The title of this is a bit misleading. They apparently haven't upgraded to, or are actively using Vista for anything, so wouldn't this merely be that they're switching to Linux, rather than are dissatisfied with Vista somehow? It seems that any time anyone "switches to" Linux, it's highly publicized, but the way this is portrayed is more anti-MS hype than pro-Linux anything, let alone "reporting a news story fairly objectively". Someone cancels their Microsoft contract, without citing explicitly why, and somehow it turns into that they're hating on Vista and are switching from Vista to Linux.
Personally, I'll be more impressed when more companies start switching to FreeBSD instead of Linux or from Linux. Sure, random companies can buy the loyalties of Linux developers or project managers, but since when was strict quality control and release management considered 'a bad thing'? Perhaps someone could tell me, but I don't see it. If I had been promoted to head of IT for some big company, and we were going to open source operating systems, I'd see it as a better idea to switch to a more reliable operating system with strict QC/QA, an actual interest into what is in patches, the best way to fix something, etc, as well as releases being planned out and approved by more than one person.
In addition to the sheer fact that FreeBSD doesn't seem to be motivated by or the flagship of a company who wants to undercut and take over commercial/closed source software, by also undercutting and taking over all other open source.
Wouldn't those be common reasons why someone left Microsoft contracts and operating systems behind in the first place?
Possibly off-topic, but so many headlines recently use acronyms for things which are possibly unfamiliar, and don't provide a link on the Acronym to the homepage or an entry about whatever-it-is. Some of the stories are starting to look like the old joke, "You got a you-know-what from you-know-who, and you're supposed to take it to you-know-where by you-know when. Wink Wink. Nudge Nudge."
They also seem to forget that a lot of "so-called programmers", particularly in the open source community, have no idea what they're doing. It's just common sense, if you don't know what you're doing in general, are you a programmer/developer? No. It's not exactly rocket science (oh, actually, it has a big part in that too), but just because you can knock two things together and make loud screeching noises doesn't make you a programmer, nor do fancy degrees. I've met people who have this and that degrees, expensive certification, and still don't know what they're doing, can't competently write or modify a program in any language. It's not an elitest thing, either. Would you, for instance, be called a Medical Doctor if you didn't know basic anatomy? Hopefully not. I'm sure that "average joe" wouldn't be any more comfortable with an incompetent person who arbitrarily decides to call themselves a doctor (usually not too long before being arrested) than they would be trying to go to an incompetent person who decides to call themselves a programmer. It doesn't take that necessarily that much to learn and develop as a good programmer (let alone as an adaquete programmer), but people often don't want to put in any effort. I know of several developers who don't do any actual work, just convince others to do the work for them, then take all of the credit, without so much as a thank you. It's also funny when a C++ teacher doesn't know things that are in the first half of "the book", and can be found on any reference material online, and have to get others to do assignments to -give to his class- to do. Funny that he's a teacher (not teaching me, of course), and has all sorts of degrees, and I took the time to teach myself, and I know more than him, and have a sparkling track record.
Luckily, like many previous Mozilla versions, it also comes with the "Modern" theme, which is easily selected. This of course goes well with the Modern icon pack.
Firefox has "always" had big memory leaks, as far as I've noticed, and Firefox has always had the "bug" where the page rendering is coupled to the entire UI. Firefox is unusable when it takes a half-second or more to switch between a 'relatively' large (cough, 20) number of tabs, and can take thirty seconds or more to load a plugin like Shockwave or Java, even on a fast machine. Then there are all of the security issues with Firefox, like that they're more or less supporting spyware tracking, nevermind the issue where it ignores most Java security; it's the only browser I've seen anymore which actually gets affected by Java Viruses, even Internet Explorer (6 SP2 or better) won't. They also tend to have a policy of inserting code which may not be stable, and may not be in the best interest of...anyone.
Also, it's not incompatible with particularly useful extensions. Even ForecastFox and Reminderfox work, as do EnigMail nightlies, Adblock (and Adblock Plus with automatic filter update extensions), Googlebar, StumbleUpon, even the web developer toolbar, and various tab browsing functionality can be replicated with Nightly builds of Multizilla. The only thing I can't easily replicate on SeaMonkey is GreaseMonkey (ironically). Ancient versions depend on Mozilla 1.7 or so, newer versions want Firefox 1.5, though I'm told there'll be a Seamonkey-compatible sometime soon.
And while Firefox may have originally been meant to "trim the fat" of Mozilla, the per-tab usage of SM vs. Firefox isn't a substantial difference (about 30MB difference on 100 tabs, which at that point is a drop in the bucket), and Mozilla/SeaMonkey also include the email client (which only adds about 4MB, compared to 40+ for Thunderbird, and 60+ or so for Outlook 2003), and can rack up more savings the more you use it to replace other things, like IRC client and Calendar (which now has a working version for Seamonkey). It also tends to render pages faster, with less CPU time, and less CPU time used for 'idle pages'. I can't count the number of times I've had to kill Firefox and restart it because some random tab or another started using 100% CPU time, even when it wasn't the active one. Animated GIFs also made the browser crazy (though I was getting that as late as December or so, before Firefox was finally purged permanently from my machine). Between SeaMonkey and Miranda, I save about 150MB of memory and a lot more CPU power compared to using other (standard) possible combinations of applications.
Perhaps everyone involved with the whole San Andreas SNAFU will think twice before trying to put "hidden content" into a game that largely no one wants aside from fourteen year olds who are so craving for nudity that they'd be obsessing about pixelated polygons that take a vague shape (gee, who remembers that 'nude patch' for the Valkyrie in Gauntlet? It's all disgusting the way people are so deperate for it), lying about it, making a really bad patch for the game, then dropping all support, and screwing both users, the mod community, and...made the fundamentalists have more than enough excuse to increase the rate at which they try to shove new laws down our throats which do nothing to 'protect' anyone, but just further their careers (such as the Utah 'violent games as porn' bill). Everyone going insane in making this, and over this, really needed a reality check (preferably the brutal hockey variety) in the first place.
And what's even worse? The "No More Hot Coffee" patch actually fixed critical things, but because there was no follow up patch, no one really noticed, and there was no "clean" version of the patch. This left some missions on some installations of the game (like that first 'dance mission' on the beach) unplayable, between the normal version not fixing it, and the second version being broken, unsupported, both by Rock Star and by "the community". At minimum, they should have made a clean/sane patch, with standard versioning available, so people didn't think that the only thing the patch did was "remove the OMG nudity" (which made all of the guys hate it, of course). Eventually, I had to give up on the game completely, was it was completely unable to complete, or even get very far due to serious bugs. Way to go, the developers really dropped the ball on this one...
Personally, I get dozens of LARGE spam emails a day, and they haven't 'fixed' my account, so it's stuck at 2MB. This means every three days or so, all email starts to bounce. Of course, Hotmail support claims that nothing's wrong, nothing's broken, despite trying to mark the same junk as junk, day after day, after day. It's one of the reasons I more or less gave up on it, and keep trying to keep friends far, far away from that mess. The amusing thing is that all of the spam is quite easily identified as spam, and is often quite large, topping out around 50K. I'd bet if there were a 'test spam' (like there is a 'test virus') to demonstrate if it's working at all, it'd get into my inbox anyway. The only thing it seems to filter out to the Spam box are messages I actually need to receive. Hotmail can easily be used to scan for addresses on their service or other email services, though, which means getting more and more spam simply because of it, even if you won't sign up. It's obviously something they haven't made anywhere near the caliber of other email services.
EA's overall game quality (including expansions/patches for various games) has been dwindling significantly in recent years. It seems to me that they peaked with games like Need for Speed: High Stakes, and SimCity 3000. High Stakes had among the best driving experience for games (Underground didn't hold a candle), including more realistic physics, full weather possibility, and if you hit something, another car, a heavy stone barrier, it actually caused damage to the car, which affected its performance. You could get knocked out of a race (with a hefty repair bill) if you were too careless, while most newer games in the series have physics inspired by "Cruisin' USA" (for those who remember the arcade game), you can hit anything, including doing flips and completely wiping out, and your car rights itself and you just hit the gas. You never need to use the brakes any more. Feasibly, a 'B' class car (the slowest, but easiest to handle) could beat a AAA class car (the best top speed, lousy acceleration) on many maps, if you were skilled enough, and these types of matches could happen, in the newer ones, it appears that you can only race with cars of the exact same class, making it less a challenge of skill, and more who doesn't get side-swiped by another competing car. SC3K was generally 'better' as well, including making larger cities quite a bit more interesting and easy to manage. Even older games old NHL98/99 were generally just more satisfying than newer editions, I imagine the same goes for most of their sports titles and other games. They seem to've given up on actually making the incremental releases more fun to play. But perhaps even worse than that, they don't seem to be making (m)any 'innovative' games anymore, and of course there were the accusations of how they treated employees like slaves. I wonder if EA's really losing touch with reality. After all, their "Big 2006" Q1 release for PC is yet another lackluster Sims 2 expansion pack.
What ever happened to games like Starflight, Skate or Die!, Road Rash, Desert Strike, and Syndicate? Their new idea of games to publish seems to be constantly repeated titles in series which don't really offer anything new. Not to be too stingy, but the only game recently I can think of off-hand that was pretty decent/original was Undying, which was somewhat standard survival horror, but did it using an FPS engine with many unique gameplay elements.
The express editions seem a bit light, but do offer redistribution.
It's probably 'way out of price range', though the higher end editions offer a myiad of new and compelling features. You can basically have your own custom toolchain, complete with property sheets and full IDE integration for 'third party' tools, like using NASM/YASM/MASM for assembly. It's enough to (finally) be able to compile various open-source things with the IDE instead of depending on autotools and GCC. I could conceivably integrate 'open source' utilities into it completely, such as bison/flex, even such random things as a SNES C Cross-Compiler.
There are also rather nice setup project utilities, you can deploy a nice installer to anywhere which can 'net install' your program, in addition to any prerequisites and dependencies (like properly setting up C/C++ Runtimes and even MSI; or.NET Framework and ASP.NET if so inclined). Despite problems with the help system (via F1), it's a big 'happy' upgrade over VS2003.
As far as Linux codes, there's always KDevelop http://www.kdevelop.org/, and Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/. While Microsoft Visual Studio makes a compelling case for use in general, there are quite a few non-Windows IDEs, though noone's forcing you to make Microsoft-specific code with MSVS, either. Personally I'm working on a few open source projects, and somewhat-targetting with a new C# application, will consider using GTK# http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/ instead of WinForms at some point (perhaps when underlying GTK+ bindings get a bit less fickle).
They thought he was a goner, but the programmer came back, the very next day, but the programmer came back, he just couldn't stay away. Away, yeah yeah. The bug around the corner swore he'd kill the programmer on-site, and loaded up his drive with spyware and viruses, it waited and it waited for the programmer to come around. 1100001 patches for the bug was all they found. o/~
I heard somewhere that All Programmers Go To Heaven. >:)
"Of course it could be argued that RPGs simply attract more emotionally unstable gamers, and that if these same players were forced to try Microsoft Flight Simulator, they'd cry like babies when their Cessna crashed into a pylon during a failed runway approach. Sadly, Bowen does not appear to explore this possibility."
I'd have to question the personal insecurity of the person who wrote this article if they included such a statement. How could any decently intelligent person come up with this, let alone a supposed gamer, unless they felt deeply threatened by the apparent results of the research?
The point of feeling emotions because of games isn't because of 'instability', emotional or otherwise (no matter how many guys would like to put on a tough act), but because emotions are natural. They're especially natural concerning any interaction, of which books, movies, and games can be considered a part of. In books and movies, you sympathize, make a connection with the characters. You sit 'on the edge of your seat', so to speak, as the story develops and as you begin to understand the characters and their interactions and development more. You see more into their lives, and appreciate the author for taking the time...if it's well done. It's not really any different for a book, game, movie, play, or any other method for telling a story.
Today, I was watching 'Dad', starring Ted Danson and Jack Lemmon. I tend not to cry all that often, but it was such a good movie that it had me sobbing, among feeling many other emotions.
It's a sad day when people who play video games can be easily considered emotionally unstable for feeling things about a video game character, or crying when something tragic happens, or after a long, hard-won victory.
However, why would crying at a failed landing approach in MSFS (particularly after the 300th time) be considered any worse than cursing at the game, or your own lack of skills, in frustration or anger?
That seems like completely unreasonable double standard, to me. For many decent games, like Freespace 2, Septerra Core, even Rogue Spear, The Thing, and System Shock 2, who hasn't displayed a wide variety of emotions? Who hasn't cheered or cried with the thrill of victory? Who hasn't felt anger, remorse, or sadness at a humiliating defeat? Isn't it the emotional response to begin with which keeps most gamers playing? It's not just that there is a challenge floating around that makes most play, it's the emotional response to that, to the story, to the challenge itself.
Nothing is more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of a generous emotion. - John Jay Chapman
It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton
If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself. - Horace
The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool. - George Santayana
Maybe I'd still view any advertising if it were still simple. Advertising that became intrusive and even dangerous is all over the place now. But, besides any personal information, privacy, or revenue for a favorite site concern (sorry Slashdot!), advertising has generally become designed exclusively for 1Mbit/s and higher connections. It's impossible to even simply browse through text anymore because of advertising anywhere. Even with adblock and similar extensions for other browsers, advertising is still intrusive enough that it still steals an insane amount of bandwidth. Only Adblock itself is particularly smart enough to track what's loaded and allow you to block advertising javascript, as well, which can steal an absurd amount of bandwidth for no real purpose.
Things in general are getting larger and larger, programs, advertising, and javascript included. Contrary to apparent popular belief, this isn't because it's getting BETTER, but because programmers (speaking as one) are getting excessively lazier and less skilled as time goes on. Noone knows how to keep things relatively small anymore.
Not to brag (or self promote; current problems with the webhost), I don't consider it something to brag about, it's simple, but my website has always been designed with a relatively small size in mind. Even from a completely clean cache, it loads in just a few seconds on dialup, and refreshes are more or less instantaneous. If people worked by that principle anymore, which is one of the reasons why I'm greatly disappointed with Firefox these days, the internet might still be a dialup-friendly place.
If Anarchy Online only uses 0.4KB/s (when not idle in a corner), what's the excuse for so much other software for utterly hating dialup since about 1999?
I don't really think that a Qt version would ever really get off the ground. Even if Sun did it, chances are it would be relatively unmaintained, and would lag behind compared to Gtk+ version. Most apps love GTK+ or 'KDE widgets' to death, even in places where nice, clean Qt widgets would be much more appropriate (and would be faster, to boot). The whole GTK+ file selector, now improved without text input, or remembering where you 'were', and without any way to input actual text or select simple things is a prime example of moving in the wrong direction instead of actually paying attention to users! (I can't even do any nominal file operations, like rename, from a GTK+ file selection dialog, can't simply change directories to something Not In The List). It's just...unspeakably horrible.;_;
It would perhaps be heavy-handed, but Qt should probably basically make a 'GTK+' compatibility library which translates GTK+ widgets/functions/whatnot to Qt equivalents for user-end applications. That way, we could all use the Happy Qt Beauty/Speed (particularly for how customizable Qt look/feel is), without needing to care if an app was written for the latest GTK+ or not...which tends to be several step backward in usability, design, and aesthetics, IMHO.
I think it's more than a little heavy handed to call ad blocking a social contract when ad size has jumped from a few kilobytes (15-30kb is perhaps reasonable) up near the megabyte range. I see MANY ads without filtering that are in excess of 750KB, few which are less than 200K. On dialup, this takes a very substantial amount of time to download, and prevents doing anything else network-wise than having to wait for an ad for a product which you're not interested in. Even worse, most of the bigger ads tend to give instructions to the web browser or proxy to never even try to cache them, so you have to wait even when just moving between pages on a website. Ads on TV are frustrating, but you're not even exclusively locked into it there, either. You can change the channel. You can turn the TV off or mute it for a few minutes. That's not violating a social contract, either The fact is that businesses online who slather the public with ads are getting an easy break. They can effectively try to get near-permanent, near-exclusive advertising all over a website. Particularly if you have little bandwidth, that can mean you have no choice but to either stop viewing the website completely, or filter out the ad before it can be downloaded. It's a sorry state to things, but going on about how people who block ads are jerks, or irresponsible is complete BS in an atmosphere like this. I'd cheerily view ads if they weren't so annoying or so large. I used to often click on ads, several years ago, to see more about something that was half-way interesting. Even when I don't run with adblocking enabled (mostly with Opera), I never find anything anymore that's even half-way interesting, and usually it's Flash, or tries to grab input, or has obnoxious sound, or fills up the entire web browser and occasionally brings my 600Mhz processor to a crawl. The bottom line is: If they want more people to view ads, they should make them less annoying, smaller in size, and more useful.
Actually, most of the 'less expensive' ISPs (eg, not Earthlink) have automated hourly accounting. This makes sure that the very second you surpass the limited number of hours they provide. Some of the cheaper ones only have 100-300 hours per month. For VERY casual use, 300 might be okay, but it adds up if you happen to talk for a few hours, then leave it to download for a few more. My current ISP (Joi Internet http://www.joiinternet.com/) costs $10 a month ($7 if you prepay for an entire year), but their number of hours averages out to having to average 20 hours a day to even possibly fill it. There's no feasible way for me to do that. It took me several months just to find an ISP that was under $10/month or under, plus didn't cap the hourly rate to a completely unreasonable level. "Unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited hours, often, but unlimited access (aside from a few ports here and there).
Having the windows 'spread out' like that reminds me of one thing in particular, the Delphi/C Builder IDEs. They too had a similar interface and were insufferable on Windows (probably just as bad with Kylix on Linux. While nice UNIX-based RAD tools are possibly a good thing, "bad" interface design (possibly the worst offense of which is not making SDI/MDI a configurable option) won't really help developers or for "open source" to gain better mainstream acceptance for users not interested in any amount of complexity.
Oh, yes, but for me, it's not so much about searching at all. It's simply that Firefox's engine is more or less tightly bolted onto 'page rendering'. There are many things that in Firefox will "lock up" the browser/UI until it's done transitioning to a page or loading it. This is completely unacceptable, and I can't believe noone's fixed it. I just recently came back to Mozilla (which also uses around half the memory of Firefox, loads pages faster, too!), but I'm glad I did. With a couple of extensions (MultiZilla and Adblock, mostly), it can do basically everything Firefox can, plus actually work well for my needs. I don't use or need the Mail or IRC parts at all (in fact, they're compiled out).
For me, Mozilla's "old world charm" makes a lot more sense than Firefox's "flash in the pan". Firefox has "fancy new features", but none that out-weigh the fact that it's just an incorrect attempt. Because of the massive slowdown (Slashdot, for example, reloads in 0.7 seconds in Mozilla and Opera with my proxy. Firefox insists on taking 20 and reloading all images from the net, despite caching, and that's not even the problem with the UI), it becomes deeply frustrating when you spend ~70% of your time when web-browsing just fighting with the browser. Nevermind that Firefox also crashes a lot more.
If Opera only supported "pretty" print output, rather than mucking it all up, I'd probably just use that, but Mozilla still marginally edges everything else out for me.
They apparently spent four years on this, but only produced numbers for the very latest version of the Linux kernel?
Why not compare it to older versions, from 2.1 to 2.6-test? Why didn't they even mention if the number of bugs has been falling or rising with that? Presumably it'd be lower in 2.4.21 than the latest 2.6.x considering that 2.6.x has suddenly become more or less a development kernel for the time being, but they don't seem to've substantiated that at all.
But even so, all of that aside, what did they compare it against that wasn't Linux? They seem to've just used guesstimation numbers. They didn't use Windows source code to check against. They didn't check against other Open Source projects. If they spent years of time on this, wouldn't it have been interesting for them to compare against the *BSDs, or even FreeDOS?
If it were really, actually, a study, there should've been a lot of competing and baseline data to compare against. Otherwise, it just seems like a thinly veiled 'PR spin' attempt to get more people on the fence to use Linux.
Actually.
I never said that it causes someone to sadistically abuse anyone else...I said that marijuana is at times (whether factually or hypothetically) blamed for it. Big difference. Just like I wasn't saying that guns actually are the thing which "should've known better" and went and shot someone.
On the pointedly hostile mention, I'm reminded to go and watch and giggle at a Cheech and Chong movie, and I don't even need to be stoned to love it!
There's apparently a remake of Reefer Madness in post-production.
Though, the original triology seems to be really funny. The reviewer's comment about the lesbian secretaries...bwahahaha.:D
This sort of argument gets very tiresome across the years. It's the gun's fault when someone shoots their neighbor. It's the car's fault when a wife drives over their husband. It's the alcohol's fault when someone shoots themself. It's the marijuana's fault when you sadistically abuse people.
CornNUTS! It's pure fluff.
People who "incorrectly" use a product are liable, not the makers. On a side note, sales typically go up as the trend of piracy does. Why settle for MP3s when you can hear it on MP3 first, then go and get the CD which has the harder-to-find songs, plus sounds better to boot? Or at least, when you can afford it? Some of us can't from time to time, but plan to when we can.
There's nothing neater than when that little CD spins up, and U2's "Staring At The Sun" (or otherwise your favorite song..) knocks ALL of the stuff off of your walls and shelves.
Isn't this one of the prime reasons why Microsoft was (and usually is, repeatedly) the subject of Anti Trust litigation? Microsoft's operating system comes "integrated" with this, that, but of course, not the other. While Office, IE, OE, among other things coming "standard", integrated, and all that, doesn't it make it unfair that competing projects become the hassle to install? No, it's not so much that it's simply available, but mostly that it comes packaged and tightly integrated with the OS itself. People can be considered inherently lazy. (I'll tell you, back in the day....) It is, at best, "nigh impossible" to uninstall Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, at least retaining any sort of functionality. You can't do it from the OS itself. You have to use "special utilities" to do it, which often leave the system in an unstable state.
Compare that from a system administrator's standpoint to Firefox. It's not only third party, but would have to be downloaded (or preloaded onto CD or other backup/installation media), updates might also have to be provided. It doesn't come in "nice neat packaging", like IE does. Even if someone wanted to use Firefox, it could easily be argued that it's far slower and uses more resources because Internet Explorer preloads with the OS and hides its memory usage. Firefox could potentially contain a virus, worm, or back door, even if the source is available. Internet Explorer, having no source available, isn't guaranteed to have none, but it reasonably assures that some disgruntled employee can't make a covert build which includes one. Firefox also updates fairly regularly, a hell to 'maintain' to any degree. Internet Explorer is more or less guaranteed to stay the same for at least another two years. Though, if you believe what Microsoft says, "IE7" won't be made available in any form for anything other than LongHorn.
To effectively "replace" Internet Explorer for users, you'd have to rip it out of the OS, deliberately making it "less stable", in addition to less compatible (some apps depend on IE controls, though Mozilla unofficially has a thing for that). You'd have to completely remove it...and then find, download, and install Firefox, an "untrusted source". You'd have to know how to configure it, and get it right for all users in a general sense. Any problems with it...well, you'd have to defer to Mozilla's website, forums, or...whatever. Even if that, fixes become available. Not in 'binary patch' form, but 'new release' form, which means new downloads, new installation media, new headaches. Especially when users start to complain "Why doesn't it work like the last version?! This is unusable!".
It's logistically a nightmare to "replace" on Windows machines...which is one of the reasons why they were sued for anti-trust practices relating to IE...and it's still one of the reasons why there's ongoing legal battles that'll drag on for years...and years, from many governments.
It's not fair, but that's Microsoft and the Microsoft World for you.
Mind, I'm a die-hard Firefox supporter. I'll cheerily rip out Internet Explorer every time if I ever have to use Windows (which I don't plan on doing anytime soon). But when you have the role of supporting potentially a large number of users, with a relatively large volume of large updates (none of which aren't guaranteed to "fix" anything, or keep your users happy) it can be a real problem to even so much as upgrade. *waves to (un)happy people still using NT4 and Win2K*
This has happened before, hasn't it?
The creator of Minix shot his mouth off then, just like the Sun COO is shooting his off now. There isn't any grounds for this. Linux has a strong base because it -is- a "Hacker's Project". It means you can probably get something 'fixed' faster in the kernel than the development cycles of other projects. So, whereever Linux might be deficient now, it gets to the point where it'll be better. A year ago, 2.4.x was stable and there were massive problems. A year later, we have a stable 2.6.x tree with a supreme amount of functionality and performance, and patches which can leverage even more of that performance if we feel we should be on the bleeding edge.
That's one of the big reasons which keeps me away from FreeBSD on my Desktop, let alone Windows.
I wouldn't be surprised if Linus has a similar response to this as he did to the "Linux is Obsolete" dig. Though who would blame him?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't "less than 2MB" be equivilent to a heavy-loaded Linux kernel? An (entirely modern) linux kernel and basic interactive environment can be loaded in 1.44MB. Make it non-interactive, add other Rover Function And Utility Stuff, that'd still be less than 2MB, wouldn't it? So, spending 2MB on kernel+code space, how is that any "better" than Linux? Plus it took...how many millions to develop?
And for all of you who say that Linux doesn't have reliable realtime, the latency isn't -that- bad, and there's a patch for 2.6.10-rc-mm-yadda that adds down to 0.1ms guaranteed worst-case latency. Admittedly beta, but stable enough to now power my desktop (which has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in, 1.7MB image size). Nevermind all of the other less general patches and patchsets for more or less "realtime" functionality.
This seems like perhaps another huge waste of Government resources if they use that much on size for an "embedded" realtime OS for a mission-critical piece of equipment.
Chances are, it wouldn't do much better on efficiency, if at all.
Slashdot Mirror
The title of this is a bit misleading. They apparently haven't upgraded to, or are actively using Vista for anything, so wouldn't this merely be that they're switching to Linux, rather than are dissatisfied with Vista somehow? It seems that any time anyone "switches to" Linux, it's highly publicized, but the way this is portrayed is more anti-MS hype than pro-Linux anything, let alone "reporting a news story fairly objectively". Someone cancels their Microsoft contract, without citing explicitly why, and somehow it turns into that they're hating on Vista and are switching from Vista to Linux.
Personally, I'll be more impressed when more companies start switching to FreeBSD instead of Linux or from Linux. Sure, random companies can buy the loyalties of Linux developers or project managers, but since when was strict quality control and release management considered 'a bad thing'? Perhaps someone could tell me, but I don't see it. If I had been promoted to head of IT for some big company, and we were going to open source operating systems, I'd see it as a better idea to switch to a more reliable operating system with strict QC/QA, an actual interest into what is in patches, the best way to fix something, etc, as well as releases being planned out and approved by more than one person.
In addition to the sheer fact that FreeBSD doesn't seem to be motivated by or the flagship of a company who wants to undercut and take over commercial/closed source software, by also undercutting and taking over all other open source.
Wouldn't those be common reasons why someone left Microsoft contracts and operating systems behind in the first place?
Possibly off-topic, but so many headlines recently use acronyms for things which are possibly unfamiliar, and don't provide a link on the Acronym to the homepage or an entry about whatever-it-is. Some of the stories are starting to look like the old joke, "You got a you-know-what from you-know-who, and you're supposed to take it to you-know-where by you-know when. Wink Wink. Nudge Nudge."
They also seem to forget that a lot of "so-called programmers", particularly in the open source community, have no idea what they're doing. It's just common sense, if you don't know what you're doing in general, are you a programmer/developer? No. It's not exactly rocket science (oh, actually, it has a big part in that too), but just because you can knock two things together and make loud screeching noises doesn't make you a programmer, nor do fancy degrees. I've met people who have this and that degrees, expensive certification, and still don't know what they're doing, can't competently write or modify a program in any language.
It's not an elitest thing, either. Would you, for instance, be called a Medical Doctor if you didn't know basic anatomy? Hopefully not. I'm sure that "average joe" wouldn't be any more comfortable with an incompetent person who arbitrarily decides to call themselves a doctor (usually not too long before being arrested) than they would be trying to go to an incompetent person who decides to call themselves a programmer. It doesn't take that necessarily that much to learn and develop as a good programmer (let alone as an adaquete programmer), but people often don't want to put in any effort. I know of several developers who don't do any actual work, just convince others to do the work for them, then take all of the credit, without so much as a thank you. It's also funny when a C++ teacher doesn't know things that are in the first half of "the book", and can be found on any reference material online, and have to get others to do assignments to -give to his class- to do. Funny that he's a teacher (not teaching me, of course), and has all sorts of degrees, and I took the time to teach myself, and I know more than him, and have a sparkling track record.
I think I've seen this mentioned before, I keep thinking it's "Red Faction Online", then fall over.
Luckily, like many previous Mozilla versions, it also comes with the "Modern" theme, which is easily selected.
This of course goes well with the Modern icon pack. Firefox has "always" had big memory leaks, as far as I've noticed, and Firefox has always had the "bug" where the page rendering is coupled to the entire UI. Firefox is unusable when it takes a half-second or more to switch between a 'relatively' large (cough, 20) number of tabs, and can take thirty seconds or more to load a plugin like Shockwave or Java, even on a fast machine. Then there are all of the security issues with Firefox, like that they're more or less supporting spyware tracking, nevermind the issue where it ignores most Java security; it's the only browser I've seen anymore which actually gets affected by Java Viruses, even Internet Explorer (6 SP2 or better) won't. They also tend to have a policy of inserting code which may not be stable, and may not be in the best interest of...anyone.
Also, it's not incompatible with particularly useful extensions. Even ForecastFox and Reminderfox work, as do EnigMail nightlies, Adblock (and Adblock Plus with automatic filter update extensions), Googlebar, StumbleUpon, even the web developer toolbar, and various tab browsing functionality can be replicated with Nightly builds of Multizilla. The only thing I can't easily replicate on SeaMonkey is GreaseMonkey (ironically). Ancient versions depend on Mozilla 1.7 or so, newer versions want Firefox 1.5, though I'm told there'll be a Seamonkey-compatible sometime soon.
And while Firefox may have originally been meant to "trim the fat" of Mozilla, the per-tab usage of SM vs. Firefox isn't a substantial difference (about 30MB difference on 100 tabs, which at that point is a drop in the bucket), and Mozilla/SeaMonkey also include the email client (which only adds about 4MB, compared to 40+ for Thunderbird, and 60+ or so for Outlook 2003), and can rack up more savings the more you use it to replace other things, like IRC client and Calendar (which now has a working version for Seamonkey). It also tends to render pages faster, with less CPU time, and less CPU time used for 'idle pages'. I can't count the number of times I've had to kill Firefox and restart it because some random tab or another started using 100% CPU time, even when it wasn't the active one. Animated GIFs also made the browser crazy (though I was getting that as late as December or so, before Firefox was finally purged permanently from my machine). Between SeaMonkey and Miranda, I save about 150MB of memory and a lot more CPU power compared to using other (standard) possible combinations of applications.
Perhaps everyone involved with the whole San Andreas SNAFU will think twice before trying to put "hidden content" into a game that largely no one wants aside from fourteen year olds who are so craving for nudity that they'd be obsessing about pixelated polygons that take a vague shape (gee, who remembers that 'nude patch' for the Valkyrie in Gauntlet? It's all disgusting the way people are so deperate for it), lying about it, making a really bad patch for the game, then dropping all support, and screwing both users, the mod community, and...made the fundamentalists have more than enough excuse to increase the rate at which they try to shove new laws down our throats which do nothing to 'protect' anyone, but just further their careers (such as the Utah 'violent games as porn' bill).
Everyone going insane in making this, and over this, really needed a reality check (preferably the brutal hockey variety) in the first place.
And what's even worse? The "No More Hot Coffee" patch actually fixed critical things, but because there was no follow up patch, no one really noticed, and there was no "clean" version of the patch. This left some missions on some installations of the game (like that first 'dance mission' on the beach) unplayable, between the normal version not fixing it, and the second version being broken, unsupported, both by Rock Star and by "the community". At minimum, they should have made a clean/sane patch, with standard versioning available, so people didn't think that the only thing the patch did was "remove the OMG nudity" (which made all of the guys hate it, of course). Eventually, I had to give up on the game completely, was it was completely unable to complete, or even get very far due to serious bugs. Way to go, the developers really dropped the ball on this one...
Personally, I get dozens of LARGE spam emails a day, and they haven't 'fixed' my account, so it's stuck at 2MB. This means every three days or so, all email starts to bounce. Of course, Hotmail support claims that nothing's wrong, nothing's broken, despite trying to mark the same junk as junk, day after day, after day. It's one of the reasons I more or less gave up on it, and keep trying to keep friends far, far away from that mess. The amusing thing is that all of the spam is quite easily identified as spam, and is often quite large, topping out around 50K. I'd bet if there were a 'test spam' (like there is a 'test virus') to demonstrate if it's working at all, it'd get into my inbox anyway. The only thing it seems to filter out to the Spam box are messages I actually need to receive. Hotmail can easily be used to scan for addresses on their service or other email services, though, which means getting more and more spam simply because of it, even if you won't sign up. It's obviously something they haven't made anywhere near the caliber of other email services.
EA's overall game quality (including expansions/patches for various games) has been dwindling significantly in recent years. It seems to me that they peaked with games like Need for Speed: High Stakes, and SimCity 3000. High Stakes had among the best driving experience for games (Underground didn't hold a candle), including more realistic physics, full weather possibility, and if you hit something, another car, a heavy stone barrier, it actually caused damage to the car, which affected its performance. You could get knocked out of a race (with a hefty repair bill) if you were too careless, while most newer games in the series have physics inspired by "Cruisin' USA" (for those who remember the arcade game), you can hit anything, including doing flips and completely wiping out, and your car rights itself and you just hit the gas. You never need to use the brakes any more. Feasibly, a 'B' class car (the slowest, but easiest to handle) could beat a AAA class car (the best top speed, lousy acceleration) on many maps, if you were skilled enough, and these types of matches could happen, in the newer ones, it appears that you can only race with cars of the exact same class, making it less a challenge of skill, and more who doesn't get side-swiped by another competing car.
SC3K was generally 'better' as well, including making larger cities quite a bit more interesting and easy to manage. Even older games old NHL98/99 were generally just more satisfying than newer editions, I imagine the same goes for most of their sports titles and other games. They seem to've given up on actually making the incremental releases more fun to play.
But perhaps even worse than that, they don't seem to be making (m)any 'innovative' games anymore, and of course there were the accusations of how they treated employees like slaves. I wonder if EA's really losing touch with reality. After all, their "Big 2006" Q1 release for PC is yet another lackluster Sims 2 expansion pack.
What ever happened to games like Starflight, Skate or Die!, Road Rash, Desert Strike, and Syndicate? Their new idea of games to publish seems to be constantly repeated titles in series which don't really offer anything new. Not to be too stingy, but the only game recently I can think of off-hand that was pretty decent/original was Undying, which was somewhat standard survival horror, but did it using an FPS engine with many unique gameplay elements.
The express editions seem a bit light, but do offer redistribution.
.NET Framework and ASP.NET if so inclined). Despite problems with the help system (via F1), it's a big 'happy' upgrade over VS2003.
It's probably 'way out of price range', though the higher end editions offer a myiad of new and compelling features. You can basically have your own custom toolchain, complete with property sheets and full IDE integration for 'third party' tools, like using NASM/YASM/MASM for assembly. It's enough to (finally) be able to compile various open-source things with the IDE instead of depending on autotools and GCC. I could conceivably integrate 'open source' utilities into it completely, such as bison/flex, even such random things as a SNES C Cross-Compiler.
There are also rather nice setup project utilities, you can deploy a nice installer to anywhere which can 'net install' your program, in addition to any prerequisites and dependencies (like properly setting up C/C++ Runtimes and even MSI; or
As far as Linux codes, there's always KDevelop http://www.kdevelop.org/, and Anjuta http://anjuta.sourceforge.net/. While Microsoft Visual Studio makes a compelling case for use in general, there are quite a few non-Windows IDEs, though noone's forcing you to make Microsoft-specific code with MSVS, either. Personally I'm working on a few open source projects, and somewhat-targetting with a new C# application, will consider using GTK# http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/ instead of WinForms at some point (perhaps when underlying GTK+ bindings get a bit less fickle).
They thought he was a goner, but the programmer came back, the very next day, but the programmer came back, he just couldn't stay away. Away, yeah yeah.
The bug around the corner swore he'd kill the programmer on-site, and loaded up his drive with spyware and viruses, it waited and it waited for the programmer to come around. 1100001 patches for the bug was all they found. o/~
I heard somewhere that All Programmers Go To Heaven. >:)
I'd have to question the personal insecurity of the person who wrote this article if they included such a statement. How could any decently intelligent person come up with this, let alone a supposed gamer, unless they felt deeply threatened by the apparent results of the research?
The point of feeling emotions because of games isn't because of 'instability', emotional or otherwise (no matter how many guys would like to put on a tough act), but because emotions are natural. They're especially natural concerning any interaction, of which books, movies, and games can be considered a part of. In books and movies, you sympathize, make a connection with the characters. You sit 'on the edge of your seat', so to speak, as the story develops and as you begin to understand the characters and their interactions and development more. You see more into their lives, and appreciate the author for taking the time...if it's well done. It's not really any different for a book, game, movie, play, or any other method for telling a story.
Today, I was watching 'Dad', starring Ted Danson and Jack Lemmon. I tend not to cry all that often, but it was such a good movie that it had me sobbing, among feeling many other emotions.
It's a sad day when people who play video games can be easily considered emotionally unstable for feeling things about a video game character, or crying when something tragic happens, or after a long, hard-won victory.
However, why would crying at a failed landing approach in MSFS (particularly after the 300th time) be considered any worse than cursing at the game, or your own lack of skills, in frustration or anger?
That seems like completely unreasonable double standard, to me. For many decent games, like Freespace 2, Septerra Core, even Rogue Spear, The Thing, and System Shock 2, who hasn't displayed a wide variety of emotions? Who hasn't cheered or cried with the thrill of victory? Who hasn't felt anger, remorse, or sadness at a humiliating defeat? Isn't it the emotional response to begin with which keeps most gamers playing? It's not just that there is a challenge floating around that makes most play, it's the emotional response to that, to the story, to the challenge itself.
Maybe I'd still view any advertising if it were still simple. Advertising that became intrusive and even dangerous is all over the place now. But, besides any personal information, privacy, or revenue for a favorite site concern (sorry Slashdot!), advertising has generally become designed exclusively for 1Mbit/s and higher connections. It's impossible to even simply browse through text anymore because of advertising anywhere. Even with adblock and similar extensions for other browsers, advertising is still intrusive enough that it still steals an insane amount of bandwidth. Only Adblock itself is particularly smart enough to track what's loaded and allow you to block advertising javascript, as well, which can steal an absurd amount of bandwidth for no real purpose.
Things in general are getting larger and larger, programs, advertising, and javascript included. Contrary to apparent popular belief, this isn't because it's getting BETTER, but because programmers (speaking as one) are getting excessively lazier and less skilled as time goes on. Noone knows how to keep things relatively small anymore.
Not to brag (or self promote; current problems with the webhost), I don't consider it something to brag about, it's simple, but my website has always been designed with a relatively small size in mind. Even from a completely clean cache, it loads in just a few seconds on dialup, and refreshes are more or less instantaneous. If people worked by that principle anymore, which is one of the reasons why I'm greatly disappointed with Firefox these days, the internet might still be a dialup-friendly place.
If Anarchy Online only uses 0.4KB/s (when not idle in a corner), what's the excuse for so much other software for utterly hating dialup since about 1999?
I don't really think that a Qt version would ever really get off the ground. Even if Sun did it, chances are it would be relatively unmaintained, and would lag behind compared to Gtk+ version. Most apps love GTK+ or 'KDE widgets' to death, even in places where nice, clean Qt widgets would be much more appropriate (and would be faster, to boot). The whole GTK+ file selector, now improved without text input, or remembering where you 'were', and without any way to input actual text or select simple things is a prime example of moving in the wrong direction instead of actually paying attention to users! (I can't even do any nominal file operations, like rename, from a GTK+ file selection dialog, can't simply change directories to something Not In The List). It's just...unspeakably horrible. ;_;
It would perhaps be heavy-handed, but Qt should probably basically make a 'GTK+' compatibility library which translates GTK+ widgets/functions/whatnot to Qt equivalents for user-end applications.
That way, we could all use the Happy Qt Beauty/Speed (particularly for how customizable Qt look/feel is), without needing to care if an app was written for the latest GTK+ or not...which tends to be several step backward in usability, design, and aesthetics, IMHO.
I think it's more than a little heavy handed to call ad blocking a social contract when ad size has jumped from a few kilobytes (15-30kb is perhaps reasonable) up near the megabyte range. I see MANY ads without filtering that are in excess of 750KB, few which are less than 200K. On dialup, this takes a very substantial amount of time to download, and prevents doing anything else network-wise than having to wait for an ad for a product which you're not interested in. Even worse, most of the bigger ads tend to give instructions to the web browser or proxy to never even try to cache them, so you have to wait even when just moving between pages on a website. Ads on TV are frustrating, but you're not even exclusively locked into it there, either. You can change the channel. You can turn the TV off or mute it for a few minutes. That's not violating a social contract, either The fact is that businesses online who slather the public with ads are getting an easy break. They can effectively try to get near-permanent, near-exclusive advertising all over a website. Particularly if you have little bandwidth, that can mean you have no choice but to either stop viewing the website completely, or filter out the ad before it can be downloaded. It's a sorry state to things, but going on about how people who block ads are jerks, or irresponsible is complete BS in an atmosphere like this. I'd cheerily view ads if they weren't so annoying or so large. I used to often click on ads, several years ago, to see more about something that was half-way interesting. Even when I don't run with adblocking enabled (mostly with Opera), I never find anything anymore that's even half-way interesting, and usually it's Flash, or tries to grab input, or has obnoxious sound, or fills up the entire web browser and occasionally brings my 600Mhz processor to a crawl.
The bottom line is: If they want more people to view ads, they should make them less annoying, smaller in size, and more useful.
Actually, most of the 'less expensive' ISPs (eg, not Earthlink) have automated hourly accounting. This makes sure that the very second you surpass the limited number of hours they provide. Some of the cheaper ones only have 100-300 hours per month. For VERY casual use, 300 might be okay, but it adds up if you happen to talk for a few hours, then leave it to download for a few more. My current ISP (Joi Internet http://www.joiinternet.com/) costs $10 a month ($7 if you prepay for an entire year), but their number of hours averages out to having to average 20 hours a day to even possibly fill it. There's no feasible way for me to do that.
It took me several months just to find an ISP that was under $10/month or under, plus didn't cap the hourly rate to a completely unreasonable level. "Unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited hours, often, but unlimited access (aside from a few ports here and there).
Having the windows 'spread out' like that reminds me of one thing in particular, the Delphi/C Builder IDEs. They too had a similar interface and were insufferable on Windows (probably just as bad with Kylix on Linux. While nice UNIX-based RAD tools are possibly a good thing, "bad" interface design (possibly the worst offense of which is not making SDI/MDI a configurable option) won't really help developers or for "open source" to gain better mainstream acceptance for users not interested in any amount of complexity.
>Quite simply, it's a better browser.
Oh, yes, but for me, it's not so much about searching at all. It's simply that Firefox's engine is more or less tightly bolted onto 'page rendering'. There are many things that in Firefox will "lock up" the browser/UI until it's done transitioning to a page or loading it. This is completely unacceptable, and I can't believe noone's fixed it. I just recently came back to Mozilla (which also uses around half the memory of Firefox, loads pages faster, too!), but I'm glad I did. With a couple of extensions (MultiZilla and Adblock, mostly), it can do basically everything Firefox can, plus actually work well for my needs.
I don't use or need the Mail or IRC parts at all (in fact, they're compiled out).
For me, Mozilla's "old world charm" makes a lot more sense than Firefox's "flash in the pan". Firefox has "fancy new features", but none that out-weigh the fact that it's just an incorrect attempt. Because of the massive slowdown (Slashdot, for example, reloads in 0.7 seconds in Mozilla and Opera with my proxy. Firefox insists on taking 20 and reloading all images from the net, despite caching, and that's not even the problem with the UI), it becomes deeply frustrating when you spend ~70% of your time when web-browsing just fighting with the browser. Nevermind that Firefox also crashes a lot more.
If Opera only supported "pretty" print output, rather than mucking it all up, I'd probably just use that, but Mozilla still marginally edges everything else out for me.
Haiku about 15 line P2P app, only 3 lines. ^_^
Slowly Spinning Peers,
Ugly, but Minimized.
Exercise in Small.
They apparently spent four years on this, but only produced numbers for the very latest version of the Linux kernel?
Why not compare it to older versions, from 2.1 to 2.6-test? Why didn't they even mention if the number of bugs has been falling or rising with that? Presumably it'd be lower in 2.4.21 than the latest 2.6.x considering that 2.6.x has suddenly become more or less a development kernel for the time being, but they don't seem to've substantiated that at all.
But even so, all of that aside, what did they compare it against that wasn't Linux? They seem to've just used guesstimation numbers. They didn't use Windows source code to check against. They didn't check against other Open Source projects. If they spent years of time on this, wouldn't it have been interesting for them to compare against the *BSDs, or even FreeDOS?
If it were really, actually, a study, there should've been a lot of competing and baseline data to compare against. Otherwise, it just seems like a thinly veiled 'PR spin' attempt to get more people on the fence to use Linux.
Actually. I never said that it causes someone to sadistically abuse anyone else...I said that marijuana is at times (whether factually or hypothetically) blamed for it. Big difference. Just like I wasn't saying that guns actually are the thing which "should've known better" and went and shot someone. :D
On the pointedly hostile mention, I'm reminded to go and watch and giggle at a Cheech and Chong movie, and I don't even need to be stoned to love it!
There's apparently a remake of Reefer Madness in post-production.
Though, the original triology seems to be really funny. The reviewer's comment about the lesbian secretaries...bwahahaha.
*cue campy dramatic 1930s propaganda music*
"Now...you know!"
This sort of argument gets very tiresome across the years. It's the gun's fault when someone shoots their neighbor. It's the car's fault when a wife drives over their husband. It's the alcohol's fault when someone shoots themself. It's the marijuana's fault when you sadistically abuse people.
CornNUTS! It's pure fluff.
People who "incorrectly" use a product are liable, not the makers.
On a side note, sales typically go up as the trend of piracy does. Why settle for MP3s when you can hear it on MP3 first, then go and get the CD which has the harder-to-find songs, plus sounds better to boot? Or at least, when you can afford it? Some of us can't from time to time, but plan to when we can.
There's nothing neater than when that little CD spins up, and U2's "Staring At The Sun" (or otherwise your favorite song..) knocks ALL of the stuff off of your walls and shelves.
Isn't this one of the prime reasons why Microsoft was (and usually is, repeatedly) the subject of Anti Trust litigation? Microsoft's operating system comes "integrated" with this, that, but of course, not the other. While Office, IE, OE, among other things coming "standard", integrated, and all that, doesn't it make it unfair that competing projects become the hassle to install?
No, it's not so much that it's simply available, but mostly that it comes packaged and tightly integrated with the OS itself. People can be considered inherently lazy. (I'll tell you, back in the day....)
It is, at best, "nigh impossible" to uninstall Internet Explorer and Outlook Express, at least retaining any sort of functionality. You can't do it from the OS itself. You have to use "special utilities" to do it, which often leave the system in an unstable state.
Compare that from a system administrator's standpoint to Firefox. It's not only third party, but would have to be downloaded (or preloaded onto CD or other backup/installation media), updates might also have to be provided. It doesn't come in "nice neat packaging", like IE does. Even if someone wanted to use Firefox, it could easily be argued that it's far slower and uses more resources because Internet Explorer preloads with the OS and hides its memory usage. Firefox could potentially contain a virus, worm, or back door, even if the source is available.
Internet Explorer, having no source available, isn't guaranteed to have none, but it reasonably assures that some disgruntled employee can't make a covert build which includes one. Firefox also updates fairly regularly, a hell to 'maintain' to any degree. Internet Explorer is more or less guaranteed to stay the same for at least another two years. Though, if you believe what Microsoft says, "IE7" won't be made available in any form for anything other than LongHorn.
To effectively "replace" Internet Explorer for users, you'd have to rip it out of the OS, deliberately making it "less stable", in addition to less compatible (some apps depend on IE controls, though Mozilla unofficially has a thing for that). You'd have to completely remove it...and then find, download, and install Firefox, an "untrusted source". You'd have to know how to configure it, and get it right for all users in a general sense. Any problems with it...well, you'd have to defer to Mozilla's website, forums, or...whatever. Even if that, fixes become available. Not in 'binary patch' form, but 'new release' form, which means new downloads, new installation media, new headaches. Especially when users start to complain "Why doesn't it work like the last version?! This is unusable!".
It's logistically a nightmare to "replace" on Windows machines...which is one of the reasons why they were sued for anti-trust practices relating to IE...and it's still one of the reasons why there's ongoing legal battles that'll drag on for years...and years, from many governments.
It's not fair, but that's Microsoft and the Microsoft World for you.
Mind, I'm a die-hard Firefox supporter. I'll cheerily rip out Internet Explorer every time if I ever have to use Windows (which I don't plan on doing anytime soon). But when you have the role of supporting potentially a large number of users, with a relatively large volume of large updates (none of which aren't guaranteed to "fix" anything, or keep your users happy) it can be a real problem to even so much as upgrade. *waves to (un)happy people still using NT4 and Win2K*
This has happened before, hasn't it? The creator of Minix shot his mouth off then, just like the Sun COO is shooting his off now. There isn't any grounds for this. Linux has a strong base because it -is- a "Hacker's Project". It means you can probably get something 'fixed' faster in the kernel than the development cycles of other projects. So, whereever Linux might be deficient now, it gets to the point where it'll be better. A year ago, 2.4.x was stable and there were massive problems. A year later, we have a stable 2.6.x tree with a supreme amount of functionality and performance, and patches which can leverage even more of that performance if we feel we should be on the bleeding edge. That's one of the big reasons which keeps me away from FreeBSD on my Desktop, let alone Windows. I wouldn't be surprised if Linus has a similar response to this as he did to the "Linux is Obsolete" dig. Though who would blame him?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't "less than 2MB" be equivilent to a heavy-loaded Linux kernel?
An (entirely modern) linux kernel and basic interactive environment can be loaded in 1.44MB. Make it non-interactive, add other Rover Function And Utility Stuff, that'd still be less than 2MB, wouldn't it?
So, spending 2MB on kernel+code space, how is that any "better" than Linux? Plus it took...how many millions to develop?
And for all of you who say that Linux doesn't have reliable realtime, the latency isn't -that- bad, and there's a patch for 2.6.10-rc-mm-yadda that adds down to 0.1ms guaranteed worst-case latency.
Admittedly beta, but stable enough to now power my desktop (which has everything but the kitchen sink thrown in, 1.7MB image size). Nevermind all of the other less general patches and patchsets for more or less "realtime" functionality.
This seems like perhaps another huge waste of Government resources if they use that much on size for an "embedded" realtime OS for a mission-critical piece of equipment.
Chances are, it wouldn't do much better on efficiency, if at all.