Is using the current GNU slocate, grep, and some glue too much or too little for some reason? Really, full-text search is a solved problem, making it fast for a indeterminately large set of files is nebulous at best, but the problem has been addressed in many other systems.
But slocate and grep are extremely mature, fast, and exist on every system with a standard GNU toolset. In fact, if the KDE people wanted to be really effective, they would do the work to give slocate this ability (or does it have it already? sorry, unable to check at this time) and just wrap that.
And if they are doing this, kudos to them - they truly know how to leverage open source.
Not to be too pedantic here, but it would be code paths - which speak in considerably smaller terms than a code base.
Not to mention, if reiser4 hsa these search features built in as alluded to by the other posters, the reiser code path (if architected correctly) should be little more than API calls. Not much to maintain really, and lays most of the burden on the reiser developers.
I was hoping to post this on the blog instead of here. Unfortunately comments have been closed. My hope is to isolate some key mistakes that could have gone a long way to preventing this problem from taking so long to address, or perhaps ever happening.
Granted I am judging from his description of how the system works and was assembled from scratch, but especially in reference to the multi-undo system, it was fairly obvious that the problem had absolutely nothing to do with the oversight of the developer regarding the open file limit, because the system was too complex to begin with.
Since (I hope) it's obvious that undo in an editor is such a unique and fundamental problem - a new pattern or a new assembly of smaller patterns needs to be applied to specifically address the undo issue. What I saw was a very typical problem in large and growing development environments, applying crow bar logic to implementing new solutions.
Proper use of exception handling and event-driven programming would have fixed the open file problem by itself, at least in my admittedly limited view. Instead of printing "Disk is full", the class exception or the file event itself could have caused a unique error to be printed with that information to aid the QA and developers. And of course, descriptive text for the user.
The second thing, Microsoft has this enormous knowledge base, would it have been too hard to do this in front of the 2 lines of code?
// KB #123456 - "Disk is Full" Open FH bug
Since this bug had already been fixed and (hopefully) entered into the KB, the developer of the Mac fork (which I'll address in a minute) not only had a place to start, but a simple grep (or the MS equivalent) would have solved this problem in short order. I suspect if this pattern is not already adopted, it would fix a TON of these communication problems (which is really what this consists of), and code review would enforce that comments like these were injected on each bug fix. If they don't want to comment it (as many small bugs would prove prohibitive), properly address this in your CASE tool of choice.
Forks are ALWAYS bad in closed software development. If you have to fork your code, you have definitely done something wrong. I don't care how much system-specific code there is, it can be abstracted in almost any language - and a company like Microsoft which not only creates the applications but the development tools as well has no real excuse.
I know, a lot of this is "woulda coulda shoulda" stuff. Both Experienced and Novice developers and management have made these mistakes before, and it won't change anytime soon. Release pressures can really warp the logic of any member of the team - the "Get it out yesterday" school of logic rarely does any good in the long-term.
I hate to evangelize about editors (mostly because it's such a personal choice), but have any of you tried emacs?
I have several routines that aid my HTML editing (even though that's not where I spend most of my time - my unix box is away from me at the time so I can't provide it here, sorry), a notable one being that when I open a paragraph tag, it sets the indent level ahead by 2 (or whatever the variable is set to), and invokes hard word-wrap. For those of you who don't do something like this to your html, you'd be amazed at how much cleaner it makes things. Closing the paragraph tag ends the word wrap and properly restores the indent level.
It uses PSGML-mode and is about 5 lines of lisp.
Seriously, even if you don't like emacs, an editor that you can actually PROGRAM (such as vim) has benefits which will pay off significantly in the long run, while syntax highlighting is nice, there is a lot more that everyone would like - and rarely an editor that fits any specific person's needs, or at least helps the person get their job done more efficiently and effectively.
Another good example is using the semantic package and ECB to link your documentation and your code - very, very handy.
I find this odd - when dreamweaver first came out, one of it's primary selling points was that you could do your WYSIWYG editing in one pane, and switch to another pane to go straight into editing the HTML - something us old hats absolutely loved and was the reason we bought/stole/paid attention to the program in the first place.
Now it has all this extra crap in the program, and the last document that I got that was purely generated in dreamweaver that I had to reformat for some HTML jockey was total rubbish - no indentation, missing closing tags, I could go on.
I don't think I'm going to post anything further in this thread, but I will say this:
Racial, Cultural, and Social stigmas will always exist. It's nothing new, and certainly not unique any "majority" demographic or to the united states - a great example, take your white pasty geek ass to an outer hawaii island. I still get a kick that between europe, canada, and the united states, white people are somehow the "majority".
The problem that the united states has that other countries don't, is that we spend so much time focusing on the issue that it never gets solved. Repair is something that happens over time and needs to happen with the goodwill of people in mind - and focusing on making sure no one tells fried chicken and watermelon jokes is not going to make anything better.
The people applied with stigmas (ie, every make and model of human) need to learn to laugh a little bit at their own culture and learn to recognize that those who truly respect you will not judge you even if you bear true to some stereotypes.
The road goes both ways - working and living in several parts on the west coast - having blue eyes, blond hair, average height/weight and having a particular love for doc martens only tells me that I have good taste in shoes that last a long time - nothing else, really. Other people seem to disagree and pre-judge me because of it. I have two choices at that point, I can ignore it, or I can earn their respect by being myself.
And heaven forbid you guys never hire someone - because I'll guarantee anyone who's had a hand in hiring people has probably turned away bright minds because they had a bad resume.
Seriously, if your problem is that productivity is defined by race, you need to fire yourself, or address the problem up front and get it out in the open - those that can't cope can find another job.
The only problem that I have had with Steam is that it leaves dialup users in the dust.
It's nice to pretend that everyone who plays games online has high-speed internet, but that's just not the case.
Several members of the > 5yo clan I am in have not been able to play CS since steam was released. It's kind of sad, I enjoyed playing with these people and now we get stuck playing something like gunbound instead.
I was only talking about X. So that leaves out BSD as it has no GUI, at all.
If you don't use legacy (OS 9 or earlier) applications, Carbon is out too. Of course, none of the systems that I was comparing against even need to consider emulating a completely different OS. I consider that a bonus for those who need that kind of support - and for those that don't, something that never is installed in the first place unless it's done manually - something you'd know if you installed the system yourself.
That leaves one.
As for custom widgets, last I checked this happens with GNOME and Qt, and the Win32 API as well. One only needs to look at things like GtkGLArea, the Qt database additions (because Qt is *much* more than just a GUI toolkit - which has good and bad repercussions), threaded and non-threaded versions of Qt (which if you want full app coverage have to be installed - separately), and that's not even getting to the "glue" widget tookits such as wxWindows, Glade, etc. And of course, one of the top complaints in the past for IT administrators was that versions of Office install a new set of widgets that overwrite portions of the Win32 widget API, causing havoc for other applications. I won't even bother touching on the various versions of Qt and GTK that need to be installed on each machine for even marginal app coverage.
And if we're going to compare other toolkits - not only do you not understand from a developer's viewpoint why toolkits are used even if they're non-standard on the system, you're obviously grasping at straws.
You should also note, that I made no attempt to even address memory usage of the Mac - as anyone who uses it knows it's a memory hog. I'm running on 768M and it runs great - it wasn't as happy under 256M, but certainly not unusable. You might also note that with rare exception do these widgets deviate - actually, only the new iTunes/Quicktime do on my system, and those are a shared library under Panther, as both applications come with it. They still use the Cocoa API, AFAIK. If they don't, their behaviors still work very similar. One can easily witness this through trivial use of AppleScript to control the applications - something that will never happen with the current state of X.
With the way that SA currently works, this would make a great addition to the point system.
That way, one could simply adjust their filters to put separate, lower-scoring spam in yet another mail folder - allowing one assurance that checking that box would provide at least semi-reputable "spam", and catch most false positives.
I think SA already tries to detect invalid punctuation in the middle of a word - if not, that would be a good one to look at too. Also, separate sentences by their end punctuation (?,., !, etc) and check for the use of words that complete a sentence - make sure they are all available - for instance, most sentences have a subject and a verb - if they don't have those, increase the point score.
Scoring is much better than instant rejection - however, I throw messagewall in front of my SMTP server, so that DNSBL queries are done quickly (combine this with a dns cache for excellent performance) and messages are rejected that will most likely just waste CPU for the same result - something that you don't want to see.
Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/
on
Enlightenment Lives
·
· Score: 1
Actually, if you want to consider me a zealot, I use FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X for all sorts of different purposes by my own choice.... daily. Consider that.
Perhaps we have a different mindset, which I'm willing to accept - the hardware is only important on my server - where I want stable, well-performing stuff that I can rely on. That includes the software to back it up - while OS X has never given me a reason to think that it's unstable, I'll stick with FreeBSD as my first choice and Linux as a second.
While my short (6 month) term hasn't given me enough time to evaluate apple's hardware from a longevity perspective, I haven't had to open this box yet - it's not a question of needing to anymore. This, I like.
And on my workstation, software is infinitely more important - since I know how to administer my development environment, I know that tech like NFS with the server being reliable hardware is infinitely more important than a workstation with teh same qualities. Also, comparing AIX to BSD requires a rather fuzzy lens, but comparing AIX to Mac OS X is nothing more than saying: "They both have commercial UNIX". There is almost nothing similar about them.
Re:Or cut the middleman, i[anything] and glitz w/
on
Enlightenment Lives
·
· Score: 1
heh.
"without the elitist image"
What, are suddenly computers some form of high fashion? I just want to use emacs, firefox and perl and not have to mess with X or anything else regarding the system to get there.
If what others percieve of you determine your choice over a superior technology - perhaps you shouldn't be the one to define "elitist".
I can buy 3 brand new powerbooks for the price of one of those IBM workstations. And they STILL run X.
I guess I haven't had a problem, dunno. The majority of all the problems I have had were with applications that relied on STL support for the C++ side of gcc, although migrating from Apple's gcc to fink's gcc changed that problem considerably.
Re:Oh no! more memory wastage...
on
Enlightenment Lives
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Seriously, if you don't like it, vote with your mindshare and your wallet.
Want unix without the X hassle, the 4 different environments you need to run all the programs that you use, the different desktops, etc, etc, etc?
BUY A MAC.
Mac OS X is the only affordable commercial unix workstation. And as a bonus, it's based on FreeBSD (quite heavily) - which means almost any unix program will work on it with relative ease (mostly a compile) - and if you need X protocol support, you have that too, without the hassle.
Use linux or FreeBSD on your server where you need the real horsies. Get an OS that's actually addressing your desktop needs for your workstation - and manages to support OSS as well; perhaps not in the way that some people here would like it, but it works for me.
First off, it seems like you're confusing things that are common to many UNIX platforms with Linux - that's a horribly misinformed approach. For what it's worth, vi and most of it's mutations follow pretty close to what nvi (which is modeled after Bill Joy's vi) does, and that certainly includes how to quit the program. For all it's fragmentations, vi is pretty much vi on every unix system. And a system without vi... I have trouble calling it UNIX. (before you cry foul, I do all my 'real work' under emacs - but vi is on every system, so it's worthwhile to know how to use it)
Second, I can't understand why a system that was built with the intention for experts to use it should be rigged so that people who have no intention of becoming an expert can use it. This is why I will never, by choice, use FreeBSD or Linux for a desktop, and will never use Windows and probably Mac OS X for a server - they really cater to different markets and should be recognized for that.
Christ, when are you guys going to start looking at the real numbers.
Linux is great for the marketing department these days - as soon as the marketing department has no vested interest in touting the OS they use, it all changes.
Solaris, Windows, and FreeBSD abound the really big companies. Yahoo! has donated userland and kernel patches to FreeBSD - including their own in-house patches, which has a lot to say about their devotion to the system, EBay uses a IIS/Solaris combo, and Apple has hired on, full-time, FreeBSD core members to improve the system. The NOC's that have the best uptime and reliability are running FreeBSD, not anything else.
To dig deeper, parts of both windows and solaris are, you guessed it, from FreeBSD or it's parents. Navigating the unix-specific portions of Mac OS X is second nature to anyone who's used FreeBSD, whether or not they've ever used a shell on OS X before.
Every UNIX application that anyone "can't live wihtout" has been brought to FreeBSD, even if that software was originally developed for linux. And if that doesn't work, heck, you can just run your linux binaries ON FreeBSD.
To add further insult to injury, a good portion of your "development model" you tout so well has involved the deliberate use of FreeBSD code in GPL'd applications - something that frustrates some in the BSD community, only because as soon as it gets improved, they can't bring it back because of your "free development model". So much for sharing code.
Don't get me wrong, there are many GPL programs that are excellent pieces of work (many of which, IMO, started at RMS's keyboard), but GPL development revolves around the mantra that your style of development fits into an ideal that if your view is less restrictive or more restrictive, too fucking bad. If it's more restrictive don't bother contributing it, and if it's less restrictive, we'll just make it more restrictive by sucking it in.
I guess what's important to understand is while there may be two camps, no one has really "won" or "lost". I have yet to see a compelling reason to move servers to linux, and I know that I am far from alone on this camp. And I could give half a flying turd about getting excited to use some bloat on top of a horrible, archaic GUI system as my desktop. So linux is out, except for the case where I need oracle 8i or later drivers, which I have no choice than to "follow the marketing", because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it would probably take oracle a few hours and a recompile to make them work on FreeBSD.
I guess, in reality, if windows was the best system for what I need to do, I would use that. Development models are neat and everything, but I want to use the best product for the job.
However, what does get under my skin is the fact that because of bellyaching by people who refuse to educate themselves I'm stuck using an inferior product - namely the oracle client on linux.
From a OSS advocate's perspective, I don't really see what he did wrong here.
He cited his reasons, made an educated choice based on those reasons, and then advocated ideas on how that choice would best be implemented.
I don't see any mud-slinging here, just fact and well-defined (and backed up, which is not nearly as common on other websites) opinion.
The headline could be construed as fear-mongering, sure, but considering the current state of affairs with all this SCO bullshit, if I was making purchasing decisions I would be a little concerned too.
A lot of people like to cast a ray of light on the bad examples regarding executives, but there are actually plenty of intelligent ones out there, at worst, intelligent enough to know when they aren't educated enough to ride the backs of people who do. I am happy to currently work with a team of execs that do this - I have, in the past worked with less than favorable execs. It's an easy to parade stereotype since rarely does middle management take the fall publicly when someone fucks up.
On the flip side, we've all seen great examples of companies where tech-types have run the show and they've plummetted into the ground. Or does anyone remember who was running those dot-bomb companies? (As opposed to who was funding them)
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, how is that different than current patent laws?
The problem we're facing currently revolves around enforcement and the legal overhead involved in that.
Once that stops becoming a problem, we can really get to the crux of the matter: not patenting physically intangible designs.
"Not Invented Here"
Is using the current GNU slocate, grep, and some glue too much or too little for some reason? Really, full-text search is a solved problem, making it fast for a indeterminately large set of files is nebulous at best, but the problem has been addressed in many other systems.
But slocate and grep are extremely mature, fast, and exist on every system with a standard GNU toolset. In fact, if the KDE people wanted to be really effective, they would do the work to give slocate this ability (or does it have it already? sorry, unable to check at this time) and just wrap that.
And if they are doing this, kudos to them - they truly know how to leverage open source.
Not to be too pedantic here, but it would be code paths - which speak in considerably smaller terms than a code base.
Not to mention, if reiser4 hsa these search features built in as alluded to by the other posters, the reiser code path (if architected correctly) should be little more than API calls. Not much to maintain really, and lays most of the burden on the reiser developers.
I was hoping to post this on the blog instead of here. Unfortunately comments have been closed. My hope is to isolate some key mistakes that could have gone a long way to preventing this problem from taking so long to address, or perhaps ever happening.
// KB #123456 - "Disk is Full" Open FH bug
Granted I am judging from his description of how the system works and was assembled from scratch, but especially in reference to the multi-undo system, it was fairly obvious that the problem had absolutely nothing to do with the oversight of the developer regarding the open file limit, because the system was too complex to begin with.
Since (I hope) it's obvious that undo in an editor is such a unique and fundamental problem - a new pattern or a new assembly of smaller patterns needs to be applied to specifically address the undo issue. What I saw was a very typical problem in large and growing development environments, applying crow bar logic to implementing new solutions.
Proper use of exception handling and event-driven programming would have fixed the open file problem by itself, at least in my admittedly limited view. Instead of printing "Disk is full", the class exception or the file event itself could have caused a unique error to be printed with that information to aid the QA and developers. And of course, descriptive text for the user.
The second thing, Microsoft has this enormous knowledge base, would it have been too hard to do this in front of the 2 lines of code?
Since this bug had already been fixed and (hopefully) entered into the KB, the developer of the Mac fork (which I'll address in a minute) not only had a place to start, but a simple grep (or the MS equivalent) would have solved this problem in short order. I suspect if this pattern is not already adopted, it would fix a TON of these communication problems (which is really what this consists of), and code review would enforce that comments like these were injected on each bug fix. If they don't want to comment it (as many small bugs would prove prohibitive), properly address this in your CASE tool of choice.
Forks are ALWAYS bad in closed software development. If you have to fork your code, you have definitely done something wrong. I don't care how much system-specific code there is, it can be abstracted in almost any language - and a company like Microsoft which not only creates the applications but the development tools as well has no real excuse.
I know, a lot of this is "woulda coulda shoulda" stuff. Both Experienced and Novice developers and management have made these mistakes before, and it won't change anytime soon. Release pressures can really warp the logic of any member of the team - the "Get it out yesterday" school of logic rarely does any good in the long-term.
I hate to evangelize about editors (mostly because it's such a personal choice), but have any of you tried emacs?
I have several routines that aid my HTML editing (even though that's not where I spend most of my time - my unix box is away from me at the time so I can't provide it here, sorry), a notable one being that when I open a paragraph tag, it sets the indent level ahead by 2 (or whatever the variable is set to), and invokes hard word-wrap. For those of you who don't do something like this to your html, you'd be amazed at how much cleaner it makes things. Closing the paragraph tag ends the word wrap and properly restores the indent level.
It uses PSGML-mode and is about 5 lines of lisp.
Seriously, even if you don't like emacs, an editor that you can actually PROGRAM (such as vim) has benefits which will pay off significantly in the long run, while syntax highlighting is nice, there is a lot more that everyone would like - and rarely an editor that fits any specific person's needs, or at least helps the person get their job done more efficiently and effectively.
Another good example is using the semantic package and ECB to link your documentation and your code - very, very handy.
I find this odd - when dreamweaver first came out, one of it's primary selling points was that you could do your WYSIWYG editing in one pane, and switch to another pane to go straight into editing the HTML - something us old hats absolutely loved and was the reason we bought/stole/paid attention to the program in the first place.
Now it has all this extra crap in the program, and the last document that I got that was purely generated in dreamweaver that I had to reformat for some HTML jockey was total rubbish - no indentation, missing closing tags, I could go on.
What happened?
Go get a IBM 3270. :)
I don't think I'm going to post anything further in this thread, but I will say this:
Racial, Cultural, and Social stigmas will always exist. It's nothing new, and certainly not unique any "majority" demographic or to the united states - a great example, take your white pasty geek ass to an outer hawaii island. I still get a kick that between europe, canada, and the united states, white people are somehow the "majority".
The problem that the united states has that other countries don't, is that we spend so much time focusing on the issue that it never gets solved. Repair is something that happens over time and needs to happen with the goodwill of people in mind - and focusing on making sure no one tells fried chicken and watermelon jokes is not going to make anything better.
The people applied with stigmas (ie, every make and model of human) need to learn to laugh a little bit at their own culture and learn to recognize that those who truly respect you will not judge you even if you bear true to some stereotypes.
The road goes both ways - working and living in several parts on the west coast - having blue eyes, blond hair, average height/weight and having a particular love for doc martens only tells me that I have good taste in shoes that last a long time - nothing else, really. Other people seem to disagree and pre-judge me because of it. I have two choices at that point, I can ignore it, or I can earn their respect by being myself.
And heaven forbid you guys never hire someone - because I'll guarantee anyone who's had a hand in hiring people has probably turned away bright minds because they had a bad resume.
This makes so many assumptions.
Seriously, if your problem is that productivity is defined by race, you need to fire yourself, or address the problem up front and get it out in the open - those that can't cope can find another job.
And the intelligence of one!
The only problem that I have had with Steam is that it leaves dialup users in the dust.
It's nice to pretend that everyone who plays games online has high-speed internet, but that's just not the case.
Several members of the > 5yo clan I am in have not been able to play CS since steam was released. It's kind of sad, I enjoyed playing with these people and now we get stuck playing something like gunbound instead.
Ok, lets get real and not stretch the truth then.
I was only talking about X. So that leaves out BSD as it has no GUI, at all.
If you don't use legacy (OS 9 or earlier) applications, Carbon is out too. Of course, none of the systems that I was comparing against even need to consider emulating a completely different OS. I consider that a bonus for those who need that kind of support - and for those that don't, something that never is installed in the first place unless it's done manually - something you'd know if you installed the system yourself.
That leaves one.
As for custom widgets, last I checked this happens with GNOME and Qt, and the Win32 API as well. One only needs to look at things like GtkGLArea, the Qt database additions (because Qt is *much* more than just a GUI toolkit - which has good and bad repercussions), threaded and non-threaded versions of Qt (which if you want full app coverage have to be installed - separately), and that's not even getting to the "glue" widget tookits such as wxWindows, Glade, etc. And of course, one of the top complaints in the past for IT administrators was that versions of Office install a new set of widgets that overwrite portions of the Win32 widget API, causing havoc for other applications. I won't even bother touching on the various versions of Qt and GTK that need to be installed on each machine for even marginal app coverage.
And if we're going to compare other toolkits - not only do you not understand from a developer's viewpoint why toolkits are used even if they're non-standard on the system, you're obviously grasping at straws.
You should also note, that I made no attempt to even address memory usage of the Mac - as anyone who uses it knows it's a memory hog. I'm running on 768M and it runs great - it wasn't as happy under 256M, but certainly not unusable. You might also note that with rare exception do these widgets deviate - actually, only the new iTunes/Quicktime do on my system, and those are a shared library under Panther, as both applications come with it. They still use the Cocoa API, AFAIK. If they don't, their behaviors still work very similar. One can easily witness this through trivial use of AppleScript to control the applications - something that will never happen with the current state of X.
With the way that SA currently works, this would make a great addition to the point system.
., !, etc) and check for the use of words that complete a sentence - make sure they are all available - for instance, most sentences have a subject and a verb - if they don't have those, increase the point score.
That way, one could simply adjust their filters to put separate, lower-scoring spam in yet another mail folder - allowing one assurance that checking that box would provide at least semi-reputable "spam", and catch most false positives.
I think SA already tries to detect invalid punctuation in the middle of a word - if not, that would be a good one to look at too. Also, separate sentences by their end punctuation (?,
Scoring is much better than instant rejection - however, I throw messagewall in front of my SMTP server, so that DNSBL queries are done quickly (combine this with a dns cache for excellent performance) and messages are rejected that will most likely just waste CPU for the same result - something that you don't want to see.
(while you have root access, edit this script)
#!/bin/sh
exec $1
---
chown root:mygroup foo.sh
chmod 4750 foo.sh
problem solved.
Actually, if you want to consider me a zealot, I use FreeBSD, Linux, Windows and Mac OS X for all sorts of different purposes by my own choice.... daily. Consider that.
Perhaps we have a different mindset, which I'm willing to accept - the hardware is only important on my server - where I want stable, well-performing stuff that I can rely on. That includes the software to back it up - while OS X has never given me a reason to think that it's unstable, I'll stick with FreeBSD as my first choice and Linux as a second.
While my short (6 month) term hasn't given me enough time to evaluate apple's hardware from a longevity perspective, I haven't had to open this box yet - it's not a question of needing to anymore. This, I like.
And on my workstation, software is infinitely more important - since I know how to administer my development environment, I know that tech like NFS with the server being reliable hardware is infinitely more important than a workstation with teh same qualities. Also, comparing AIX to BSD requires a rather fuzzy lens, but comparing AIX to Mac OS X is nothing more than saying: "They both have commercial UNIX". There is almost nothing similar about them.
heh.
"without the elitist image"
What, are suddenly computers some form of high fashion? I just want to use emacs, firefox and perl and not have to mess with X or anything else regarding the system to get there.
If what others percieve of you determine your choice over a superior technology - perhaps you shouldn't be the one to define "elitist".
I can buy 3 brand new powerbooks for the price of one of those IBM workstations. And they STILL run X.
I guess I haven't had a problem, dunno. The majority of all the problems I have had were with applications that relied on STL support for the C++ side of gcc, although migrating from Apple's gcc to fink's gcc changed that problem considerably.
Seriously, if you don't like it, vote with your mindshare and your wallet.
Want unix without the X hassle, the 4 different environments you need to run all the programs that you use, the different desktops, etc, etc, etc?
BUY A MAC.
Mac OS X is the only affordable commercial unix workstation. And as a bonus, it's based on FreeBSD (quite heavily) - which means almost any unix program will work on it with relative ease (mostly a compile) - and if you need X protocol support, you have that too, without the hassle.
Use linux or FreeBSD on your server where you need the real horsies. Get an OS that's actually addressing your desktop needs for your workstation - and manages to support OSS as well; perhaps not in the way that some people here would like it, but it works for me.
Perl hackers are the new guys...
Of course, you might be thinking of this, as that's where all this stuff got popular.
First off, it seems like you're confusing things that are common to many UNIX platforms with Linux - that's a horribly misinformed approach. For what it's worth, vi and most of it's mutations follow pretty close to what nvi (which is modeled after Bill Joy's vi) does, and that certainly includes how to quit the program. For all it's fragmentations, vi is pretty much vi on every unix system. And a system without vi... I have trouble calling it UNIX. (before you cry foul, I do all my 'real work' under emacs - but vi is on every system, so it's worthwhile to know how to use it)
Second, I can't understand why a system that was built with the intention for experts to use it should be rigged so that people who have no intention of becoming an expert can use it. This is why I will never, by choice, use FreeBSD or Linux for a desktop, and will never use Windows and probably Mac OS X for a server - they really cater to different markets and should be recognized for that.
SuSE. If you're not happy with the free version, support isn't that expensive.
And I find KDE significantly easier to use than GNOME, but I'm not saying anything more about either of them than that.
Wow - thank you for that very reasoned argument.
While I don't nessicarily agree with your viewpoint, it is a compelling one.
Christ, when are you guys going to start looking at the real numbers.
Linux is great for the marketing department these days - as soon as the marketing department has no vested interest in touting the OS they use, it all changes.
Solaris, Windows, and FreeBSD abound the really big companies. Yahoo! has donated userland and kernel patches to FreeBSD - including their own in-house patches, which has a lot to say about their devotion to the system, EBay uses a IIS/Solaris combo, and Apple has hired on, full-time, FreeBSD core members to improve the system. The NOC's that have the best uptime and reliability are running FreeBSD, not anything else.
To dig deeper, parts of both windows and solaris are, you guessed it, from FreeBSD or it's parents. Navigating the unix-specific portions of Mac OS X is second nature to anyone who's used FreeBSD, whether or not they've ever used a shell on OS X before.
Every UNIX application that anyone "can't live wihtout" has been brought to FreeBSD, even if that software was originally developed for linux. And if that doesn't work, heck, you can just run your linux binaries ON FreeBSD.
To add further insult to injury, a good portion of your "development model" you tout so well has involved the deliberate use of FreeBSD code in GPL'd applications - something that frustrates some in the BSD community, only because as soon as it gets improved, they can't bring it back because of your "free development model". So much for sharing code.
Don't get me wrong, there are many GPL programs that are excellent pieces of work (many of which, IMO, started at RMS's keyboard), but GPL development revolves around the mantra that your style of development fits into an ideal that if your view is less restrictive or more restrictive, too fucking bad. If it's more restrictive don't bother contributing it, and if it's less restrictive, we'll just make it more restrictive by sucking it in.
I guess what's important to understand is while there may be two camps, no one has really "won" or "lost". I have yet to see a compelling reason to move servers to linux, and I know that I am far from alone on this camp. And I could give half a flying turd about getting excited to use some bloat on top of a horrible, archaic GUI system as my desktop. So linux is out, except for the case where I need oracle 8i or later drivers, which I have no choice than to "follow the marketing", because it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that it would probably take oracle a few hours and a recompile to make them work on FreeBSD.
I guess, in reality, if windows was the best system for what I need to do, I would use that. Development models are neat and everything, but I want to use the best product for the job.
However, what does get under my skin is the fact that because of bellyaching by people who refuse to educate themselves I'm stuck using an inferior product - namely the oracle client on linux.
From a OSS advocate's perspective, I don't really see what he did wrong here.
He cited his reasons, made an educated choice based on those reasons, and then advocated ideas on how that choice would best be implemented.
I don't see any mud-slinging here, just fact and well-defined (and backed up, which is not nearly as common on other websites) opinion.
The headline could be construed as fear-mongering, sure, but considering the current state of affairs with all this SCO bullshit, if I was making purchasing decisions I would be a little concerned too.
A lot of people like to cast a ray of light on the bad examples regarding executives, but there are actually plenty of intelligent ones out there, at worst, intelligent enough to know when they aren't educated enough to ride the backs of people who do. I am happy to currently work with a team of execs that do this - I have, in the past worked with less than favorable execs. It's an easy to parade stereotype since rarely does middle management take the fall publicly when someone fucks up.
On the flip side, we've all seen great examples of companies where tech-types have run the show and they've plummetted into the ground. Or does anyone remember who was running those dot-bomb companies? (As opposed to who was funding them)
Damn, that is a seriously cool idea. Now only if I could only get the people in the office that use vi to switch to emacs.... :)