Okay, I read the article, and here's a basic rundown (I think:):
* 802.11g in a homogenous network (ie: only 802.11g access points) is faster than 802.11b (by a factor of five or so) *and* 802.11a (just a bit faster)
* 802.11g in a heterogenous network (ie: some 802.11g access points, and some 802.11a access points _which have been "assosiated" with the 802.11g_) is rougly 1.5 to 2.5 times faster than 802.11b, depending on the type of collision-detection algorithm used.
So, to sum up the summary: If you start replacing your 802.11b access points with 802.11g access points, you'll see some performance gain with 802.11g client devices right away. When all your 802.11b client devices are gone (and thus all the 802.11b access points), it'll be *way* faster. Faster even than 802.11a.
Why is this billed as a bad thing? You get compatibility with your existing infrastructure, a little bonus performance now, and when the time comes, *bang* you get a big boost.
This is the kind of thing that sysadmins such as myself LOVE:)
Remember when the Feds snatching this guy from Intel was a big deal here at/.? When we all thought that the FBI was overstepping their bounds? When we all thought that they were wrong; that an Intel engineer couldn't possibly be guilty?
The problem now is that we'll never know whether he's actually guilty, or whether he was forced into the plea. You can hope that he was, indeed, guilty, and that the FBI was quite right in bending the Constitution to keep him around until he finally admitted it. Or you can say that it's never right to break a person's rights in order to get them to admit their guilt, regardless of whether you *know* they're guilty (even if you couldn't prove it in court) or not.
The problem with the former approach (hoping that he's guilty and accepting the methods involved in attaining the admission of guilt) is that the constitution wasn't just some fancy of some guy. It was the result of millenia of people being raped, tortured, and murdered. In many cases, that rape, torture, and murder was designed to elicit confessions (from those who weren't the ones being killed, obviously:). Relatively speaking, this particular stab at Rights (note the capitalisation there) has thus far been very short-lived. A few centuries, barely that. If it slides into the same environment that was prelevant for thousands of years previously, it wouldn't be surprising (statistically speaking).
do palms become laptops? If I got a palm, I'd get one because of its size, if I wanted something more powerful, I'd get a laptop. This just seems to me a cross between a palm and a laptop that has none of the benefits of either.
Except that this is the size of a normal PDA. I believe it's somewhat smaller than an iPaq with its sleeve.
Of course, even if it *was* bigger, that may still hit the sweet spot for many people. Or perhaps we're all your clones, and not only do we actually *CARE* about what you don't need this device for (hahahaha), but we also have the exact same not-needs?:)
I dunno. If he was saying that the quality of Russian grammar, spelling, and prose was better than the English grammar, spelling, and prose, you'd think he would have mentioned that he was a world-class linguist with three or four degrees.:)
Overall, I found the article somewhat weak. While the author made some very good specific points, he often harped about the quality of the localised ripoffs. Specifically, the author referred to the original as "superior" to the localised versions which incorporated a culture's own mythology and history.
Having written a large number of editorial articles in the past, I think I understand where this author is coming from. The author may be attempting to appeal to those who are staunch (some might say zealous) supporters of the Harry Potter and its creator Rowling by appealing to their vanity.
Unfortunately, I think the tradeoff wasn't worth it. The end result is that anybody *rational* who reads it (anybody who can understand the innate quality and indeed superiority of characters adapted to the mythos, legends, and history of a given community) will see this HUGE flaw in logic and will doubt the rest of the article.
I know I do, myself - even though after careful examination I agree with his specific points, I wish such careful examination wasn't required.
I don't read Tom's Hardware enough any more to be familiar with the quality of its various authors. They have several, so it *can* vary. That being said, I stopped reading it because I found MUCH better sources of information (I pointed out two of them).
Regardless, though, this "article" didn't have an author listed. Might have been submitted anonymously I suppose.
The closest it gets to examining the (possible!) new Windows filesystem is calling it a relational database, and going on for a bit about how paths (ie: directory structures) will be irrelevant. Oh, and yeah, the closest thing he found to the implementation was called "winfs.exe" and did nothing but produce errors.
The bulk of the article is a (poor) attempt at explaining filesystems in general, and FAT and NTFS in particular. However, it gets a number of things wrong and - at best - garbles a lot of things. If you already know what he's trying to say, you *may* be able to pick out truths, but if you don't you'll walk away with misinformation.
I would suggest instead perusing arstechnica.com and aceshardware.com. I don't know if they've done any filesystem stuff, but if they have it'll be of reasonable quality.
If cable or DSL were available, there wouldn't be a need for magnoliaroad.net et al....
Obviously cable and DSL aren't available to them;) They were, however, examples of alternative technologies which are *much* cheaper, even over long distances.
Frame relay pricing is also not distance-sensitive as T1 is (at least here in Qwest-land, YMMV). It turns out we get better customer service on a FR than T1, while loop costs on the latter are higher!
provide justification whenever a proprietary software product is acquired instead of open source software;
I have always been of the opinion that the correct tool should be chose for the task at hand, be that tooling open or proprietary I really dont care.
I get concerned when I see clauses such as those above when there is no corresponding clause for justifying Open source choice over proprietary. Forcing adoption of Open Source thru legisaltion is every bit as bad, if not worse as the methods MS used to gain dominance.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, it's a sad state of affairs when people need to be told to justify picking the best solution available.
Unfortunately, that IS the state of affairs. It's sad, but many, many, MANY proprietary software aquisitions aren't chosen because they're the best solution for the job, but because somebody got taken out to a nice dinner. What's more, in my experience, the people who are deciding what software to buy aren't even remotely qualified to evaluate whether or not it even solves the problem at hand, let alone whether it's the best solution or not.
Does this happen with Open Source or Free Software? I've never seen it, but I'll accept for the sake of argument that it happens. But on a much, much, much smaller scale. Because of this problem, because it's so endemic with proprietary software but pretty much non-existent with Open Source and Free Software, because authorities routinely purchase software which doesn't fit the bill (so to speak), it's necessary to say to them, "allright, you can choose whatever you want, but if it's going to be proprietary, if it's going to cose us these truly distrubing amounts of money, you have to tell us why."
It's a purely reactionary bill to a very specific trend that's been observed. It isn't an attempt to make some ethical statement, it's an attempt to stop the over-aquisition of software that costs more to buy, that costs more to maintain, and may not even solve the problem it was supposedly bought for.
Why don't they say the same Open Source and Free Software? I dunno. I guess because up-front aquisition costs are so small in comparison to proprietary software as to be negligible (I've seen a government agency purchanse about six million dollars worth of Oracle licenses when all they needed were flat-file text databases, and would certainly have been served by one of MySQL, SAPDB, or Postgres. They could have bought the software, hardware, *and* support from a vendor like IBM for about a sixth of that). Perhaps it's also proven to be cheaper to maintain, as well. (And, in my experience, it always is. Invariably. I had six people working under me at one point maintaining a hundred Windows workstations. And they were overworked. I was maintaining, on my own, well over two hundred Unix workstations and servers. And I still had time left over to do the odd programming task that some other group needed, as well as "manage" the six Windows techs. They weren't idiots, either, they followed pretty decent administration policies. There have been studies to this affect. There have also been studies saying the opposite, but I'm sorry, my own experience trumps all studies that were paid-for by lobbiests:).
Perhaps, if or when Open Source and Free Software proves to be more expensive to both purchase and maintain than the overwhelmingly vast majority of proprietary software that's bought, there will be another bill similar to this one, stating that government agencies must justify these obscene expenditures with little to no benefit. They've proven that they're willing to do it when it happens, so I'll have faith they'll do it again if it becomes necessary:)
Yeah, it'll be nice to have ipv6 in place when we need it, but I think a higher priority would be to speed up X's abysmal performance when compared to most other modern windowing subsystems out there, including Aqua and Windows' GUI.
Yeah, I know, you're trolling, but hey - why not use this as an opportunity to enlighten others?:)
Many people, unfortunately, misunderstand what X is. Basically, X is a hardware abstraction layer. Each app doesn't need to code specifically for each video card, nor do they code specifically for a given output device.
Instead, X exports a fair number of "primitives" which applications use. The X server then renders these primitives. Normally to a screen.
How does the X server get these instructions, for lines, pixels, polygons, bitmaps, and what have you? That primarily depends on the task at hand; there are a number of extensions and modules that are used when they're needed. There's DRI, which allows a very, very thin abstraction layer. There's TCP, which lets apps talk X over a network. Loads of other ones. Shared memory and UNIX domain sockets are used for general local communications, just as fast as any other platform.
"Wait! You're describing a video driver!" you might say. Indeed, you'd be right; XFree86 is you're computer's video driver. But instead of each driver needing to be 20M full of duplicated code, we have small driver-modules, which share a common code base (the rest of XFree86). XFree86 also includes the libraries apps use, a (very) basic GUI toolkit, the tools to control your video drivers, etc., etc.
Is XFree86 slow? No. I'd like to see some benchmarks where XFree86 is more than 1-4% slower than a similarily-functional Windows or Mac driver. You might have trouble though, since none exist.
Last time I booted into Windows 2000 and tried to run a game, it came out at about 62 frames per second. The same game under XFree86 ran at about 64.5 frames per second. Why such a little difference? Because XFree86 with a decent video card is just as fast as any video drivers you'll find under Windows. The differences in speed I saw had nothing to do with XFree86 and everything to do with what I was running it on; CPU-intensive programs I run under Windows 2000 which don't do *any* graphics whatsoever are almost exactly 4% slower than under Linux; the same difference I saw when running that game.
t's totally up to Microsoft to determine how to license their software, and whom to license it to. What's the fuss?
It's a big deal BECAUSE there is no license. They're giving away unlicensed software. To students. Who might use it to make really great software. With unlicensed tools. They might make great software. Illegal software, because of those unlicensed tools. Software MS may take offense at.
If this was a Microsoft problem and they kept it quiet you would have been ranting and raving right now, right?
Were it a Microsoft problem, they would have known about it six months ago and not told anybody.
Were it a Microsoft problem, three months ago their customers would have started reporting the problem (along with the exploits people had been trying to use), and Microsoft would have denied everything.
Were it a Microsoft problem, four months after discovery they would have released a patch which broke almost every system, and the advisory would have stated that risk was "minimal", despite the fact that they'd known about the problem for four months and people had been actively using exploits for two months.
Were it a Microsoft problem, six months after their initial discovery they would have finally released a patch that worked... and charged you for it.
Personally, I don't care what other people call it - I call it "unix", and everybody seems to get the idea:)
That being said, you misunderstand what they refer to when they say "GNU/Linux". They aren't referring to the kernel itself. If they felt that the kernel (Linux itself) was FSF software, they'd just call it "GNU":) No, they're referring to what almost every laymen refers to when they say "Linux" - the complete system, as sold by distributors.
Huge portions of a standard Linux distribution are GNU software, and they're arguably some of the most important parts (the compiler, the system libraries). When they say "you should call -it- GNU/Linux", they aren't referring to the kernel. They're refferring to the kernel *and* the rest of the system, of which the kernel is a relatively small part. The "GNU" in "GNU/Linux" refers to the GNU software that the distribution is built on, not the kernel. That's what the "Linux" part in "GNU/Linux" refers to.
The problem is that even if you consider MS a troll they are the largest troll you've ever encountered and the only way to stop them is to fight back in some aspect, you can't simply ignore them. MS has a special status regaurdless of if you like or hate them. If you like them they are your biggest friends, and if you hate them they are your biggest enemy.
I do actually agree wholeheartedly. Quite frankly, I'm glad I don't have to make decisions about whether they're invited to conferences, or allowed to attend at all.
That said, if you allow MS to speak at an OSS conference and they are actuall able to pursuade the attendants, who I would concider OSS advocates and guru's, to switch away from OSS then maybe MS is doing something right. If you really believe in something you shouldn't be able to be swayed.
Well, this goes back to the "naive attitude" thing. People _can_ be manipulated into feeling things they otherwise wouldn't feel. Microsoft is extremely good at this, they've displayed their proficiency time and again. A good example is the truism, "lies, damn lies, and statistics."
The point is that you can dupe perfectly intelligent people into acting a certain way or believing a certain viewpoint, when later on in hindsight they'll say, "geeze, all the evidence was there, why didn't I see it?"
Of course, if MS does convince people, based on honest-to-goodness merits and whatnot, good for them. I don't wish the destruction of Microsoft, I'd rather a nice, healthy balance with lots of choices and alternatives for everybody:) That will, unfortunately, require a changed Microsoft. (IBM is one of the companies I most admire. In fact, I have quite the unhealthy respect for them. They are just a corporation after all. But they've been incredibly good citizens, by and large, for the last ten or fifteen years. That was a truly remarkable turnaround, and they've done so much good for the industry since... if MS can pull the same, I'd be more than happy.)
Perhaps the OSS people are afraid that there isn't any one solution be is MS or *nix or whatever.
Yeah, like I said above. I'm not interested in seeing the total destruction of Microsoft, per se. What you saw me reacting to was the kind of attitude that can so easily result in the destruction of FOSS, were it held by enough people.
If the Open Source community is so convinced of Microsoft's villany and non-worth, allow them to speak on their own behalf. People need to come to their own conclusions about this matter, or they'll never truly reconcile themselves to the fact that Open Source is a truly good thing, possibly even superior to Microsoft's offerings. Wouldn't it be better for the OS movement to win in a forum of free discussion, than to say, "This is MY point of view, and it's the right one. No, I won't let you speak and defend yourself, because I'm right." How childish does that seem?
That's a naive attitude.
This isn't the movies, where the villain details his dastardly plot to the hero shortly before his demise. Microsoft has proven time and again that they're adept manipulators of the media, the public, and even engineers (.NET being "an open standard, free for anybody to implement", anybody?).
Like any troll you enounter on the 'net, you shouldn't feed them. You shouldn't pander them. You shouldn't pretend like what's coming out of their mouth isn't horse-shit on a stick.
Microsoft is on the defensive. They would like nothing better than to see FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) wiped off the face of the Earth. Microsoft employees and executives have admitted this on-record, though not in such colourful terms.
Anybody who's willing to give MS every opportunity to actually ACCOMPLISH that deserves just what they get. Remember, kiddies, this is Microsoft. They know what they're doing. They're going to use this opportunity to try and further their aims. You know what? That may include pretending to be a model member of the community... for the time being. Don't play with the dragon, you're gonna get burnt.
Interesting how modern day critics claim the gnu project to be too political
I will, for this post, ignore the blatant pandering to the unwashed masses of Slashdot readership.
That being said, how dare you misrepresent Mr. Ritchie? He didn't say he felt that it was too political. He said that it was more extreme than he cared for. "I believe we should kill all the whales" is obviously more extreme than "we should only kill some of them", but they're equally political. They're also equally economic in nature.
He was co-developing UNIX before printer companies decided to have software contractors signing NDAs and closing off the specs, or vendor lock-ins.
And as somebody else has already pointed out, he was co-developing C when there was nothing *BUT* vendor lock-in.
I disagree. If everybody was honest, you'd be right. But that's not the case.
Microsoft has spent years and years outright lying, cheating, and stealing, in order to come to market dominance and stay there. (If you don't believe me, go ahead and review the anti-trust court cases.)
So *any* win for non-MS companies, even proprietary ones, is good. It will help mature the industry, and make it less lopsided. I'm not interested in the complete destruction of MS - that'd probably end up being just as bad as what we have now; a monoculture.
But these *are* wins. Microsoft has less money in its pockets to lie about FOSS, for instance. It has less clout to twist people's arms.
Now, before you start saying "Oh, MS could easily fix that...", instead think about the real problem here. Either I don't use that feature at all, or MS has to think of every single malicious use of a feature and only allow the non-dangerous ones. Sorry, that's not a good solution. You're holding MS (or anybody else) responsible for other people's creativity.
No. I'm holding Microsoft responsible for shitty code written by people who thought they'd get big bucks after going to a three-month course at a local community college. That same code that's either unaudited or audited by somebody no more technically advanced.
There's something called "criminal negligence". Look it up. Criminal negligence is all about how, if you can't do a job right, you aren't allowed to do it at all. If you go ahead and do it anyways, and that causes some harm to some person, you're criminally negligent.
Basically, if Bell Canada (or their holding company) wants to do something price isn't a problem, gov't regulations aren't an issue, and they're already so in bed with municipalities they can pretty much plug in anything they want where they want for as long as they want. In short if they wanna go WiFi they've got everything in place to make it happen, happen big, and nobody can compete.
That's bull. Plain and simple. Bell Canada is MASSIVE, and they're a GREAT BIG BLOODY MONOPOLY. Yay! They're regulated up the wing-wang. I love Bell Canada. They have to sell DSL at *extremely* fixed prices (low to consumers, and way lower to resellers), so I can get 1.2Mbit/128kbit DSL for less than $30CAD a month. (That's less than $20USD, for those non-Canadian folk reading this.)
What does Bell Canada get for this? A 20-year monopoly on providing DSL service. Of course, "monopoly" is something of a misnomer, since they're required to sell at absurdly low rates to wholesalers/resellers. So Bell may be providing the wires, but they're getting raped on cost. But they have 20 years of these prices to cover the cost of the rollout.
Rollout, I say? Yes, rollout. Ontario has an amazing ATM network, thanks to Bell Canada, and their government-granted 20-year monopoly. Not only can I get 1.2Mbit/128kbit DSL for dirt-fucking-cheap, but I can get 3.0Mbit/640kbit DSL (That's 400kB/s downloading and 80kB/s uploading) for $60CAD or less. Top that without somebody who has a huge amonut of time to cover network rollout costs!
Is Bell Canada a monopoly? Yes! Did the government give them this status? Yes! Are we thankful? YES!
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, I read the article, and here's a basic rundown (I think :):
:)
* 802.11g in a homogenous network (ie: only 802.11g access points) is faster than 802.11b (by a factor of five or so) *and* 802.11a (just a bit faster)
* 802.11g in a heterogenous network (ie: some 802.11g access points, and some 802.11a access points _which have been "assosiated" with the 802.11g_) is rougly 1.5 to 2.5 times faster than 802.11b, depending on the type of collision-detection algorithm used.
So, to sum up the summary: If you start replacing your 802.11b access points with 802.11g access points, you'll see some performance gain with 802.11g client devices right away. When all your 802.11b client devices are gone (and thus all the 802.11b access points), it'll be *way* faster. Faster even than 802.11a.
Why is this billed as a bad thing? You get compatibility with your existing infrastructure, a little bonus performance now, and when the time comes, *bang* you get a big boost.
This is the kind of thing that sysadmins such as myself LOVE
The problem now is that we'll never know whether he's actually guilty, or whether he was forced into the plea. You can hope that he was, indeed, guilty, and that the FBI was quite right in bending the Constitution to keep him around until he finally admitted it. Or you can say that it's never right to break a person's rights in order to get them to admit their guilt, regardless of whether you *know* they're guilty (even if you couldn't prove it in court) or not.
The problem with the former approach (hoping that he's guilty and accepting the methods involved in attaining the admission of guilt) is that the constitution wasn't just some fancy of some guy. It was the result of millenia of people being raped, tortured, and murdered. In many cases, that rape, torture, and murder was designed to elicit confessions (from those who weren't the ones being killed, obviously :). Relatively speaking, this particular stab at Rights (note the capitalisation there) has thus far been very short-lived. A few centuries, barely that. If it slides into the same environment that was prelevant for thousands of years previously, it wouldn't be surprising (statistically speaking).
Except that this is the size of a normal PDA. I believe it's somewhat smaller than an iPaq with its sleeve.
Of course, even if it *was* bigger, that may still hit the sweet spot for many people. Or perhaps we're all your clones, and not only do we actually *CARE* about what you don't need this device for (hahahaha), but we also have the exact same not-needs? :)
I dunno. If he was saying that the quality of Russian grammar, spelling, and prose was better than the English grammar, spelling, and prose, you'd think he would have mentioned that he was a world-class linguist with three or four degrees. :)
Overall, I found the article somewhat weak. While the author made some very good specific points, he often harped about the quality of the localised ripoffs. Specifically, the author referred to the original as "superior" to the localised versions which incorporated a culture's own mythology and history.
Having written a large number of editorial articles in the past, I think I understand where this author is coming from. The author may be attempting to appeal to those who are staunch (some might say zealous) supporters of the Harry Potter and its creator Rowling by appealing to their vanity.
Unfortunately, I think the tradeoff wasn't worth it. The end result is that anybody *rational* who reads it (anybody who can understand the innate quality and indeed superiority of characters adapted to the mythos, legends, and history of a given community) will see this HUGE flaw in logic and will doubt the rest of the article.
I know I do, myself - even though after careful examination I agree with his specific points, I wish such careful examination wasn't required.
I don't read Tom's Hardware enough any more to be familiar with the quality of its various authors. They have several, so it *can* vary. That being said, I stopped reading it because I found MUCH better sources of information (I pointed out two of them).
Regardless, though, this "article" didn't have an author listed. Might have been submitted anonymously I suppose.
This article is tripe.
The closest it gets to examining the (possible!) new Windows filesystem is calling it a relational database, and going on for a bit about how paths (ie: directory structures) will be irrelevant. Oh, and yeah, the closest thing he found to the implementation was called "winfs.exe" and did nothing but produce errors.
The bulk of the article is a (poor) attempt at explaining filesystems in general, and FAT and NTFS in particular. However, it gets a number of things wrong and - at best - garbles a lot of things. If you already know what he's trying to say, you *may* be able to pick out truths, but if you don't you'll walk away with misinformation.
I would suggest instead perusing arstechnica.com and aceshardware.com. I don't know if they've done any filesystem stuff, but if they have it'll be of reasonable quality.
It's a pretty small installation as these things go, but most business uses probably revolve around those sizes of networks.
:)
So good news.
And, if it turns out that it's bullshit, at least it's first-rate bullshit
You seem to be forgetting your history... :)
Obviously cable and DSL aren't available to them ;) They were, however, examples of alternative technologies which are *much* cheaper, even over long distances.
This, indeed, is another example ;)
With respect to the T1 ... god, PLEASE shop around for options.
T1s aren't significantly faster than good DSL service, and can be significantly slower than cable 'net access. For about 20 times the price.
Now, you may have no other option, but do shop around. You won't regret it.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, it's a sad state of affairs when people need to be told to justify picking the best solution available.
Unfortunately, that IS the state of affairs. It's sad, but many, many, MANY proprietary software aquisitions aren't chosen because they're the best solution for the job, but because somebody got taken out to a nice dinner. What's more, in my experience, the people who are deciding what software to buy aren't even remotely qualified to evaluate whether or not it even solves the problem at hand, let alone whether it's the best solution or not.
Does this happen with Open Source or Free Software? I've never seen it, but I'll accept for the sake of argument that it happens. But on a much, much, much smaller scale. Because of this problem, because it's so endemic with proprietary software but pretty much non-existent with Open Source and Free Software, because authorities routinely purchase software which doesn't fit the bill (so to speak), it's necessary to say to them, "allright, you can choose whatever you want, but if it's going to be proprietary, if it's going to cose us these truly distrubing amounts of money, you have to tell us why."
It's a purely reactionary bill to a very specific trend that's been observed. It isn't an attempt to make some ethical statement, it's an attempt to stop the over-aquisition of software that costs more to buy, that costs more to maintain, and may not even solve the problem it was supposedly bought for.
Why don't they say the same Open Source and Free Software? I dunno. I guess because up-front aquisition costs are so small in comparison to proprietary software as to be negligible (I've seen a government agency purchanse about six million dollars worth of Oracle licenses when all they needed were flat-file text databases, and would certainly have been served by one of MySQL, SAPDB, or Postgres. They could have bought the software, hardware, *and* support from a vendor like IBM for about a sixth of that). Perhaps it's also proven to be cheaper to maintain, as well. (And, in my experience, it always is. Invariably. I had six people working under me at one point maintaining a hundred Windows workstations. And they were overworked. I was maintaining, on my own, well over two hundred Unix workstations and servers. And I still had time left over to do the odd programming task that some other group needed, as well as "manage" the six Windows techs. They weren't idiots, either, they followed pretty decent administration policies. There have been studies to this affect. There have also been studies saying the opposite, but I'm sorry, my own experience trumps all studies that were paid-for by lobbiests :).
Perhaps, if or when Open Source and Free Software proves to be more expensive to both purchase and maintain than the overwhelmingly vast majority of proprietary software that's bought, there will be another bill similar to this one, stating that government agencies must justify these obscene expenditures with little to no benefit. They've proven that they're willing to do it when it happens, so I'll have faith they'll do it again if it becomes necessary :)
Since when does Microsoft "approve" what hardware can and cannot be used with its software?
...
Oh, wait
Yeah, I know, you're trolling, but hey - why not use this as an opportunity to enlighten others? :)
Many people, unfortunately, misunderstand what X is. Basically, X is a hardware abstraction layer. Each app doesn't need to code specifically for each video card, nor do they code specifically for a given output device.
Instead, X exports a fair number of "primitives" which applications use. The X server then renders these primitives. Normally to a screen.
How does the X server get these instructions, for lines, pixels, polygons, bitmaps, and what have you? That primarily depends on the task at hand; there are a number of extensions and modules that are used when they're needed. There's DRI, which allows a very, very thin abstraction layer. There's TCP, which lets apps talk X over a network. Loads of other ones. Shared memory and UNIX domain sockets are used for general local communications, just as fast as any other platform.
"Wait! You're describing a video driver!" you might say. Indeed, you'd be right; XFree86 is you're computer's video driver. But instead of each driver needing to be 20M full of duplicated code, we have small driver-modules, which share a common code base (the rest of XFree86). XFree86 also includes the libraries apps use, a (very) basic GUI toolkit, the tools to control your video drivers, etc., etc.
Is XFree86 slow? No. I'd like to see some benchmarks where XFree86 is more than 1-4% slower than a similarily-functional Windows or Mac driver. You might have trouble though, since none exist.
Last time I booted into Windows 2000 and tried to run a game, it came out at about 62 frames per second. The same game under XFree86 ran at about 64.5 frames per second. Why such a little difference? Because XFree86 with a decent video card is just as fast as any video drivers you'll find under Windows. The differences in speed I saw had nothing to do with XFree86 and everything to do with what I was running it on; CPU-intensive programs I run under Windows 2000 which don't do *any* graphics whatsoever are almost exactly 4% slower than under Linux; the same difference I saw when running that game.
It's a big deal BECAUSE there is no license. They're giving away unlicensed software. To students. Who might use it to make really great software. With unlicensed tools. They might make great software. Illegal software, because of those unlicensed tools. Software MS may take offense at.
Were it a Microsoft problem, they would have known about it six months ago and not told anybody.
Were it a Microsoft problem, three months ago their customers would have started reporting the problem (along with the exploits people had been trying to use), and Microsoft would have denied everything.
Were it a Microsoft problem, four months after discovery they would have released a patch which broke almost every system, and the advisory would have stated that risk was "minimal", despite the fact that they'd known about the problem for four months and people had been actively using exploits for two months.
Were it a Microsoft problem, six months after their initial discovery they would have finally released a patch that worked ... and charged you for it.
Test post, please ignore.
Personally, I don't care what other people call it - I call it "unix", and everybody seems to get the idea :)
:) No, they're referring to what almost every laymen refers to when they say "Linux" - the complete system, as sold by distributors.
:)
That being said, you misunderstand what they refer to when they say "GNU/Linux". They aren't referring to the kernel itself. If they felt that the kernel (Linux itself) was FSF software, they'd just call it "GNU"
Huge portions of a standard Linux distribution are GNU software, and they're arguably some of the most important parts (the compiler, the system libraries). When they say "you should call -it- GNU/Linux", they aren't referring to the kernel. They're refferring to the kernel *and* the rest of the system, of which the kernel is a relatively small part. The "GNU" in "GNU/Linux" refers to the GNU software that the distribution is built on, not the kernel. That's what the "Linux" part in "GNU/Linux" refers to.
All clear I hope
I do actually agree wholeheartedly. Quite frankly, I'm glad I don't have to make decisions about whether they're invited to conferences, or allowed to attend at all.
Well, this goes back to the "naive attitude" thing. People _can_ be manipulated into feeling things they otherwise wouldn't feel. Microsoft is extremely good at this, they've displayed their proficiency time and again. A good example is the truism, "lies, damn lies, and statistics."
The point is that you can dupe perfectly intelligent people into acting a certain way or believing a certain viewpoint, when later on in hindsight they'll say, "geeze, all the evidence was there, why didn't I see it?"
Of course, if MS does convince people, based on honest-to-goodness merits and whatnot, good for them. I don't wish the destruction of Microsoft, I'd rather a nice, healthy balance with lots of choices and alternatives for everybody :) That will, unfortunately, require a changed Microsoft. (IBM is one of the companies I most admire. In fact, I have quite the unhealthy respect for them. They are just a corporation after all. But they've been incredibly good citizens, by and large, for the last ten or fifteen years. That was a truly remarkable turnaround, and they've done so much good for the industry since ... if MS can pull the same, I'd be more than happy.)
Yeah, like I said above. I'm not interested in seeing the total destruction of Microsoft, per se. What you saw me reacting to was the kind of attitude that can so easily result in the destruction of FOSS, were it held by enough people.
That's a naive attitude.
This isn't the movies, where the villain details his dastardly plot to the hero shortly before his demise. Microsoft has proven time and again that they're adept manipulators of the media, the public, and even engineers (.NET being "an open standard, free for anybody to implement", anybody?).
Like any troll you enounter on the 'net, you shouldn't feed them. You shouldn't pander them. You shouldn't pretend like what's coming out of their mouth isn't horse-shit on a stick.
Microsoft is on the defensive. They would like nothing better than to see FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) wiped off the face of the Earth. Microsoft employees and executives have admitted this on-record, though not in such colourful terms.
Anybody who's willing to give MS every opportunity to actually ACCOMPLISH that deserves just what they get. Remember, kiddies, this is Microsoft. They know what they're doing. They're going to use this opportunity to try and further their aims. You know what? That may include pretending to be a model member of the community ... for the time being. Don't play with the dragon, you're gonna get burnt.
I will, for this post, ignore the blatant pandering to the unwashed masses of Slashdot readership.
That being said, how dare you misrepresent Mr. Ritchie? He didn't say he felt that it was too political. He said that it was more extreme than he cared for. "I believe we should kill all the whales" is obviously more extreme than "we should only kill some of them", but they're equally political. They're also equally economic in nature.
And as somebody else has already pointed out, he was co-developing C when there was nothing *BUT* vendor lock-in.
I disagree. If everybody was honest, you'd be right. But that's not the case.
Microsoft has spent years and years outright lying, cheating, and stealing, in order to come to market dominance and stay there. (If you don't believe me, go ahead and review the anti-trust court cases.)
So *any* win for non-MS companies, even proprietary ones, is good. It will help mature the industry, and make it less lopsided. I'm not interested in the complete destruction of MS - that'd probably end up being just as bad as what we have now; a monoculture.
But these *are* wins. Microsoft has less money in its pockets to lie about FOSS, for instance. It has less clout to twist people's arms.
Buyer beware. They're selling stuff. CDs for 15 pounds a pop (~25USD), and tickets for 20 pounds a pop.
:) Significantly less sexy, eh?
Supposedly, you are supposed to be able to view a video interview with some guy, but there are no links to that interview. You've got to buy the CD.
So, "uh-huh".
And let's keep in mind that UFOs are unidentified flying objects. A meteor *IS* a UFO, if it hasn't yet been identified.
In fact, if they have identified it as anything, it's not a UFO any more.
No. I'm holding Microsoft responsible for shitty code written by people who thought they'd get big bucks after going to a three-month course at a local community college. That same code that's either unaudited or audited by somebody no more technically advanced.
There's something called "criminal negligence". Look it up. Criminal negligence is all about how, if you can't do a job right, you aren't allowed to do it at all. If you go ahead and do it anyways, and that causes some harm to some person, you're criminally negligent.
That's bull. Plain and simple. Bell Canada is MASSIVE, and they're a GREAT BIG BLOODY MONOPOLY. Yay! They're regulated up the wing-wang. I love Bell Canada. They have to sell DSL at *extremely* fixed prices (low to consumers, and way lower to resellers), so I can get 1.2Mbit/128kbit DSL for less than $30CAD a month. (That's less than $20USD, for those non-Canadian folk reading this.)
What does Bell Canada get for this? A 20-year monopoly on providing DSL service. Of course, "monopoly" is something of a misnomer, since they're required to sell at absurdly low rates to wholesalers/resellers. So Bell may be providing the wires, but they're getting raped on cost. But they have 20 years of these prices to cover the cost of the rollout.
Rollout, I say? Yes, rollout. Ontario has an amazing ATM network, thanks to Bell Canada, and their government-granted 20-year monopoly. Not only can I get 1.2Mbit/128kbit DSL for dirt-fucking-cheap, but I can get 3.0Mbit/640kbit DSL (That's 400kB/s downloading and 80kB/s uploading) for $60CAD or less. Top that without somebody who has a huge amonut of time to cover network rollout costs!
Is Bell Canada a monopoly? Yes! Did the government give them this status? Yes! Are we thankful? YES!