They might sell an iPod package that contains a $40 firewire interface (they are available for as little as that), then wintel PC's can access the iPod too.
Most modern intel Laptops already have a firewire interface built in.
The iPod might just be an extra 'killer-app' (apart from DV) that helps to spread the firewire interface in the PC market (at the cost of USB2).
I hope more interesting firewire devices arrive, this will eventually lead to firewire become standard in PC's too.
First, the question remains whether Java won't be a Microsoft killer. As applet it has not delivered what was expected (though it isn't dead yet), but at the server (servlets, EJB's etc) and in embedded devices (soon there is a JVM in all cell phones, and cell phones are predicted to at least partially replace the desktop computer) Java is very alive an a big threat to Microsoft.
He claims that Java is bulky and slow still, after 5 years, and C# is supposed to be winning because it "feels better" and is "snappier"? Where on earth did this guy get such benchmarks from to prove this? It simply is NOT TRUE. Java performance has come a long way, and I haven't seen any evidence to date that C# is faster nor a better language. In fact C# is lacking in one major area, checked exceptions (meaning you are not obliged to catch or explicitly throw exceptions, which will lead to massively unreliable C# code bombing out all over the place).
MSFT once more is pushing an unproven and less superior alternative, just and only because it wasn't able to apply it's embrace and extend strategy to Java, that is the ONLY reason MSFT rejected Java.
Exactly the Java/C# example shows that Microsoft may drive other companies or technologies out of business, not because it makes less mistakes or has more technical excellence, but just be unethical tactics, misleading, false promises and massive marketing, leveraging its OS monopoly to kill off competitors.
The question is if Linux is not the same as Windows in this respect, in that it does not succeed because of technical excellence, but because of politics and coincidence.
Compared to most commercial Unixes, and even to most other free Unixes (*BSD) Linux technically lags behind, is less advanced. Linus may claim tha Sun is dead (I'm not so sure) but compared to Solaris Linux has a long way to go.
However, Linux came at the right time, at the right place, and amongst others politics helped it (IBM and others found it good to use it as a weapon in the battle against Microsoft), and it had the luck that its competitors, the better designed NetBSD and FreeBSD, were having licensing problems at a crucial period in time.
This strange even-uneven scheme means that for a while (since 2.4.0 arrived) no development kernel exists. The unavoidable result is that development goes into the "stable" kernel.
Also, when stable and development exist, all fixes from development to stable have to be made by hand, without the aid of a decent version control system.
All this because Linus thinks that CVS (which serves huge open source projects quite well) somehow doesn't fit him, and he has been waiting for years now for the ultimate version-control tool to arrive (bitkeeper). In the meantime it is apparently better to use nothing. I have my doubts.
This difficult management of the two branches is also evident from the huge time it took between 1.2 and 2.0, 2.0 and 2.2 and now between 2.2 and 2.4 (every time Linus promised that the next time between two stable releases should not take so long, but every time it failed). This creates so much and long during stagnation of "stable" that adding new functionality to stable becomes almost unavoidable (making stable quite unstable at times).
Most projects based on CVS create new stable versions (aided by CVS) much faster, leaving less discrepance between development and stable which makes catching up much easier and safer.
This is FreeBSD, which installs a relatively clean OS under/usr and puts all extra stuff in/usr/local (sometimes the executable is in/usr/local/bin, sometimes in/usr/local//bin).
I like that much more, it is the old UNIX way to separate the essential OS from optional stuff. It really is a pity that most Linux distro's dump everything directly in/usr.
As for my slackware, I installed only the minimum, and roll my own packages for everything I consider not to be 'core Linux'; all these packages go under/usr/local. It can be done, and keeps things tidy and clean.
As far as software patents are concerned: they have not been accepted part of doing business on this planet; maybe in the US, but the planet is larger than the US (luckily). In the EU it has just been reaffirmed by several governments and organizations (on 15.11) that the specifically do NOT want software patents.
I am always highly sceptible on claiming some principle to be good, but just the way it has been implemented is wrong or sub-optimal.
No, it sounds more like Apple than like MSFT.
Apple has a history of suing others w.r.t. patents. This is the reason that in the 80s and part of the 90s, Apple was subject to a boycott of the FSF (MSFT never was).
MSFT might look meaner and more dangerous to us, but that is only because of it's size. When it comes to unethical practices Apple is at least as bad; we can only be glad that Apple didn't win, or we (the free software community) would have an even more dangerous enemy.
B.t.w. it seems there never comes an end to these patent things. It is really tiring. Why not just go on frontal collision course with this &^#&^$: Blatently violate as many software patents as possible in Open Software, distribute it underground or from bases in Europe (where software patents still don't apply and politics is tending against them) and just say f*ck you against the US patent system. It would be interesting to see what happens. It might spark a healthy discussion, if not inside the US then at least between the US and the EU.
I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.
Support of "important" hardware is about the same.
My USB printer and scanner function well in both, for example.
Support of more exotic hardware still is more problematic in FreeBSD: No 3D graphics on nvidia because nvidia's driver has not been ported to FBSD yet. My DVB-S (satellite card) is not supported in FBSD, in Linux I can use it to watch and digitally record programs. DV-video through Firewire doesn't work in FBSD. I don't know whether Linux does any better (I think so) because I switch to Windows to capture and process video.
For software (except 3D games as mentioned) FreeBSD has somewhat less native software, but almost everything (even including VMWare for Linux) runs extremely well under the Linux emulator, often even surpassing the speed when run natively under Linux (this is possible since technically it is not really emulation, but all Linux system calls have been added via a loadable kernel module).
He compared with FreeBSD 4.3, while 4.4 has been out since September. In 4.4, softupdates are on by default b.t.w. (licensing problems have been solved).
It is very clear from this article that this is a long-time Linux user who (being curious) wants to give FreeBSD a try. The difference in his expertise of Linux vs. FreeBSD shows.
Regarding I/O performance: As someone who is running both Slackware 8 and FreeBSD 4.4 on the same hardware, and being a benchmarking freak myself, I have to say that the result of his benchmark simply IS WRONG. This was (apart from a stupid MAXUSERS=20 setting) a one-sided benchmark, testing only a single program in a single (SMP) configuration.
FreeBSD is lagging in SMP lock granularity (which only affects certain programs) but any decent I/O benchmark shows that I/O of FreeBSD by far outperforms that of Linux (2.4.14): better bandwidth, response times and lower CPU usage.
There may always be some particular devices where the driver for either Linux or FreeBSD is particularly bad or good, but generally speaking when it comes to performance FreeBSD wins in almost all areas hands-down, and certainly for I/O.
Huh? I run Slackware 8 and FreeBSD (4.4) on my Athlon+GF2. Both run like a charm, and all hardware (including USB printer, scanner etc) is supported by BOTH. FreeBSD Horror story? I don't know what you're talking about, except 3D graphics (no NVidia driver, which is Linux only alas). If you don't need 3D graphics (like for a server or a desktop where 3D games are not important) there is no reason to skip FreeBSD at all.
Sorry, but you go too far. Whereas x86 servers may compete with low-end Sun and IBM servers, compared to the high-end Sun or IBM everything that x86 can offer (or the comping itanium for that matter) is in a totally different league.
Clustering dozens of separate boxes doesn't help for most applications. If you have some high-volume (w.r.t. transactions) tables you can really forget distributing those over separate boxes.
Have you really ever tried running large databases (in size and transaction volume) on any kind of x86 configuration?
Not all people are alike, some may like IT jobs, some won't. I can only hope that those not really interested (but only in the money) drop out soon in these times.
As for myself, I studied physics and gradually moved into IT. I am a fanatic and never get enough of it. I consider myself lucky that I can have work that I really like, and I intend to stay into technically challenging jobs, i.e. not go into management, until I'm 60 (hope to retire then, I'm 35 now).
I keep being fascinated by all new developments and things that come along, in a faster pace than in most other professions; I guess that in the end there is a boring element in all jobs, but those that really love their profession will always see interesting things and be able to cope with the negative things that occur everywhere.
The problem is: there are lots of people into IT that don't have that drive/fascination for technology, but mainly for the money that is/was in it. They are bored by the job since they don't have the capacity or will to research things for themselves, which means that those shall get more routine jobs where less initiative is asked or desired.
If I had to choose between money and what I like, it would definately not be money. You can't be good at a job that you do mainly for money, and if you're not good in your job, your job won't be fun.
You may be right from a short sighted POV only looking at what is just or not (OTOH why someone becomes a criminal sometimes has to do with background, chances etc and also is not entirely just, in that sense one may ask whether justice can really exist). From a society POV however, it pays off to try to get criminals or potential criminals back on track, preventing them to harm society in the end saves loads of money and sorrow.
The good and honest people can/should be able to get there on their own.
I don't see why a criminal should be helped to get "back" into simple jobs, and honest people should get more complex jobs. Some of the (potential) criminals may be very smart people that would be wasted on simple jobs, that would even despise them because of bore and lack of challenge; those (not all) should also get the chance to do something that matches their level.
Forcing people to work far below their capacity is a recipe to get them to drop out again.
Not really, but gradually and constantly: There is a -current and a -stable CVS branch. You can follow the -stable CVS branch to stay completely uptodate all the time. Nothing ever breaks except on major announcements and big MFC's (merge from current) that are announced. At those times it may be necessary to revisit your config files in/etc (which can be automated with 'mergemaster').
Thus, you never have to download a new version, but you can always download incremental diffs (daily) that patch the complete source tree (cvsup). I have not reinstalled my FreeBSD system in 5 years time, yet it is 100% clean (all add-ons and optional parts to into/usr/local and don't spoil the main OS) and up to date.
(cd/usr/src; make world from time to time).
Re:Resources
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Seriously, Emacs with it's old nickname "Eight Megabytes and Always Swapping" nowadays better might be called "Ten megabytes and never swapping", since we all have 64MB or more these days.
Emacs once was relatively big and perceived as bloated. However through the times all others (even vim/xvim) have grown and grown, and most have surpassed Emacs. Emacs has been developed more carefully and, where the base system once was relatively big but complete, actually today is one of the smaller programs.
Many editors are bigger, and almost any mail/newsreader, graphical ftp-client or whatever functionality Emacs includes are much bigger alone than Emacs that includes all these functionalities.
Who would have thought that, Emacs truely has become a lean and mean program.
Re:Why prefer GNU Emacs over XEmacs?
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
I feel exactly the same, but you can disable all these features. I tried to switch a couple of times to Xemacs, and the first thing I did was turn off all these annoyances.
Even then Xemacs irritated me somehow, just little imperfections and inconsistencies. Compared to that, GNU emacs feels more polished, stable and faster.
Re:I'd really like to see some thoughts on this.
on
GNU Emacs 21
·
· Score: 2
Using NT, you can use GNU Emacs. The NT version (NT-emacs) is very good, I use it all the time. Being forced to use NT I usually maximise Emacs so I hardly notice being in NT. There aren't many things I have to leave emacs for.
As someone who uses emacs and vi all the time (brotherly next to each other) and my main programming (in Java) is in JBuilder (built-in Java editor) and in Oracle-pl/sql in PLSQL-developer (built in editor) I can truely claim to be not locked into some kind of a trap.
Still, after 15 years no editor comes close to emacs. B.t.w. the last 10 years or so (since version 20) emacs has a menu bar that you can use instead of keystrokes for all but the most basic things (which you learn in the built-in tutorial in 15 minutes); this enables you to gradually learn the keys for more complex things.
Also you can execute most functions with the function name (M-x browse-url for example) and while you do so emacs tells you which shortcut keystroke exists so after 3 times you know what key you might use (unless you're senile).
Emacs has the best mail and newsreader around: GNUS. I've tried numerous others, am a heavy usenet reader/poster and after GNUS have never found anything that comes even close (on any platform). GNUS is also an excellent mailreader (with IMAP client functionality if you want).
You can even read slashdot as if it were a usenet newsgroup in GNUS!
I am absolutely convinced that someone who claims that 'emacs' (you can't say that because it depends on which lisp application you use within emacs) that is GNUS is a fairly bad news reader has no idea what it is and at most has only had a superficial glance.
Note I don't claim it is the best looking or easiest-to-setup reader, but it is the best in terms of effective reading and flexibility.
MD is not very popular in (at least) Switzerland, Germany and Holland.
They got some market share, but compete with (more widespread) portable CD-players and now the MP3 players (solid state, HDD-based and CD-based) are taking over fast.
In one or two years, MD shall be gone (rightly so).
Terminal server is something different
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
·
· Score: 2
Terminal server can't be compared to a multi-user system like UNIX. It may look the same at first sight, but in fact it is more like VMWare, in the sense that a large part of the operating system is instantiated for every user that "logs in", that is each user has almost a private copy of the operating system (which explains the huge amount of resources required per user). This is a gross hack, and WinXP multi-user logon is based on the same technology. It can't be compared to a true multi-user operating system such as UNIX.
Indeed (as someone also remarked in another response) one could compare getting admin-right on a flie as equivalent to a local root exploit. Still, it is not the same. It only applies to file-access rights, not to executing processes with other permissions.
"Only" a local root exploit
on
Linux Kernel Bugs
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Before screaming, please remember that this is only a local root exploit, that is you must already have logged in on the machine as non-root before using this exploit.
Most Unixes have had dozens of (sometimes known) local root exploits for years, and while most of them have been ironed out, some surely remain. They are much much harder to eradicate as exploits directed to network services (i.e. from the outside) are. Every once in a while one is discovered in most UNIXes (often obscure race conditions etc).
Till a few years ago the saying was that you should never give a local login to someone who you would not trust to be root, i.e. one could assume that sooner or later those that really try to become root shall succeed. Any mission critical servers should not have any user accounts for untrusted people; therefore, local root exploits have never been considered to be a big deal.
If you want to compare to Windows: up till Windows XP it wasn't even possible to be logged in as multiple users at the same time, so the equivalent of a local root exploit was not really possible. Still, Windows managed to have multitudes of the way more stupid and serious class of remote exploits. With the advent of Windows XP the concept Windows kind of becomes multi-user for the first time (though in a very crude way, since unlike UNIX/Linux each login session almost starts a new instance of larger parts of the operating system). While this new concept is 30 years old in UNIX, only now Windows (XP) starts having the possibility of local exploits. Surely many of them will exist and it will take decades to kind of iron them out.
I've been doing it for years, to have an independant und uninterrupted news and email service when I switch ISP.
It is hard to find a good ISP that offers a decent newsfeed these days, and email service in general is also deteriorating. IMO it is better to subscribe to mail and news at a specialized provider, and use the ISP only for access.
Slashdot Mirror
How long is a "song"? They should just measure capacity in time. A classical CD may not have 10 3-minute "songs", but have one 60 minute concerto.
They might sell an iPod package that contains a $40 firewire interface (they are available for as little as that), then wintel PC's can access the iPod too.
Most modern intel Laptops already have a firewire interface built in.
The iPod might just be an extra 'killer-app' (apart from DV) that helps to spread the firewire interface in the PC market (at the cost of USB2).
I hope more interesting firewire devices arrive, this will eventually lead to firewire become standard in PC's too.
First, the question remains whether Java won't be a Microsoft killer. As applet it has not delivered what was expected (though it isn't dead yet), but at the server (servlets, EJB's etc) and in embedded devices (soon there is a JVM in all cell phones, and cell phones are predicted to at least partially replace the desktop computer) Java is very alive an a big threat to Microsoft.
He claims that Java is bulky and slow still, after 5 years, and C# is supposed to be winning because it "feels better" and is "snappier"? Where on earth did this guy get such benchmarks from to prove this? It simply is NOT TRUE. Java performance has come a long way, and I haven't seen any evidence to date that C# is faster nor a better language. In fact C# is lacking in one major area, checked exceptions (meaning you are not obliged to catch or explicitly throw exceptions, which will lead to massively unreliable C# code bombing out all over the place).
MSFT once more is pushing an unproven and less superior alternative, just and only because it wasn't able to apply it's embrace and extend strategy to Java, that is the ONLY reason MSFT rejected Java.
Exactly the Java/C# example shows that Microsoft may drive other companies or technologies out of business, not because it makes less mistakes or has more technical excellence, but just be unethical tactics, misleading, false promises and massive marketing, leveraging its OS monopoly to kill off competitors.
The question is if Linux is not the same as Windows in this respect, in that it does not succeed because of technical excellence, but because of politics and coincidence.
Compared to most commercial Unixes, and even to most other free Unixes (*BSD) Linux technically lags behind, is less advanced. Linus may claim tha Sun is dead (I'm not so sure) but compared to Solaris Linux has a long way to go.
However, Linux came at the right time, at the right place, and amongst others politics helped it (IBM and others found it good to use it as a weapon in the battle against Microsoft), and it had the luck that its competitors, the better designed NetBSD and FreeBSD, were having licensing problems at a crucial period in time.
Please also remove all hyperlinks to your web page.
This strange even-uneven scheme means that for a while (since 2.4.0 arrived) no development kernel exists. The unavoidable result is that development goes into the "stable" kernel.
Also, when stable and development exist, all fixes from development to stable have to be made by hand, without the aid of a decent version control system.
All this because Linus thinks that CVS (which serves huge open source projects quite well) somehow doesn't fit him, and he has been waiting for years now for the ultimate version-control tool to arrive (bitkeeper). In the meantime it is apparently better to use nothing. I have my doubts.
This difficult management of the two branches is also evident from the huge time it took between 1.2 and 2.0, 2.0 and 2.2 and now between 2.2 and 2.4 (every time Linus promised that the next time between two stable releases should not take so long, but every time it failed). This creates so much and long during stagnation of "stable" that adding new functionality to stable becomes almost unavoidable (making stable quite unstable at times).
Most projects based on CVS create new stable versions (aided by CVS) much faster, leaving less discrepance between development and stable which makes catching up much easier and safer.
~> ls /usr/bin | wc -l
/bin | wc -l
/sbin | wc -l
/usr/sbin | wc -l
/usr/local/bin | wc -l
/usr and puts all extra stuff in /usr/local (sometimes the executable is in /usr/local/bin, sometimes in /usr/local//bin).
/usr.
/usr/local. It can be done, and keeps things tidy and clean.
403
~> ls
36
~> ls
91
~> ls
220
~> ls
796
This is FreeBSD, which installs a relatively clean OS under
I like that much more, it is the old UNIX way to separate the essential OS from optional stuff. It really is a pity that most Linux distro's dump everything directly in
As for my slackware, I installed only the minimum, and roll my own packages for everything I consider not to be 'core Linux'; all these packages go under
As far as software patents are concerned: they have not been accepted part of doing business on this planet; maybe in the US, but the planet is larger than the US (luckily). In the EU it has just been reaffirmed by several governments and organizations (on 15.11) that the specifically do NOT want software patents.
I am always highly sceptible on claiming some principle to be good, but just the way it has been implemented is wrong or sub-optimal.
No, it sounds more like Apple than like MSFT.
Apple has a history of suing others w.r.t. patents. This is the reason that in the 80s and part of the 90s, Apple was subject to a boycott of the FSF (MSFT never was).
MSFT might look meaner and more dangerous to us, but that is only because of it's size. When it comes to unethical practices Apple is at least as bad; we can only be glad that Apple didn't win, or we (the free software community) would have an even more dangerous enemy.
B.t.w. it seems there never comes an end to these patent things. It is really tiring. Why not just go on frontal collision course with this &^#&^$: Blatently violate as many software patents as possible in Open Software, distribute it underground or from bases in Europe (where software patents still don't apply and politics is tending against them) and just say f*ck you against the US patent system. It would be interesting to see what happens. It might spark a healthy discussion, if not inside the US then at least between the US and the EU.
I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.
Support of "important" hardware is about the same.
My USB printer and scanner function well in both, for example.
Support of more exotic hardware still is more problematic in FreeBSD: No 3D graphics on nvidia because nvidia's driver has not been ported to FBSD yet. My DVB-S (satellite card) is not supported in FBSD, in Linux I can use it to watch and digitally record programs. DV-video through Firewire doesn't work in FBSD. I don't know whether Linux does any better (I think so) because I switch to Windows to capture and process video.
For software (except 3D games as mentioned) FreeBSD has somewhat less native software, but almost everything (even including VMWare for Linux) runs extremely well under the Linux emulator, often even surpassing the speed when run natively under Linux (this is possible since technically it is not really emulation, but all Linux system calls have been added via a loadable kernel module).
He compared with FreeBSD 4.3, while 4.4 has been out since September. In 4.4, softupdates are on by default b.t.w. (licensing problems have been solved).
It is very clear from this article that this is a long-time Linux user who (being curious) wants to give FreeBSD a try. The difference in his expertise of Linux vs. FreeBSD shows.
Regarding I/O performance: As someone who is running both Slackware 8 and FreeBSD 4.4 on the same hardware, and being a benchmarking freak myself, I have to say that the result of his benchmark simply IS WRONG. This was (apart from a stupid MAXUSERS=20 setting) a one-sided benchmark, testing only a single program in a single (SMP) configuration.
FreeBSD is lagging in SMP lock granularity (which only affects certain programs) but any decent I/O benchmark shows that I/O of FreeBSD by far outperforms that of Linux (2.4.14): better bandwidth, response times and lower CPU usage.
There may always be some particular devices where the driver for either Linux or FreeBSD is particularly bad or good, but generally speaking when it comes to performance FreeBSD wins in almost all areas hands-down, and certainly for I/O.
Huh? I run Slackware 8 and FreeBSD (4.4) on my Athlon+GF2. Both run like a charm, and all hardware (including USB printer, scanner etc) is supported by BOTH. FreeBSD Horror story? I don't know what you're talking about, except 3D graphics (no NVidia driver, which is Linux only alas). If you don't need 3D graphics (like for a server or a desktop where 3D games are not important) there is no reason to skip FreeBSD at all.
Sorry, but you go too far. Whereas x86 servers may compete with low-end Sun and IBM servers, compared to the high-end Sun or IBM everything that x86 can offer (or the comping itanium for that matter) is in a totally different league.
Clustering dozens of separate boxes doesn't help for most applications. If you have some high-volume (w.r.t. transactions) tables you can really forget distributing those over separate boxes.
Have you really ever tried running large databases (in size and transaction volume) on any kind of x86 configuration?
Not all people are alike, some may like IT jobs, some won't. I can only hope that those not really interested (but only in the money) drop out soon in these times.
As for myself, I studied physics and gradually moved into IT. I am a fanatic and never get enough of it. I consider myself lucky that I can have work that I really like, and I intend to stay into technically challenging jobs, i.e. not go into management, until I'm 60 (hope to retire then, I'm 35 now).
I keep being fascinated by all new developments and things that come along, in a faster pace than in most other professions; I guess that in the end there is a boring element in all jobs, but those that really love their profession will always see interesting things and be able to cope with the negative things that occur everywhere.
The problem is: there are lots of people into IT that don't have that drive/fascination for technology, but mainly for the money that is/was in it. They are bored by the job since they don't have the capacity or will to research things for themselves, which means that those shall get more routine jobs where less initiative is asked or desired.
If I had to choose between money and what I like, it would definately not be money. You can't be good at a job that you do mainly for money, and if you're not good in your job, your job won't be fun.
You may be right from a short sighted POV only looking at what is just or not (OTOH why someone becomes a criminal sometimes has to do with background, chances etc and also is not entirely just, in that sense one may ask whether justice can really exist). From a society POV however, it pays off to try to get criminals or potential criminals back on track, preventing them to harm society in the end saves loads of money and sorrow.
The good and honest people can/should be able to get there on their own.
I don't see why a criminal should be helped to get "back" into simple jobs, and honest people should get more complex jobs. Some of the (potential) criminals may be very smart people that would be wasted on simple jobs, that would even despise them because of bore and lack of challenge; those (not all) should also get the chance to do something that matches their level.
Forcing people to work far below their capacity is a recipe to get them to drop out again.
Not really, but gradually and constantly: There is a -current and a -stable CVS branch. You can follow the -stable CVS branch to stay completely uptodate all the time. Nothing ever breaks except on major announcements and big MFC's (merge from current) that are announced. At those times it may be necessary to revisit your config files in /etc (which can be automated with 'mergemaster').
/usr/local and don't spoil the main OS) and up to date.
/usr/src; make world from time to time).
Thus, you never have to download a new version, but you can always download incremental diffs (daily) that patch the complete source tree (cvsup). I have not reinstalled my FreeBSD system in 5 years time, yet it is 100% clean (all add-ons and optional parts to into
(cd
Seriously, Emacs with it's old nickname "Eight Megabytes and Always Swapping" nowadays better might be called "Ten megabytes and never swapping", since we all have 64MB or more these days.
Emacs once was relatively big and perceived as bloated. However through the times all others (even vim/xvim) have grown and grown, and most have surpassed Emacs. Emacs has been developed more carefully and, where the base system once was relatively big but complete, actually today is one of the smaller programs.
Many editors are bigger, and almost any mail/newsreader, graphical ftp-client or whatever functionality Emacs includes are much bigger alone than Emacs that includes all these functionalities.
Who would have thought that, Emacs truely has become a lean and mean program.
I feel exactly the same, but you can disable all these features. I tried to switch a couple of times to Xemacs, and the first thing I did was turn off all these annoyances.
Even then Xemacs irritated me somehow, just little imperfections and inconsistencies. Compared to that, GNU emacs feels more polished, stable and faster.
Using NT, you can use GNU Emacs. The NT version (NT-emacs) is very good, I use it all the time. Being forced to use NT I usually maximise Emacs so I hardly notice being in NT. There aren't many things I have to leave emacs for.
As someone who uses emacs and vi all the time (brotherly next to each other) and my main programming (in Java) is in JBuilder (built-in Java editor) and in Oracle-pl/sql in PLSQL-developer (built in editor) I can truely claim to be not locked into some kind of a trap.
Still, after 15 years no editor comes close to emacs. B.t.w. the last 10 years or so (since version 20) emacs has a menu bar that you can use instead of keystrokes for all but the most basic things (which you learn in the built-in tutorial in 15 minutes); this enables you to gradually learn the keys for more complex things.
Also you can execute most functions with the function name (M-x browse-url for example) and while you do so emacs tells you which shortcut keystroke exists so after 3 times you know what key you might use (unless you're senile).
Emacs has the best mail and newsreader around: GNUS. I've tried numerous others, am a heavy usenet reader/poster and after GNUS have never found anything that comes even close (on any platform). GNUS is also an excellent mailreader (with IMAP client functionality if you want).
You can even read slashdot as if it were a usenet newsgroup in GNUS!
I am absolutely convinced that someone who claims that 'emacs' (you can't say that because it depends on which lisp application you use within emacs) that is GNUS is a fairly bad news reader has no idea what it is and at most has only had a superficial glance.
Note I don't claim it is the best looking or easiest-to-setup reader, but it is the best in terms of effective reading and flexibility.
MD is not very popular in (at least) Switzerland, Germany and Holland.
They got some market share, but compete with (more widespread) portable CD-players and now the MP3 players (solid state, HDD-based and CD-based) are taking over fast.
In one or two years, MD shall be gone (rightly so).
Terminal server can't be compared to a multi-user system like UNIX. It may look the same at first sight, but in fact it is more like VMWare, in the sense that a large part of the operating system is instantiated for every user that "logs in", that is each user has almost a private copy of the operating system (which explains the huge amount of resources required per user). This is a gross hack, and WinXP multi-user logon is based on the same technology. It can't be compared to a true multi-user operating system such as UNIX.
Indeed (as someone also remarked in another response) one could compare getting admin-right on a flie as equivalent to a local root exploit. Still, it is not the same. It only applies to file-access rights, not to executing processes with other permissions.
Before screaming, please remember that this is only a local root exploit, that is you must already have logged in on the machine as non-root before using this exploit.
Most Unixes have had dozens of (sometimes known) local root exploits for years, and while most of them have been ironed out, some surely remain. They are much much harder to eradicate as exploits directed to network services (i.e. from the outside) are. Every once in a while one is discovered in most UNIXes (often obscure race conditions etc).
Till a few years ago the saying was that you should never give a local login to someone who you would not trust to be root, i.e. one could assume that sooner or later those that really try to become root shall succeed. Any mission critical servers should not have any user accounts for untrusted people; therefore, local root exploits have never been considered to be a big deal.
If you want to compare to Windows: up till Windows XP it wasn't even possible to be logged in as multiple users at the same time, so the equivalent of a local root exploit was not really possible. Still, Windows managed to have multitudes of the way more stupid and serious class of remote exploits. With the advent of Windows XP the concept Windows kind of becomes multi-user for the first time (though in a very crude way, since unlike UNIX/Linux each login session almost starts a new instance of larger parts of the operating system). While this new concept is 30 years old in UNIX, only now Windows (XP) starts having the possibility of local exploits. Surely many of them will exist and it will take decades to kind of iron them out.
I've been doing it for years, to have an independant und uninterrupted news and email service when I switch ISP.
It is hard to find a good ISP that offers a decent newsfeed these days, and email service in general is also deteriorating. IMO it is better to subscribe to mail and news at a specialized provider, and use the ISP only for access.