...and if our standards of today<*> aren't good enough for the likes of university students and unemployed people, then they can just buy SFU, can't they?
...I'd prefer/local/bin,/local/sbin,/local/etc,/local/share "and so on and so forth". Much easier to cope with than nested mounts, particularly if one of them (e.g./usr) might be NFS and in theory less reliable than local storage.
Mandrake have noticed how cluttered ~/ gets and now default all (well, many) of their apps to saving stuff in ~/Documents/ instead. It wouldn't be a great conceptual leap from there to add ~/etc/ or ~/rc/ config files to that (only they'd probably want to use something more user-intuitive like ~/Configuration/) but it would take forever to get the several thousand individual upstream application authors to make such a conversion, and they'd have to get Debian, SuSE et al to agree that it was a good idea.
And hey, it'd break POSIX compliance even further, wouldn't it?
POSIX should be followed unless there is a good reason not to.
There are some very good reasons for doing stuff differently to POSIX, but most of them relate to simple issues like gets() which could be addressed by a compatibility library or the location of "at" files which can be mostly cured with a symlink.
Some of the issues are annoying to cure even on POSIX systems because different versions of POSIX sometimes make incompatible recommentations (the case raised by the GNU people was "sort +2" which sorts based on the second field in earlier POSICES and sorts a file called "+2" in later ones. The vast majority of the FSF's GNU tools snap very much into the POSIX line if you run them with POSIXLY_CORRECT=yes.
MS-Windows is a mess due to randomness not scatter
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
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· Score: 1
It doesn't matter where the files go, as long as they go there consistently. MS-Windows apps, including Microsoft's ones, put stuff all over the filesystem (and registry) in a semi-haphazard way. This is very bad, because if it was totally systematic you'd be able to predict where it went, and if it was totally random you'd fire up a search immediately.
IRL, there seem to be ablout 3 or 4 common ways of arranging files and/or registry entries. Let's take the example of an application which could be considered a utility, something vaguely like MS-Draw or their equation editor.
In the Bad Very Old Days, everything would just get dumped into C:\WINDOWS (except that I never called it WINDOWS because some virii had that path hardwired) and/or possibly C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM and if you were lucky you'd see a NAMEOFAP.INI file there;
In the Bad Not So Old Days, the app would either go into C:\NAMEOFAP or C:\BRNDNAME\APPLNAME and maybe C:\WINDOWS would be awarded an.INI file or maybe it's live with the app, or maybe in C:\;
In the Bad Moderately Old Days, that usually morphed to C:\ProgramFiles\NameOfApplication (possibly with a \Manufacturer path element squeezed in there (or after MS-Windows borked itself, C:\PROGRA~1\NAMEOF~1) and you'd have both.INI files and registry entries;
Nowadays, you might get an \Applicationn.n suffix on the path, and most configuration things live somewhere in the registry so that if that gets corrupted the whole system goes wonky or dies, and every application running under every user now needs write access to all of your config information;
Woven in amongst the last two are propensities to jam apps like this into corners like C:\ProgramFiles\CommonFiles or C:\ProgramFiles\MicrosoftOffice\Addins;
Of course, now we also have C:\DocumentsandSettings competing with the registry, and things like the menus live here rather than in the registry where you would expect them, and so on.
That's roughly six and a half changes, to say nothing of the odd application which ignore the existing mess or (MS-Publisher comes to mind) was slow to keep up with it. If Microsoft had had a standard like POSIX or LSB to follow, this wouldn't have happened, and those vendors who broke the guidelines could very reasonably and clearly be reprimanded for their intransignence. However, they've dug their own cesspit, now they have to wallow in it.
Put the files in/etc and symlink them into/usr/lib/cron to keep both parties happy (and let me continue to run with/usr mounted readonly). A slightly less bizarre place to put them than cron would be/usr/lib/at if that existed, however I've become accustomed to finding all of my global config files under/etc.
I do agree that some of POSIX exists for hysterical reasons only, but if it gets people off UnixWare - which is not UnixV3 compliant, and neither is OpenServer - I'm quite happy to have (configurable) breakage added to Linux.
"Oh, is that all?" Is this a POSIX Linux offer?
on
LSB & Posix Conflicts
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· Score: 1
It would be PSB, Posix Standard Base, not as humourous but a lot more functional.
The system calls in particular seem to be preponderantly a matter of documentation. AFAIK, upwardly compatible extensions aren't an issue at all, eliminating another dozen or so issues. The remainder seem to be trivial enough (e.g. returning EISDIR vs EPERM when rm is aimed at a directory) that they could easily be a kernel config (or even runtime) option.
It would be relatively trivial to add/sysfs/posix/* for the documented features to allow you to set stuff like "gets(): yes/warn/signal" on the fly. If you did this per-process you could have your LSB and POSIX too. (-:
The utilities? Well, there's always the POSIXLY_CORRECT and _POSIX2_VERSION envars. The utilities can be knocked over one at a time based on that, and the stuff in glibc like leading zeros can make decisions based on it (I would cache detection of the envars once on process startup lest this become slow).
What I want to know is: does this Open Group document represent an unofficial/tactful offer to POSIX-certify a version of Linux, presuming compliance?
As for Stac, that's fine for you to think that they did it deliberately
If Microsoft hadn't accumulated such a rich track record of doing exactly what Stac Electronics accused them of doing, I might be tempted to allow them the presumption of innocence. But to do so in light of all that they've done would be a pretty mindless (and in some circumstances suicidal) act of pedantry.
Lastly, you can't offhandedly dismiss all of my points
It works for everyone else. (-:
Re:Should be easy to change the OS
on
Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ok, and their Click-N-Run software to distribute what most of us pull from our distro CD's or the net.
Visit this page, add a few URLs with it, then type "rpmdrake" and tell me if Mandrake doesn't have something at least as easy to use as click-n-run - for free. It'd surprise me if there wasn't at least as nice a GUI tool for Debian.
I can tell you don't have your own children...
on
Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 1
they would have to spoon the jam in through a screw-hole.
...he'd graduated from writing them in 4K of RAM on an 8-bit AIM-65; if he was lucky, he got started wire-wrapping up his own three-chip 4040 4-bit CPU chipset with a terrifyingly expensive 256x4 static RAM chip or bewilderingly complicated set of 1024x1 dynamic RAM chips and associated board-full of logic to keep them refreshed without contention. Video? Hah! We had two-digit 7-segment displays and a hex keypad (on the luxury version, else you programmed it with DIP switches or built your own keyboard out of bits of brass). If you plugged in a better monitor ROM and a UART chip, you could hook it up to something wonderful like the EME2 terminals or a scrounged ASR-33. Your keyboard has more memory than that entire system did, and runs a few orders of magnitude faster. (-: Hands up any of you young whipper-snappers who think I'm kidding?:-)
...I don't have a motorcycle... is there a book "Zen and the art of Cantankerous Japanese Direct Import Toyota Master Ace Surf 4WD Diesel Van Maintenance?" With a section on getting it to exceed 0.01G (and that's downhill) without exhaling its rings in small pieces?
...and of course decaf coffee is carcinogenic...
on
How Do You Get Work Done?
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· Score: 2, Informative
...on account of the processors not being able to get all of the hexane [3rd par] back out again [2nd par].
...the up-front price (USD$189) is AUD$285.40 at today's rates.
Visiting a random local wholesaler and using their one-off retail prices: AllInOne Mobo $99.00 (choice of 3), CPU $104.40 (Athlon 1800+, or $130.80 for a Celeron 2GHz), RAM $54.00, CDROM $32.40 (writer $58.80 AOpen 48x, DVD $70.80 BenQ 16x), case $58.50 (midi tower, 300W PSU), total AUD$365.10. Their website is buggered again as usual because they derive it from an Excel spreadsheet and the code to do it sucks so badly that I completely eclipsed it with 90 minutes' worth of effort using gawk and oocalc to turn the spreadsheet into a PostgreSQL database and PHP to display it.
Options: 128MB USB thumb $66.00.
Treating another random wholesaler similarly gives $99, $118 (2000+, identical Celeron), $66.00, $50.00 (writer, no reader avail; cheapest DVD at $118.00 includes CD writer), case $40.00 total AUD$373.00.
USB thumb for $69.00.
Add roughly $15 for a keyboard and mouse, $20 for a modem (or $35 for a hardware modem, which I'd recommend for reliability), so $400.10 and $408.00, respectively. For $100 extra you'd get twice the CPU and in one case a burner on top of a reader, lose the floppy (or pay $17), and I'm guessing that either shop would bundle the collection for AUD$389 or less, especially if they expected to sell lots of them.
And guess what? The price of MS-Windows XP Home OEM is AUD$189, and MS-Office XP OEM is AUD$429 - more than the cost of either machine, and a combined total of half as much again as the hardware, just to do word-processing. Mandrake Linux 9.1 PowerPack edition is AUD$99.95 inc GST and includes two good office suites plus extras (and of course the ingrates amongst us can download it for free).
There are no slow low-capacity hard drives left. They'd cost nearly as much to make as a fast, high-capacity drive (similar materials, similar plant) and nobody's going to bother putting together a plant to build drives that won't sell. Put it this way, if you had a choice of a 5GB drive for AUD$75, a 10GB drive for AUD$80 or a 40GB drive for AUD$95, which would you buy? If you can get 128MB of Flash for AUD$69 and (with a compressed FS) that's enough to run your system, why would you want a bulky, noisy, unreliable hard drive? The Cyrix-based motherboards are only selling well for niche markets, and I suspect that low-capacity hard drives would be the same. Make one small, slow, low-power, low-heat, long-life and you might find a market - until Flash gets that cheap too.
Now I'm off to go listen to my Somy Walman and then go out for a drive in my Porshe. Do you think I should get an Appie ePod to replace my Walman?
Oops, I meant Palm PC. Or did I?
I'm looking at a Word etched on all the Windows in my Office and wondering why Microsoft Excel at copyrighting the dictionary. Wait 'till some Publisher has you on their FrontPage being sued real Money for your Project's moniker adjacency (and ripping out your server's PowerPoint), a grim Outlook to Exchange for freedom, ain't it?
Microsoft loses case to Stacker.
Microsoft had the chutzpah to sue Stac! The page illustrates both Microsoft's suit and that the judge had been convinced that Microsoft hadn't done it deliberately (fat chance). The rest of your responses are of similar quality (but see above on MacOpinion), e.g. there are heaps of high-tech companies without anything like the lawyer overburden, care to try again?
...litigiousness - there's lots more besides. The Amazon one does have to do with MS and the MacOpinion was a (successful) reply-generator (see above).
I know later ones like BASIC-PLUS-TWO did, but I'm reasonably sure that the canonical BASIC on STOP-10 did as well, at least left$() or something very much like it. And bingo, here it is, from 1974, first printing 1968 [warning, huge PDF], page 8.10 (PDF page #80), ya gotta love Google! (-:
Have the beastie check a server for updates...
on
Lindows Webstation
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· Score: 1
...since the price difference between a CD-ROM and a CD-Writer is squat. Wouldn't work so well standalone, but a server could pull an image of the original CD, unpack it, apply a patch and republish it so the workstations could rewrite their boot CDs at an opportune moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Signed: Trey Gates
* so called because they'll be different tomorrow
Won't agree 100% but I do like their use of config directories (/etc/pp/ip-{up,down}.d/ for example).
...I'd prefer /local/bin, /local/sbin, /local/etc, /local/share "and so on and so forth". Much easier to cope with than nested mounts, particularly if one of them (e.g. /usr) might be NFS and in theory less reliable than local storage.
How... readable.
Damn fine idea.
Mandrake have noticed how cluttered ~/ gets and now default all (well, many) of their apps to saving stuff in ~/Documents/ instead. It wouldn't be a great conceptual leap from there to add ~/etc/ or ~/rc/ config files to that (only they'd probably want to use something more user-intuitive like ~/Configuration/) but it would take forever to get the several thousand individual upstream application authors to make such a conversion, and they'd have to get Debian, SuSE et al to agree that it was a good idea.
And hey, it'd break POSIX compliance even further, wouldn't it?
There are some very good reasons for doing stuff differently to POSIX, but most of them relate to simple issues like gets() which could be addressed by a compatibility library or the location of "at" files which can be mostly cured with a symlink.
Some of the issues are annoying to cure even on POSIX systems because different versions of POSIX sometimes make incompatible recommentations (the case raised by the GNU people was "sort +2" which sorts based on the second field in earlier POSICES and sorts a file called "+2" in later ones. The vast majority of the FSF's GNU tools snap very much into the POSIX line if you run them with POSIXLY_CORRECT=yes.
IRL, there seem to be ablout 3 or 4 common ways of arranging files and/or registry entries. Let's take the example of an application which could be considered a utility, something vaguely like MS-Draw or their equation editor.
That's roughly six and a half changes, to say nothing of the odd application which ignore the existing mess or (MS-Publisher comes to mind) was slow to keep up with it. If Microsoft had had a standard like POSIX or LSB to follow, this wouldn't have happened, and those vendors who broke the guidelines could very reasonably and clearly be reprimanded for their intransignence. However, they've dug their own cesspit, now they have to wallow in it.
Put the files in /etc and symlink them into /usr/lib/cron to keep both parties happy (and let me continue to run with /usr mounted readonly). A slightly less bizarre place to put them than cron would be /usr/lib/at if that existed, however I've become accustomed to finding all of my global config files under /etc.
I do agree that some of POSIX exists for hysterical reasons only, but if it gets people off UnixWare - which is not UnixV3 compliant, and neither is OpenServer - I'm quite happy to have (configurable) breakage added to Linux.
It would be PSB, Posix Standard Base, not as humourous but a lot more functional.
/sysfs/posix/* for the documented features to allow you to set stuff like "gets(): yes/warn/signal" on the fly. If you did this per-process you could have your LSB and POSIX too. (-:
The system calls in particular seem to be preponderantly a matter of documentation. AFAIK, upwardly compatible extensions aren't an issue at all, eliminating another dozen or so issues. The remainder seem to be trivial enough (e.g. returning EISDIR vs EPERM when rm is aimed at a directory) that they could easily be a kernel config (or even runtime) option.
It would be relatively trivial to add
The utilities? Well, there's always the POSIXLY_CORRECT and _POSIX2_VERSION envars. The utilities can be knocked over one at a time based on that, and the stuff in glibc like leading zeros can make decisions based on it (I would cache detection of the envars once on process startup lest this become slow).
What I want to know is: does this Open Group document represent an unofficial/tactful offer to POSIX-certify a version of Linux, presuming compliance?
Will you also ack that doing so reduces the righteousness of suing people using similar names, regardless of the other party's intent?
Agree, especially since there is no such thing as "X Windows". (-:
If Microsoft hadn't accumulated such a rich track record of doing exactly what Stac Electronics accused them of doing, I might be tempted to allow them the presumption of innocence. But to do so in light of all that they've done would be a pretty mindless (and in some circumstances suicidal) act of pedantry.
It works for everyone else. (-:
Visit this page, add a few URLs with it, then type "rpmdrake" and tell me if Mandrake doesn't have something at least as easy to use as click-n-run - for free. It'd surprise me if there wasn't at least as nice a GUI tool for Debian.
...because you think this ain't likely. (-:
...he'd graduated from writing them in 4K of RAM on an 8-bit AIM-65; if he was lucky, he got started wire-wrapping up his own three-chip 4040 4-bit CPU chipset with a terrifyingly expensive 256x4 static RAM chip or bewilderingly complicated set of 1024x1 dynamic RAM chips and associated board-full of logic to keep them refreshed without contention. Video? Hah! We had two-digit 7-segment displays and a hex keypad (on the luxury version, else you programmed it with DIP switches or built your own keyboard out of bits of brass). If you plugged in a better monitor ROM and a UART chip, you could hook it up to something wonderful like the EME2 terminals or a scrounged ASR-33. Your keyboard has more memory than that entire system did, and runs a few orders of magnitude faster. (-: Hands up any of you young whipper-snappers who think I'm kidding? :-)
...wouldn't-you-like-it-to-be-harder-than-steel emails.
...is better than being becalmed". Then you at least have steerage way.
...I don't have a motorcycle... is there a book "Zen and the art of Cantankerous Japanese Direct Import Toyota Master Ace Surf 4WD Diesel Van Maintenance?" With a section on getting it to exceed 0.01G (and that's downhill) without exhaling its rings in small pieces?
...on account of the processors not being able to get all of the hexane [3rd par] back out again [2nd par].
...the up-front price (USD$189) is AUD$285.40 at today's rates.
Visiting a random local wholesaler and using their one-off retail prices: AllInOne Mobo $99.00 (choice of 3), CPU $104.40 (Athlon 1800+, or $130.80 for a Celeron 2GHz), RAM $54.00, CDROM $32.40 (writer $58.80 AOpen 48x, DVD $70.80 BenQ 16x), case $58.50 (midi tower, 300W PSU), total AUD$365.10. Their website is buggered again as usual because they derive it from an Excel spreadsheet and the code to do it sucks so badly that I completely eclipsed it with 90 minutes' worth of effort using gawk and oocalc to turn the spreadsheet into a PostgreSQL database and PHP to display it.
Options: 128MB USB thumb $66.00.
Treating another random wholesaler similarly gives $99, $118 (2000+, identical Celeron), $66.00, $50.00 (writer, no reader avail; cheapest DVD at $118.00 includes CD writer), case $40.00 total AUD$373.00.
USB thumb for $69.00.
Add roughly $15 for a keyboard and mouse, $20 for a modem (or $35 for a hardware modem, which I'd recommend for reliability), so $400.10 and $408.00, respectively. For $100 extra you'd get twice the CPU and in one case a burner on top of a reader, lose the floppy (or pay $17), and I'm guessing that either shop would bundle the collection for AUD$389 or less, especially if they expected to sell lots of them.
And guess what? The price of MS-Windows XP Home OEM is AUD$189, and MS-Office XP OEM is AUD$429 - more than the cost of either machine, and a combined total of half as much again as the hardware, just to do word-processing. Mandrake Linux 9.1 PowerPack edition is AUD$99.95 inc GST and includes two good office suites plus extras (and of course the ingrates amongst us can download it for free).
There are no slow low-capacity hard drives left. They'd cost nearly as much to make as a fast, high-capacity drive (similar materials, similar plant) and nobody's going to bother putting together a plant to build drives that won't sell. Put it this way, if you had a choice of a 5GB drive for AUD$75, a 10GB drive for AUD$80 or a 40GB drive for AUD$95, which would you buy? If you can get 128MB of Flash for AUD$69 and (with a compressed FS) that's enough to run your system, why would you want a bulky, noisy, unreliable hard drive? The Cyrix-based motherboards are only selling well for niche markets, and I suspect that low-capacity hard drives would be the same. Make one small, slow, low-power, low-heat, long-life and you might find a market - until Flash gets that cheap too.
Oops, I meant Palm PC. Or did I?
I'm looking at a Word etched on all the Windows in my Office and wondering why Microsoft Excel at copyrighting the dictionary. Wait 'till some Publisher has you on their FrontPage being sued real Money for your Project's moniker adjacency (and ripping out your server's PowerPoint), a grim Outlook to Exchange for freedom, ain't it?
Microsoft had the chutzpah to sue Stac! The page illustrates both Microsoft's suit and that the judge had been convinced that Microsoft hadn't done it deliberately (fat chance). The rest of your responses are of similar quality (but see above on MacOpinion), e.g. there are heaps of high-tech companies without anything like the lawyer overburden, care to try again?
...litigiousness - there's lots more besides. The Amazon one does have to do with MS and the MacOpinion was a (successful) reply-generator (see above).
I know later ones like BASIC-PLUS-TWO did, but I'm reasonably sure that the canonical BASIC on STOP-10 did as well, at least left$() or something very much like it. And bingo, here it is, from 1974, first printing 1968 [warning, huge PDF], page 8.10 (PDF page #80), ya gotta love Google! (-:
I felt that linking the Tamagochi story would have been a bit over the top. (-: Now I'm reassured that people actually read those links :-)
Pity the effort was wasted here. (-:
...since the price difference between a CD-ROM and a CD-Writer is squat. Wouldn't work so well standalone, but a server could pull an image of the original CD, unpack it, apply a patch and republish it so the workstations could rewrite their boot CDs at an opportune moment.
"Remove support for The SCO Group lawsuit"
"Emit mocking laughter when incoming TCP profile matches SCO UNIX"
"Increment World Domination progress meter when incoming TCP profile matches Linux"