Shipping developmental libraries/kernels/etc. with custom patches that make things work. But not quite.
I haven't had any real library problems since the 5.1 hump.
Linuxconf (yes, it has improved, but that is a recent thing)
Yes, it has improved, but as far as I can tell, it still mostly sucks. That's ok, it doesn't do anything I needed a GUI tool for anyway, really. I get very nervous and pale when some script is modifying my configuration files anyway... I'd rather use pico as my "GUI admin tool."
15-20 security patches per version.
How often are they problems unique to RedHat? Linux software in general tends to have frequent security patches, because a great deal of it is still under heavy development. This one's kind of a wash, I think. Also, it depends on what your main use is. If it's a server or a firewall, that needs to be locked down hard, use OpeBSD or something with serious auditing. I think RedHat tries to fill a niche-- multi-use servers, and workstations. Often it's more advantageous to have more recent software, that may be subject to security patching.
Specifically to RH6.0: GNOME losing preferences constantly, and other related problems
I was really disappointed with Gnome 1.0. I think it was rushed to fit onto RH6. That said, Gnome 1.1 solved almost all of the problems I had with it. As of RH 6.0, I'd have said gnome was behind KDE in terms of stability, usability, etc. Now, I'd call it even. And I'll be very surprised if Gnome doesn't continue to gain market share. It's improving a lot faster than KDE, and all in all, I credit RedHat for sticking to their guns on it.
As for the RH 6.1 installer-- You need to get the update. The first time I tried it (downloaded) I had the same problems. I installed off a CD, and poof! Problems gone. And man, is it ever a nice install. Puts any microsoft product absolutely to shame.
I firmly believe RH 6.1 is a very, very good release. I'm glad you did know what you were talking about though. Thanks for the examples.
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Wow. You all got way more mileage out of the airplane analogy than I would have thought was possible!:-)
Don't take me wrong-- I'm a huge proponent of Linux, and I have no doubt personally that it'll be a good choice on nearly any hardware you want to put it on. I go to great lengths to avoid using anything else, as a matter of fact. And if you plonked a quad CPU intel box down in front of me and said "have at 'er", I'd whip out my RedHat CD's faster than you could blink.
But people like me tend not to care about benchmarks too much. So nix that for a target audience of these silly tests.
These are basically for PHB's, to whom one $25,000 computer may as well be any other $25,000 computer. And bet your ass, when they open the wallet, there's gonna be someone whispering "Sun" in their ear. Hopefully, comeone else will be whispering "Linux" in their other ear, but who knows.
Anyway, my point is that I agree with you. I think perhaps the phrase "just silly" in my original post was a little stronger than it was intended.
Whatever. Benchmarks don't hold a candle to personal experience in my book, and NT sure as hell has a long way to go in the "pleasant user/admin experience" department. This week has not been a good one for me and NT. Oh, how I loathe it...
Ok, I've vented.
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... a very lightweight (i.e., basically no-controls) standards-compliant (XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS) internet-applications renderer. I've said this before in this space, and I'll keep on saying it. "The Web" as it exists now, is a crappy place to deploy apps. But it also has incredible potential as the future of computing. Sharing resources, mobility, cooperative work environements, the list of advantages to "web-based" apps goes on and on. The main handicap right now is that it's a huge pain to support the damn things, because you might as well be writing them for an infinite number of clients. What if there was just a set of standards you needed to conform to, and everyone had, locally, their little app renderer. All they need to do is launch it, and maybe enter a URL, and then they're using your application. It doesn't need email. It doesn't need buttons of any kind. It doesn't need bookmarks or any of the content-is-king-www-dot-com GUI frosting. It doesn't need a "message center" (What IS a message center?) It's just a place where I can draw my interface, so you can use my nifty distributed application. Who wants to write this?
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2) Try as they might otherwise, they are still joined to Intel, and if I had a new wonderful process to protect, I wouldn't wave it anywhere near Intel.
Ironically, TransMeta is right down the street from Intel.
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Microsoft isn't aiming at that market (yet) thus testing Sun (solaris) vs. NT is way out of touch.
The point the first poster was making, I think, is that by using a 4-way box, and crowing about their advantage on ludicrously high server loads, MS is aiming at that market. That is, once you step into the realm of 4 processor machines, testing NT vs. Linux is just silly, because who in their right mind would use either one for such hardware? It's like saying that my Cessna is a better stealth fighter than your Piper Cub, and ignoring the F-111 because "we're not competing in that market."
The fact remains that this test only proves that for applications where you should have been using a high-end OS (and, apparently, where stability doesn't matter), NT can pump more bits down the pipe for as long as it manages to remain up. As for "real world scenario," this test sure ain't. I'm a little disappointed that RedHat actually sent people to compete in this test, since we all knew what it would show anyway. They should've just pointed out that the test was silly and they have more important things to do. Corporate pride and all that, I guess...
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...once a lot of people realize that they're recent releases (4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 6.1 for instance) are horrible and that the competition (Linux-Mandrake for instance) is way ahead in terms of actually getting things working correctly.
Have you used any of these products? I've used all of them, and uniformly, the ones you mention have been the best distro's available when they were released. I have a feeling that you're just talking smack, because if you had any idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't have pointed at the good releases as examples of how bad redhat is.
In fact, they have had some weak releases. 5.1 and 5.2 leap to mind as miserable piles of crap. Even this was not really redhat's fault, since both of these were released in the midst of the general libc5->glibc->glibc2 shuffling, not to even mention all the gtk incompatibilities. Basically, the 5 series is not particularly strong. They did the best they could with what was available, though, and 5.0 is not bad.
6.0 and 6.1 in particular, I've found to be outstanding. 6.1 especially. For a.1 version number, it has a lot of nice improvements. I installed it on a Toshiba Satellite laptop two days ago, expecting lots of problems, and had none whatsoever. It just works, beautifully.
RedHat continues to gain market share because they put out the most balanced distribution. Debian hobbles themselves with Free Software fanatacism (NOT that this is a bad thing, they just serve a different market sector, and one that is not likely to ever be the majority), SuSe, I've found, tends to run behind the curve in terms of functionality (SuSe 6.0 included ancient versions of KDE and Gnome, not to even mention WindowMaker). and tries to make up for it by piling everything under the sun onto their 6 CD's. And slackware... well, never mind.
I'm sure mandrake is a good distro. It's redhat. You simply can't have mandrake be really good and redhat be really bad. It doesn't make any sense!
Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a "my distro's better than yours" flame. I just see a lot of this "RedHat sucks" talk around, and it mystifies me. Where is the great distro that puts redhat to shame, if it's so bad? And why have I not had these "horrible problems" with it that no one ever specifically names? I don't know...
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These things do happen. The worst, by far, are X lockups, which can in fact freeze the whole system. I've also has IRQ conflicts freeze the system (usually when something else tries to use the same IRQ as a disk controller-- that's bad news).
The good news, though, is that most application crashes can be recovered from without a hard restart. If you have another machine around, you can often telnet or ssh into your frozen box, even if the keyboard and console are giving you no love. It appears to be possible for apps to lock up your input devices without freezing the rest of the system. So just telnet in, su to root, and check out the process table to see what's got your system in a headlock. Sometimes you have to do more drastic things, like/sbin/init 3 (I run in 5, ususally), or/sbin/init 6 to reboot, if you can't figure out any other way to unlock the thing. This does force a reboot, but at least it'll shut down clean and come back up without fsck'ing. It also gives you a chance to warn people and put the system in a reasonable state.
This is one of the things I love most about linux (as opposed to, say, windows). I find that about 90% of system freezes can be dealt with safely, and considering that system freezes are pretty rare to begin with, things tend to go smoothly more often than not.
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I don't know much about heterotopias, but panopticon, it definitely is. Quick gloss on the term, for anyone who's not familiar-- a panopticon, or panoptic system, is basically a place where you might be under observation at any time, but you can never truly know. Foucault took the word from the prison design work of Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a prison architecture where all the cells were arranged in a huge cylinder around a central observation tower. The prisoners couldn't really see each other, and they couldn't see into the observation tower, but anyone in the observation tower could see into any cell at any time, and in great detail, with the aid of binoculars.
So what happens is, you encourage a sense of constantly being watched in the prisoners. They might not be being watched at any given moment, but they always could be under observation. So they would tend to be self-policing, thereby reducing the number of actual guards you should need.
This general trick has been pulled off in many different contexts, including of course, Disney theme parks. Hence the rumors that the guys in costume might be security, and the fact that there are... or could be cameras watching every square inch of the parks. Whether there are or not doesn't even matter. It works as long as people believe they could be under observation at any time.
This is probably also familiar to many of you as a main feature of society in 1984. The population was totally self-policing because they simply believed that they could be under observation at any time. And with just a little bit of effort, the authorities could easily maintain that impression.
Jon, if you really do plan to write this book, you're going to have to make a herculean effort to make it worth reading. Many people who are way smarter than you have dealt with this topic before, so please don't waste everybody's time by writing up a little vacation and pretending you did something worthwhile.
Be sure, especially, you've read Jean Baudrillard's pieces about Disney, including The DisneyWorld Company, and... umm, he has a book that is primarily about Disney, I think, but the name is escaping me.
Anyway, good luck.
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If the Supreme Court decides not to hear your case, they are, in effect, making a decision to uphold the ruling of the lower court. They are still the ultimate arbiters of truth.
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Ok, good points about this finding of fact being a strong wake-up call to all the offliners who still think of Gates as a Real American Hero, and MS as the champions of Truth and Justice and Capitalistic Right.
But I think Katz is way off the mark in trying to cast this as a case of the Government regulating the internet.
History suggests they have good for concern. Judge Jackson's ruling was, in fact, by far the most significant and far-reaching intrusion into Net commerce by a federal authority, and represents a landmark judicial effort to begin writing Net law.
How is this ruling a "significant and far reaching intrusion into Net commerce?" Is Miscrosoft Windows sold or distributed primarily over the internet? No. Are the competitors that MS is accused of crushing primarily Internet companies? No. In fact, this ruling has little or nothing to do with MS's forays into online commerce and content, and is explicitly about Microsoft's poor treatment of competing software development companies, who sell products (shrink-wrapped, in stores) that compete in MS's core markets.
Judge Jackson wasn't just curbing the power of a company, he was also seeking to redefine anti-trust law as it applies to commerce online.
Now we have an exploration of the "implications" of the foregoing totally unsupported (and mystifying, to say the least) claim. What does this finding of fact have to do with online commerce? Other than superficial things like "Well, I can download Netscape..." This case is about standard, old fashioned monopolistic behavior. I'm puzzled as to why Katz seems to think it has much at all to do with the internet.
And he was definitely plowing new ground. Traditionally, companies have gotten into anti-trust trouble when their monopolies become so vast they monopolize products and goods, prevent competition and innovation, and unfairly control and drive up the price consumers pay for those products. That was the rationale behind one of the first landmark anti-trust rulings, the one that broke up Standard Oil, and behind the decision that dispersed AT&T.
In fact, Jackson explicitly does not plow new ground, and, as would be clear to anyone who read and understood the finding of fact, took great pains to emphasize that this case is an anti-trust case which clearly and indisputably falls within the established bounds of US anti-trust law. Point by point, he lays out the ways in which Microsoft has engaged in typical, standard, monopolistic behavior; i.e. consumer harm through price-fixing, "bundling", market leveraging, and anti-competetive practices. The finding of fact is very clear and very readable, and, I thought, tried hard to avoid accusations of "Extending" or "redefining" anti-trust law in any way. But over and over, I see commentators talking about how the new tech economy is a totally mystifying and inexplicable market, and how anti-trust law does not apply the same way, and so Jackson must be "extending" or "redifining" that law. This is simply not true, and points out the ignorance of these commentators.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by jacking up prices, but by using practically the opposite tactic - in effect giving products away to obtain staggering market share. Gate's big idea was to make sure his company's software and operating systems were distributed so freely and aggressively they were on every desktop.
Jackson's finding also takes pains to point out that this is not true. When is the last time you got a Windows OS "upgrade" for free? He clearly explains that Microsoft unnecessariuly raised prices of it's OS (pricing Windows 98, for example, far higher than it's own internal economists stated would be profitable), in order to increase funds to support it's undercutting of prices in other markets, such as web browsers. To give away IE for free, MS leveraged it's monopoly stranglehold on the desktop OS for easy cash flow. This is classic monopoly behavior-- once you have a monopoly in one market, you can fix prices at whatever point they need to be in order to allow you to give away a product in another market and force competitors out of business. There's nothing new about this, as Jackson makes clear.
The rest of the article, the analysis of Gates himself, and MS's legacy, I think is pretty much on target. But the part in the middle, that brainlessly spews the offliner's party line about this case being about the internet, and about tech commerce being unique and brand new and incomprehensible, just underlines Katz's fundamental lack of understanding of the technology. The only reason people think the high-tech market is different is because when they turn on their desktop, what happens is, for them, "indistinguishable from magic." Technologists might as well be shamans, for all they know, coaxing spirits to live inside beige boxes and animate flickering screens.
But anyone who grasps the technology, also understands that this market is fundamentally no different from other markets, and the same laws apply to Bill Gates that applied to Standdrd Oil, and to Bell Telephone.
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So you'd be suprised at how little impact computers really have on their lives.
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I used to be a sign-maker, and I worked in a furniture shop for a while (can ya tell by the examples in my other post?). I was also a ditch digger for two miserable hellish days (digging holes for sprinkler systems). And yeah, most of the people I worked with neither knew nor cared whatsoever what all this computer stuff was about. Interestingly, the owner of the furniture company was an ex-programmer, though.
In any case, computers will, and are already, having an effect on people's lives. They might never notice it though, and it's that sort of ubiquity that the article is really talking about, I think. There were people who said the the newfangled "horseless carriage" was a tinker toy for hobbyists, and would never have any effect on *their* lives, but of course it did. Same thing for electricity. And there's always The Graduate: "One words, boy: Plastics!"
The point of all this being, of course, that pretty soon, my (and many other's here) "glorious" profession is going to be seen as no more than plumbing. Fixing the internet pipes when they get clogged up. And whenever someone casts a profession in that light, someone else is bound to say that "we could just use machines to do that." And then this thread gets going.
So why are you, a human, still digging ditches? Can it be that in all our decades of industrial progress, somehow the work of digging ditches has been overlooked as a job that could be done by machines? Nope, there are lots of ditching machines. But (and I've been there) there are some ditches that are tricky to dig, and require the flexibility and learning skills of human ditch-diggers to do it. Sure, some clever engineer could make a machine to dig that bit right next to the house, where the outdoor pipes are. But that machine wouldn't be able to do the intersection in the middle of the lawn where two pipes cross. Basically, it'd be way way more expensive to make a machine to do your job than it would be to pay you to do it.
So, you're pretty much right. No machine is going to replace [you] until it learns how to get drunk and be miserable! For most jobs that are considered skilled crafts (and even many that aren't considered such, but actually are), people are still by far the most cost-effective machines to perform them. Until we can build a machine with the physical and mental flexibility to get drunk and be miserable (i.e. duplicate human behaviour, basically), all these jobs will keep on bein done by all the "plain old ordinary stupid people" that programmers think they're so much better than.
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At the beginning of this century, people were saying basically this about the world of things. Humans would no longer be needed to craft things, because it could all be automated, and everything could be made in factories. Well, that has happened to some extent, i.e. factories do mass-produce a lot of the goods that we buy. But there are some things that still are not, and I'd argue, cannot be done by machines in a cost-effective way.
Note: This is not a "machines cannot do what Humanity can do!" argument. I've no doubt that machines could be built that can (for example) duplicate the craftsmanship of an experienced woodcarver. However, doing so would be prohibitively expensive. It's simply more cost-effective to hire an experienced woodcarver than to try to duplicate that skill in a machine. The same is true for many other fields, where an approximation can be made with cheap and fast machinery, but for the Real Thing, it's just way less hassle to hire a skilled human to do the work.
The same thing, IMHO, is true for programming. Yes, you can automate the process, and eventually, I won't be at all surprised to see some sort of evolutionary "device-driver-writing" AI (for example). It'll crank out simple, common code by reusing chunks of "boilerplate" and evolving the whole program till it works. BUT. I don't believe it will ever be cost-effective to build an AI that can so closely approximate the workings of a skilled coder that it's output would be indistinguishable from that of a Real Programmer.
Just to emphasize-- this is not an argument that it cannot be done. I'm not advocating some sort of "human's have souls that make them unique in the universe" idea. I'm simply saying that the decision to build machines that approximate or duplicate human activity is an economically motivated decision, and for many things, duplicating human labor mechanically is simply not cost-effective past a certain point.
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First point: It's all about the CNAME's. You CAN name your servers anything you want, and register CNAME's for any boring naming scheme the PHB's want to enforce. They will never even know, and everyone's happy.
Second point: I like to name servers after words that I like. It's not a very coherent scheme, as these words can sometimes be names, sometimes moods, sometimes adjectives. But they're all words that I like, so as far as I care, it's a perfectly rational naming convention (as in, I can always tell if a name is part of the "potential names set" simply bty thinking: 'Do I like it?'). My current machines are named continuity (and you all know where that comes from, right?), paranoia, and velocity. I'd think of some more, but I haven't had enough coffee yet today. My vocabulary hasn't woken up yet.
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Google doesn't seed their results. This has been explained here many many times before. They are not doing the same thing. It's simply a weird emergent behaviour of their search algorithms.
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Dell's linux boxen are very nice indeed. I won't be at all surprised to see them emerge as one of the premiere linux hardware vendors. Plus, they've been effective at seeding the market by giving away a bunch of Precision workstations in cross-promotions with linuxcare, etc. Seems like every time I turn around, another linux company is running a "win a Dell" drawing. Good strategy-- I won one of those, and based on the quality of my box, I've probably sold four or five servers for them.
Are there any figures on how much linux sales are affecting their bottom line? That would be interesting to see.
Wired had a story about this sort of research in March of last year. It's a load of crap. Even fa-chrissakes Wired Magazine decided it was crap. Exciting "wouldn't it be cool if..." crap, but scientifically, it's up there with astrology and psychology in the annals of pseudoscience. I'd love to see this patent application your buddies filed. We all know patents are valid scientific proof-of-concept right?
Don't forget Dupont. While not as... "interesting" as Adams Morgan (where I hope to move back to), it's still a pretty nice place for a stroll.
Virginia scares me though. Went to a friend's condo the other day and I went to the wrong house three times. The first two, I wasn't even on the right street. It all looks the same...
Wrong wrong wrong. I'm very tired of hearing about what a shithole Washington DC is from people who don't live here. DC is:
Not one big ghetto. Even if I dropped you down in the "bad" parts of town these days, you probably wouldn't realize it.
Not full of politicians. I've never met a politician. I have a couple of friends who work for Senators, but most people I know either work for hi-tech companies or non-profits. There's an amazing amount of really really smart people here.
Extremely diverse-- I'm pretty sure there isn't a country on earth that doesn't have at least a few representatives living in DC. And I'm not talking about the embassies.
Overall, it's a great place to live, except for when you have to listen to ignorant midwesterners who've never been here talk about how horrible DC is.
As the poster above pointed out-- the libc5 version has major problems with complicated table sets. Other Netscape problems:
The textarea widget leaks up memory like no one's business. If you're going to leave netscape open for a while, for god's sake don't leave it displaying a textarea widget!
Intermittently, Messenger (the only semi-functional IMAP client I've found for linux btw, for X) will go into some kind of loop, where it cycles using 100% of the processor, then 0%, etc about once per second. It also fails to get mail, frequently, stalls on IMAP connects, etc etc. Basically it needs to be restarted about every fifth time I check for mail.
I'm getting really sick of netscape, myself. I wish there was another option.
By the way, has anyone figured out what's different between 4.6 and 4.7? Besides the "Shop" button, that is. ALL the bugs I found in 4.6 are still in 4.7. What the hell was the point of that release?
Anyone notice that xybernaut claims a patent on "a computer you wear that has a head-mounted display and you can interact with by voice"? And they think that this patent will help them retain market share? Think about this for a moment-- the field of wearable applications and uses will explode in a couple of years. There's no way one company (Xybernaut) can cover the whole field by themselves. But if they start enforcing patent rights on the whole market ("We have a patent on wearable computing, you can't make one and sell it!") then the whole market will suffocate and die. This is classic Microsoftism, only it's being done by a company that can't possibly exploit any niche it does manage to retain.
Did it occur to any of them that by encouraging other entrants into the market, they build the whole market for everyone? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Wearable computing will be huge in 2-5 years (depending on how quickly some of the current stumbling blocks are removed-- we need a high-quality eyeglass display, and much better voice recognition) and hopefully, if their intentions and track record are any indication, Xybernaut will not be around to enjoy it.
And this tool (BO2K) is one of the reasons that governments worldwide don't use Windows. Period.
I worked (as a contractor) for DARPA for a while... That's the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, yes, those guys who invented the internet. Guess what they standardized on? M$. We were constantly fighting with them because their (idiotic) MIS guy was a total borg. Nothing but NT, IIS, and ASP shall grace DARPA's network. And these are the guys who are supposed to know what they're doing.
So I don't know about worldwide governments, but here in the good ol' U S of A, we're still a pack of idiots.
There have been encouraging signs from certain US Gov't agencies recently however. Maybe the times are changing. But it's still, currently, rare to see a government office with anything but wintel boxen, as far as the eye can see.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't had any real library problems since the 5.1 hump.
Yes, it has improved, but as far as I can tell, it still mostly sucks. That's ok, it doesn't do anything I needed a GUI tool for anyway, really. I get very nervous and pale when some script is modifying my configuration files anyway... I'd rather use pico as my "GUI admin tool."
How often are they problems unique to RedHat? Linux software in general tends to have frequent security patches, because a great deal of it is still under heavy development. This one's kind of a wash, I think. Also, it depends on what your main use is. If it's a server or a firewall, that needs to be locked down hard, use OpeBSD or something with serious auditing. I think RedHat tries to fill a niche-- multi-use servers, and workstations. Often it's more advantageous to have more recent software, that may be subject to security patching.
I was really disappointed with Gnome 1.0. I think it was rushed to fit onto RH6. That said, Gnome 1.1 solved almost all of the problems I had with it. As of RH 6.0, I'd have said gnome was behind KDE in terms of stability, usability, etc. Now, I'd call it even. And I'll be very surprised if Gnome doesn't continue to gain market share. It's improving a lot faster than KDE, and all in all, I credit RedHat for sticking to their guns on it.
As for the RH 6.1 installer-- You need to get the update. The first time I tried it (downloaded) I had the same problems. I installed off a CD, and poof! Problems gone. And man, is it ever a nice install. Puts any microsoft product absolutely to shame.
I firmly believe RH 6.1 is a very, very good release. I'm glad you did know what you were talking about though. Thanks for the examples.
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Don't take me wrong-- I'm a huge proponent of Linux, and I have no doubt personally that it'll be a good choice on nearly any hardware you want to put it on. I go to great lengths to avoid using anything else, as a matter of fact. And if you plonked a quad CPU intel box down in front of me and said "have at 'er", I'd whip out my RedHat CD's faster than you could blink.
But people like me tend not to care about benchmarks too much. So nix that for a target audience of these silly tests.
These are basically for PHB's, to whom one $25,000 computer may as well be any other $25,000 computer. And bet your ass, when they open the wallet, there's gonna be someone whispering "Sun" in their ear. Hopefully, comeone else will be whispering "Linux" in their other ear, but who knows.
Anyway, my point is that I agree with you. I think perhaps the phrase "just silly" in my original post was a little stronger than it was intended.
Whatever. Benchmarks don't hold a candle to personal experience in my book, and NT sure as hell has a long way to go in the "pleasant user/admin experience" department. This week has not been a good one for me and NT. Oh, how I loathe it...
Ok, I've vented.
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... a very lightweight (i.e., basically no-controls) standards-compliant (XML, HTML, Javascript, CSS) internet-applications renderer. I've said this before in this space, and I'll keep on saying it. "The Web" as it exists now, is a crappy place to deploy apps. But it also has incredible potential as the future of computing. Sharing resources, mobility, cooperative work environements, the list of advantages to "web-based" apps goes on and on. The main handicap right now is that it's a huge pain to support the damn things, because you might as well be writing them for an infinite number of clients. What if there was just a set of standards you needed to conform to, and everyone had, locally, their little app renderer. All they need to do is launch it, and maybe enter a URL, and then they're using your application. It doesn't need email. It doesn't need buttons of any kind. It doesn't need bookmarks or any of the content-is-king-www-dot-com GUI frosting. It doesn't need a "message center" (What IS a message center?) It's just a place where I can draw my interface, so you can use my nifty distributed application. Who wants to write this?
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Ironically, TransMeta is right down the street from Intel.
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The point the first poster was making, I think, is that by using a 4-way box, and crowing about their advantage on ludicrously high server loads, MS is aiming at that market. That is, once you step into the realm of 4 processor machines, testing NT vs. Linux is just silly, because who in their right mind would use either one for such hardware? It's like saying that my Cessna is a better stealth fighter than your Piper Cub, and ignoring the F-111 because "we're not competing in that market."
The fact remains that this test only proves that for applications where you should have been using a high-end OS (and, apparently, where stability doesn't matter), NT can pump more bits down the pipe for as long as it manages to remain up. As for "real world scenario," this test sure ain't. I'm a little disappointed that RedHat actually sent people to compete in this test, since we all knew what it would show anyway. They should've just pointed out that the test was silly and they have more important things to do. Corporate pride and all that, I guess...
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Have you used any of these products? I've used all of them, and uniformly, the ones you mention have been the best distro's available when they were released. I have a feeling that you're just talking smack, because if you had any idea what you were talking about, you wouldn't have pointed at the good releases as examples of how bad redhat is.
In fact, they have had some weak releases. 5.1 and 5.2 leap to mind as miserable piles of crap. Even this was not really redhat's fault, since both of these were released in the midst of the general libc5->glibc->glibc2 shuffling, not to even mention all the gtk incompatibilities. Basically, the 5 series is not particularly strong. They did the best they could with what was available, though, and 5.0 is not bad.
6.0 and 6.1 in particular, I've found to be outstanding. 6.1 especially. For a .1 version number, it has a lot of nice improvements. I installed it on a Toshiba Satellite laptop two days ago, expecting lots of problems, and had none whatsoever. It just works, beautifully.
RedHat continues to gain market share because they put out the most balanced distribution. Debian hobbles themselves with Free Software fanatacism (NOT that this is a bad thing, they just serve a different market sector, and one that is not likely to ever be the majority), SuSe, I've found, tends to run behind the curve in terms of functionality (SuSe 6.0 included ancient versions of KDE and Gnome, not to even mention WindowMaker). and tries to make up for it by piling everything under the sun onto their 6 CD's. And slackware... well, never mind.
I'm sure mandrake is a good distro. It's redhat. You simply can't have mandrake be really good and redhat be really bad. It doesn't make any sense!
Anyway, this wasn't supposed to be a "my distro's better than yours" flame. I just see a lot of this "RedHat sucks" talk around, and it mystifies me. Where is the great distro that puts redhat to shame, if it's so bad? And why have I not had these "horrible problems" with it that no one ever specifically names? I don't know...
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
The good news, though, is that most application crashes can be recovered from without a hard restart. If you have another machine around, you can often telnet or ssh into your frozen box, even if the keyboard and console are giving you no love. It appears to be possible for apps to lock up your input devices without freezing the rest of the system. So just telnet in, su to root, and check out the process table to see what's got your system in a headlock. Sometimes you have to do more drastic things, like /sbin/init 3 (I run in 5, ususally), or /sbin/init 6 to reboot, if you can't figure out any other way to unlock the thing. This does force a reboot, but at least it'll shut down clean and come back up without fsck'ing. It also gives you a chance to warn people and put the system in a reasonable state.
This is one of the things I love most about linux (as opposed to, say, windows). I find that about 90% of system freezes can be dealt with safely, and considering that system freezes are pretty rare to begin with, things tend to go smoothly more often than not.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
I don't know much about heterotopias, but panopticon, it definitely is. Quick gloss on the term, for anyone who's not familiar-- a panopticon, or panoptic system, is basically a place where you might be under observation at any time, but you can never truly know. Foucault took the word from the prison design work of Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a prison architecture where all the cells were arranged in a huge cylinder around a central observation tower. The prisoners couldn't really see each other, and they couldn't see into the observation tower, but anyone in the observation tower could see into any cell at any time, and in great detail, with the aid of binoculars.
So what happens is, you encourage a sense of constantly being watched in the prisoners. They might not be being watched at any given moment, but they always could be under observation. So they would tend to be self-policing, thereby reducing the number of actual guards you should need.
This general trick has been pulled off in many different contexts, including of course, Disney theme parks. Hence the rumors that the guys in costume might be security, and the fact that there are... or could be cameras watching every square inch of the parks. Whether there are or not doesn't even matter. It works as long as people believe they could be under observation at any time.
This is probably also familiar to many of you as a main feature of society in 1984. The population was totally self-policing because they simply believed that they could be under observation at any time. And with just a little bit of effort, the authorities could easily maintain that impression.
Jon, if you really do plan to write this book, you're going to have to make a herculean effort to make it worth reading. Many people who are way smarter than you have dealt with this topic before, so please don't waste everybody's time by writing up a little vacation and pretending you did something worthwhile.
Be sure, especially, you've read Jean Baudrillard's pieces about Disney, including The DisneyWorld Company, and... umm, he has a book that is primarily about Disney, I think, but the name is escaping me.
Anyway, good luck.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
If the Supreme Court decides not to hear your case, they are, in effect, making a decision to uphold the ruling of the lower court. They are still the ultimate arbiters of truth.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
But I think Katz is way off the mark in trying to cast this as a case of the Government regulating the internet.
History suggests they have good for concern. Judge Jackson's ruling was, in fact, by far the most significant and far-reaching intrusion into Net commerce by a federal authority, and represents a landmark judicial effort to begin writing Net law.
How is this ruling a "significant and far reaching intrusion into Net commerce?" Is Miscrosoft Windows sold or distributed primarily over the internet? No. Are the competitors that MS is accused of crushing primarily Internet companies? No. In fact, this ruling has little or nothing to do with MS's forays into online commerce and content, and is explicitly about Microsoft's poor treatment of competing software development companies, who sell products (shrink-wrapped, in stores) that compete in MS's core markets.
Judge Jackson wasn't just curbing the power of a company, he was also seeking to redefine anti-trust law as it applies to commerce online.
Now we have an exploration of the "implications" of the foregoing totally unsupported (and mystifying, to say the least) claim. What does this finding of fact have to do with online commerce? Other than superficial things like "Well, I can download Netscape..." This case is about standard, old fashioned monopolistic behavior. I'm puzzled as to why Katz seems to think it has much at all to do with the internet.
And he was definitely plowing new ground. Traditionally, companies have gotten into anti-trust trouble when their monopolies become so vast they monopolize products and goods, prevent competition and innovation, and unfairly control and drive up the price consumers pay for those products. That was the rationale behind one of the first landmark anti-trust rulings, the one that broke up Standard Oil, and behind the decision that dispersed AT&T.
In fact, Jackson explicitly does not plow new ground, and, as would be clear to anyone who read and understood the finding of fact, took great pains to emphasize that this case is an anti-trust case which clearly and indisputably falls within the established bounds of US anti-trust law. Point by point, he lays out the ways in which Microsoft has engaged in typical, standard, monopolistic behavior; i.e. consumer harm through price-fixing, "bundling", market leveraging, and anti-competetive practices. The finding of fact is very clear and very readable, and, I thought, tried hard to avoid accusations of "Extending" or "redefining" anti-trust law in any way. But over and over, I see commentators talking about how the new tech economy is a totally mystifying and inexplicable market, and how anti-trust law does not apply the same way, and so Jackson must be "extending" or "redifining" that law. This is simply not true, and points out the ignorance of these commentators.
Microsoft didn't become a monopoly by jacking up prices, but by using practically the opposite tactic - in effect giving products away to obtain staggering market share. Gate's big idea was to make sure his company's software and operating systems were distributed so freely and aggressively they were on every desktop.
Jackson's finding also takes pains to point out that this is not true. When is the last time you got a Windows OS "upgrade" for free? He clearly explains that Microsoft unnecessariuly raised prices of it's OS (pricing Windows 98, for example, far higher than it's own internal economists stated would be profitable), in order to increase funds to support it's undercutting of prices in other markets, such as web browsers. To give away IE for free, MS leveraged it's monopoly stranglehold on the desktop OS for easy cash flow. This is classic monopoly behavior-- once you have a monopoly in one market, you can fix prices at whatever point they need to be in order to allow you to give away a product in another market and force competitors out of business. There's nothing new about this, as Jackson makes clear.
The rest of the article, the analysis of Gates himself, and MS's legacy, I think is pretty much on target. But the part in the middle, that brainlessly spews the offliner's party line about this case being about the internet, and about tech commerce being unique and brand new and incomprehensible, just underlines Katz's fundamental lack of understanding of the technology. The only reason people think the high-tech market is different is because when they turn on their desktop, what happens is, for them, "indistinguishable from magic." Technologists might as well be shamans, for all they know, coaxing spirits to live inside beige boxes and animate flickering screens.
But anyone who grasps the technology, also understands that this market is fundamentally no different from other markets, and the same laws apply to Bill Gates that applied to Standdrd Oil, and to Bell Telephone.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
I wouldn't be surprised at all. I used to be a sign-maker, and I worked in a furniture shop for a while (can ya tell by the examples in my other post?). I was also a ditch digger for two miserable hellish days (digging holes for sprinkler systems). And yeah, most of the people I worked with neither knew nor cared whatsoever what all this computer stuff was about. Interestingly, the owner of the furniture company was an ex-programmer, though.
In any case, computers will, and are already, having an effect on people's lives. They might never notice it though, and it's that sort of ubiquity that the article is really talking about, I think. There were people who said the the newfangled "horseless carriage" was a tinker toy for hobbyists, and would never have any effect on *their* lives, but of course it did. Same thing for electricity. And there's always The Graduate: "One words, boy: Plastics!"
The point of all this being, of course, that pretty soon, my (and many other's here) "glorious" profession is going to be seen as no more than plumbing. Fixing the internet pipes when they get clogged up. And whenever someone casts a profession in that light, someone else is bound to say that "we could just use machines to do that." And then this thread gets going.
So why are you, a human, still digging ditches? Can it be that in all our decades of industrial progress, somehow the work of digging ditches has been overlooked as a job that could be done by machines? Nope, there are lots of ditching machines. But (and I've been there) there are some ditches that are tricky to dig, and require the flexibility and learning skills of human ditch-diggers to do it. Sure, some clever engineer could make a machine to dig that bit right next to the house, where the outdoor pipes are. But that machine wouldn't be able to do the intersection in the middle of the lawn where two pipes cross. Basically, it'd be way way more expensive to make a machine to do your job than it would be to pay you to do it.
So, you're pretty much right. No machine is going to replace [you] until it learns how to get drunk and be miserable! For most jobs that are considered skilled crafts (and even many that aren't considered such, but actually are), people are still by far the most cost-effective machines to perform them. Until we can build a machine with the physical and mental flexibility to get drunk and be miserable (i.e. duplicate human behaviour, basically), all these jobs will keep on bein done by all the "plain old ordinary stupid people" that programmers think they're so much better than.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Note: This is not a "machines cannot do what Humanity can do!" argument. I've no doubt that machines could be built that can (for example) duplicate the craftsmanship of an experienced woodcarver. However, doing so would be prohibitively expensive. It's simply more cost-effective to hire an experienced woodcarver than to try to duplicate that skill in a machine. The same is true for many other fields, where an approximation can be made with cheap and fast machinery, but for the Real Thing, it's just way less hassle to hire a skilled human to do the work.
The same thing, IMHO, is true for programming. Yes, you can automate the process, and eventually, I won't be at all surprised to see some sort of evolutionary "device-driver-writing" AI (for example). It'll crank out simple, common code by reusing chunks of "boilerplate" and evolving the whole program till it works. BUT. I don't believe it will ever be cost-effective to build an AI that can so closely approximate the workings of a skilled coder that it's output would be indistinguishable from that of a Real Programmer.
Just to emphasize-- this is not an argument that it cannot be done. I'm not advocating some sort of "human's have souls that make them unique in the universe" idea. I'm simply saying that the decision to build machines that approximate or duplicate human activity is an economically motivated decision, and for many things, duplicating human labor mechanically is simply not cost-effective past a certain point.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Second point: I like to name servers after words that I like. It's not a very coherent scheme, as these words can sometimes be names, sometimes moods, sometimes adjectives. But they're all words that I like, so as far as I care, it's a perfectly rational naming convention (as in, I can always tell if a name is part of the "potential names set" simply bty thinking: 'Do I like it?'). My current machines are named continuity (and you all know where that comes from, right?), paranoia, and velocity. I'd think of some more, but I haven't had enough coffee yet today. My vocabulary hasn't woken up yet.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Fist of the Firemonkey
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Pokey: THIS MOON-CHEESE WILL MAKE ME VERY RICH! VERY RICH INDEED!
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Google doesn't seed their results. This has been explained here many many times before. They are not doing the same thing. It's simply a weird emergent behaviour of their search algorithms.
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Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
Are there any figures on how much linux sales are affecting their bottom line? That would be interesting to see.
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We hope your rules and wisdom choke you....
Right?...
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We hope your rules and wisdom choke you....
Virginia scares me though. Went to a friend's condo the other day and I went to the wrong house three times. The first two, I wasn't even on the right street. It all looks the same...
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We hope your rules and wisdom choke you....
- Not one big ghetto. Even if I dropped you down in the "bad" parts of town these days, you probably wouldn't realize it.
- Not full of politicians. I've never met a politician. I have a couple of friends who work for Senators, but most people I know either work for hi-tech companies or non-profits. There's an amazing amount of really really smart people here.
- Extremely diverse-- I'm pretty sure there isn't a country on earth that doesn't have at least a few representatives living in DC. And I'm not talking about the embassies.
Overall, it's a great place to live, except for when you have to listen to ignorant midwesterners who've never been here talk about how horrible DC is.----
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you....
- The textarea widget leaks up memory like no one's business. If you're going to leave netscape open for a while, for god's sake don't leave it displaying a textarea widget!
- Intermittently, Messenger (the only semi-functional IMAP client I've found for linux btw, for X) will go into some kind of loop, where it cycles using 100% of the processor, then 0%, etc about once per second. It also fails to get mail, frequently, stalls on IMAP connects, etc etc. Basically it needs to be restarted about every fifth time I check for mail.
I'm getting really sick of netscape, myself. I wish there was another option.By the way, has anyone figured out what's different between 4.6 and 4.7? Besides the "Shop" button, that is. ALL the bugs I found in 4.6 are still in 4.7. What the hell was the point of that release?
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
But they say specifically in their article that they plan to maintain their market niche by defending their patent. That's what worries me.
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
Did it occur to any of them that by encouraging other entrants into the market, they build the whole market for everyone? Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Wearable computing will be huge in 2-5 years (depending on how quickly some of the current stumbling blocks are removed-- we need a high-quality eyeglass display, and much better voice recognition) and hopefully, if their intentions and track record are any indication, Xybernaut will not be around to enjoy it.
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
I worked (as a contractor) for DARPA for a while... That's the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, yes, those guys who invented the internet. Guess what they standardized on? M$. We were constantly fighting with them because their (idiotic) MIS guy was a total borg. Nothing but NT, IIS, and ASP shall grace DARPA's network. And these are the guys who are supposed to know what they're doing.
So I don't know about worldwide governments, but here in the good ol' U S of A, we're still a pack of idiots.
There have been encouraging signs from certain US Gov't agencies recently however. Maybe the times are changing. But it's still, currently, rare to see a government office with anything but wintel boxen, as far as the eye can see.
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.
I'm having fun searching for odd stuff though, I must say.
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We all take pink lemonade for granted.