optimizations, but completely different O(1) algorithms.
As a confirmed and commited FreeBSD, I must assert, sir, that you are a nitwit.
FreeBSD 5.1 has not, indeed, reached the hallowed state known as "stable". But neither has Linux 2.6. This is a genuine apples vs apples comparison (expect for the inclusion of NetBSD and OpenBSD, which were stable releases).
Seriously, with this type of improvement, I can only conclude that the 2.4 and 2.5 series were crap. Web pages rendering twice as fast? Are you sure you were using the same browser and version both times? Since you don't say what your previous kernel was, a 100% rendering improvement leads me to suspect 0.97!
I also suspect you're running a 200MHz Celeron or equivalent, since I've never had any problems compiling, listening and surfing at the same time. Okay I have, but under Windows. I will get some lag when I'm running a "make install" on a large package, but that's because the fs is swamped. Other than that I get no performance problems running all this stuff at the same time under Slackware (or under FreeBSD).
And having built on recently, I agree. The SATA cable is much more convenient than the old ribbon. It's stiff so you can bend it into position easily and not have it flop around. It's small so you can snake it around the back of the drive cage. And at least on my motherboard, the SATA connectors were in the middle of the mobo, instead of up at the top in the snake's nest of connections.
The power connection is much smaller as well, and you don't break off fingernails if you have to remove it. Unfortunately, most PSU's don't come with SATA power connections, so you have to use an adaptor.
Don't ask. Everytime I've asked this question on Slashdot, or any Linux support forum, I've been flamed. Apparently until the SATA gets hammered down and made a default part of the kernel, the typical Linux advocate regards it as unimportant. It's almost as if they expect people NOT to use SATA drives just because it isn't ready for Linux yet.
Yet SATA-only systems are becoming increasingly common. I expect in six months that OEMs won't even ship IDE systems any more. If Linux distros don't put in SATA support by default in their install CDs, there's going to be a real problem.
Anyone with a brain knows that this $50M is not an investment, because an investment expects a return on investment.
Actually it could be, albeit a risky one. Make your investment a publicized and noisy one, and the SCO stock goes up, and up, and up. Cash out before the court date. Profit!
So who has an installation CD for the development version of Linux with SATA drivers? No one that I've found. You're sarcastic comments aren't helping me locate one either.
No, it's because no Linux installation CD or floppy image I've yet found supports installation to my ICH5 SATA drive. Everything I've tried hangs during install. There are SATA patches for Linux, but they're not on any installation media that I've found.
On FreeBSD 5.1, however, I've not had one second of problem with it. I expect Linux will catch up. Heck, it HAS to catch up, because systems are being sold with no IDE drives. IDE has become "legacy" hardware overnight, and the Linux community needs to wake up and realize it. SATA support in FreeBSD is new, very new. But at least it has it.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is precisely why there's an ongoing jihad between vi and emacs users. vi is the UNIX editor, emacs was designed for another system. But at the beginning, emacs was tiny. But it's been around so long that Zawinski's Law demanded it expand until it could real mail.
Whether you can or cannot is irrelevant, since OpenOffice is a direct descendent of an application designed for Windows. Yes, Windows. That fact that it because most popular under UNIX doesn't change its heritage.
Now if OpenOffice were designed with all of his other design principles, then it would be a piece of cake to script.
Why not? We have to keep up with "One the Minute, Every Minute, Slashdot Linux coverage".
As a systems programmer, I'm supposed to have a lot of in depth OS knowledge. Which is why I'm currently taking sysadmin classes, to get a better knowledge of it.
Every systems programmer I work with uses Linux or FreeBSD at work or at home (though maybe not as their primary syste). Most hardware engineers here do as well. But none of the application developers do. I don't know if this is the industry norm, but it is at my work.
When I have a code review, the systems programmers want to know why I used vfork() instead of execve(). The applications programmers want to know why I used a visitor pattern instead of a mediator.
You've misunderstood the nature of the actuarial industry. Actuarians place a monetary value on risk, not on life. Granted, government "fixes" to health care insurance have severely distorted the actuarial functioning, but the concept is still there. If an insurance company doesn't pay out, it's commiting fraud and breaking the law. But if a government or public financed health plan doesn't pay out, it's perfectly "legal".
If you want the drug delivered to your stomache or duodenum, then I guess this works. But it's hardly optimal.
My company is working with "contrast destruction agents", which is a way to use ultrasound to precisely deliver an agent to the heart at a precise time. The agent (drug) is encapsulated in microscopic bubbles that get disintegrated at a specific ultrasound frequency. Target the area with ultrasound, press a button to briefly change the frequency, and you get delivery where you want it. Apply this same technology to chemotherapy and you have an amazing innovation in cancer treatment. The process already out there, and once the research and approval hurdles are met, it will become a routine application in many areas of medicine.
Yes, it is quite selfish to divert $100,000s of dollars to keeping the heart beating in a braindead human
In the current case of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, the money is her own. She has $750,000 of her own money, from a malpractice suit, to keep her alive. But her husband and legal guardian wants it, so he got a court to order her death. Oh, and she's not even brain dead. Not even close.
That's selfishness.
I refuse to place a monetary price on human life, because what has a price can be sold, discounted and liquidated.
Or you may be thinking of a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) order.
No, I'm thinking of the cases where plugs are "pulled" on those that are not "brain dead". Fortunately it's rare, but only because the legal obstacles that must be hurdled. The UK may be different, but in the US it happens. One reference to a current case is Terri Schindler-Schiavo. Terri may not be competent enough now to make legal decisions, but she is most certainly not brain dead.
Is the thought of being branded a member of the "religious right" too high a price to pay for defending a person's right to live?
Terri is brain damaged, but she is not brain dead. She is still a living human being in every definition of the phrase. The only "life support" she received was a feeding tube. But the courts have ruled, and enforced with police, that she may no longer be fed, not even by her closest relatives. A priest was even prevented by police from administering communion because the host was considered "food". Terri's is being executed by the government for the crime of being inconvenient to her legal guardian.
They're simply the decision makers. CEOs, CTOs, CIOs. They assume that their personal needs are duplicated across the corporation. In my company we replaced a working Netscape server with Exchange SOLELY because Netscape Calendar didn't have the feature set of Outlook Calendar. The new Exchange server is down for "maintenance" about once a week. They replaced five UNIX sysadmins with fifty MCSEs. Ain't progress wonderful?
Oooh so selfish of them! How awful it is that they don't want people to die.
...the US that are still debating whether or not a human fetus is alive and whether its life should be protected from abortion.
Apparently that's the hard question, because it's apparently okay to "pull the plug" on convalescents merely because they're a drain on their children's bank accounts. In modern society, your right to life is predicated on your being "wanted" by your family.
Or a functioning brain with accumulated memories? The latter I'd say.
Functioning brain, maybe. But accumulated memories? Are you advocating the euthanasia of amnesiacs? Or infanticide?
DA: "Where were you on the night of December 6th?"
Saeger: "I don't remember."
Judge: "Abort him!"
I'm guessing that it's because the people that need the Outlook feature set are precisely those people that won't ever consider anything but Microsoft. You know, the people that will send your jobs overseas to save money, but mandate Outlook/Exchange even though they can easily get by with something else that's cheaper or even free.
We use MO drives at work (it's a DICOM standard while CDROM is not). Not blazingly fast, but good enough that you can boot an OS off of it and not care much. Handy as a floppy, roomier than a zip, handy for backups (before the days of the huge harddrives), etc.
What went wrong? Hard to say. But one can compare with zip drives to see what the difference was. You had parallel port zip drives, handy in the days of sneaker net, but I've never seen a parallel port MO drive. You could get IDE zip drives, but MOs tended to stick to SCSI. Until recently, the few IDE MO drives out there were crap. There were some OEMs including zip drives in their systems, but I'm not aware of any that include removable MO drives.
But I think they're dead altogether now that flash memory devices are common. Which is a shame because there are places where MO still makes sense. But specialized applications and hardware still dances to the tune of the desktop user. Sad.
Oooh, nice italics! I knew I should have previewed the post first...
I'm not really surprised at the results. FreeBSD has never seemed faster than Linux
Linux 2.6 is significantly faster than 2.4, yet FreeBSD continually beats 2.4 in these benchmarks. If FreeBSD has never seemed faster than Linux, it must be because you started Linux with 2.6.
Beware subjectivity! I remember rebuilding all of Slackware with "-O3 -athlon" because everyone told me that it was 10% to 15% faster than the default 386 code. After two days of compiling in the background while working on the desktop in the foreground, when I was done Slackware subjectively seemed magnitudes faster! Guess why? Duh! Speaking of Slackware, it has always seemed subjectively faster than Mandrake. Yet they use the same kernel and libc. Why? Guess. In the end, to me, FreeBSD seems faster than Linux. But that's my subjective opinion.
Beware benchmarks! These benchmarks were focused on network related system calls. If you're running a web server it makes sense to pay attention to them. But if you're running a development workstation or corporate desktop, they're meaningless. Who is going to have 4000 copies of emacs running at the same time? As an aside, I just love it when Tom's Hardware has benchmarks of cases. And not just cooling benchmarks, which might make sense, but 3D video benchmarks. Huh? This makes no sense to me at all, but the benchmarks are there, and people use them to buy cases.
In short, look at those benchmarks again. In most cases Linux wins, but by an insignificant amount, considering that both Linux and FreeBSD have the same Big O performances. What makes Linux 2.6 faster than 2.4 is not some tweaks or hand coded optimizations, but completely different O(1) algorithms.
As a confirmed and commited FreeBSD, I must assert, sir, that you are a nitwit.
FreeBSD 5.1 has not, indeed, reached the hallowed state known as "stable". But neither has Linux 2.6. This is a genuine apples vs apples comparison (expect for the inclusion of NetBSD and OpenBSD, which were stable releases).
Pentium makes the internet faster!
Seriously, with this type of improvement, I can only conclude that the 2.4 and 2.5 series were crap. Web pages rendering twice as fast? Are you sure you were using the same browser and version both times? Since you don't say what your previous kernel was, a 100% rendering improvement leads me to suspect 0.97!
I also suspect you're running a 200MHz Celeron or equivalent, since I've never had any problems compiling, listening and surfing at the same time. Okay I have, but under Windows. I will get some lag when I'm running a "make install" on a large package, but that's because the fs is swamped. Other than that I get no performance problems running all this stuff at the same time under Slackware (or under FreeBSD).
It's just plain easier for the systems builders.
And having built on recently, I agree. The SATA cable is much more convenient than the old ribbon. It's stiff so you can bend it into position easily and not have it flop around. It's small so you can snake it around the back of the drive cage. And at least on my motherboard, the SATA connectors were in the middle of the mobo, instead of up at the top in the snake's nest of connections.
The power connection is much smaller as well, and you don't break off fingernails if you have to remove it. Unfortunately, most PSU's don't come with SATA power connections, so you have to use an adaptor.
Don't ask. Everytime I've asked this question on Slashdot, or any Linux support forum, I've been flamed. Apparently until the SATA gets hammered down and made a default part of the kernel, the typical Linux advocate regards it as unimportant. It's almost as if they expect people NOT to use SATA drives just because it isn't ready for Linux yet.
Yet SATA-only systems are becoming increasingly common. I expect in six months that OEMs won't even ship IDE systems any more. If Linux distros don't put in SATA support by default in their install CDs, there's going to be a real problem.
Since I work for a European company, I know first hand how greedy they can be.
Yeah! The greedy European capitalists want to rule the world instead!
Anyone with a brain knows that this $50M is not an investment, because an investment expects a return on investment.
Actually it could be, albeit a risky one. Make your investment a publicized and noisy one, and the SCO stock goes up, and up, and up. Cash out before the court date. Profit!
So who has an installation CD for the development version of Linux with SATA drivers? No one that I've found. You're sarcastic comments aren't helping me locate one either.
No, it's because no Linux installation CD or floppy image I've yet found supports installation to my ICH5 SATA drive. Everything I've tried hangs during install. There are SATA patches for Linux, but they're not on any installation media that I've found.
On FreeBSD 5.1, however, I've not had one second of problem with it. I expect Linux will catch up. Heck, it HAS to catch up, because systems are being sold with no IDE drives. IDE has become "legacy" hardware overnight, and the Linux community needs to wake up and realize it. SATA support in FreeBSD is new, very new. But at least it has it.