These flawed modules will be replaced when the better implementation is ready for production beta release, but certainly not when they're being drafted. This software evolves towards perfection and has been designed to do so. Its not perfect, nobody ever said that, but its focus on being open minded to new ideas, accepting of experimentation and exploration, free thinking, modular and UNIX (KISS, everything is a file, etc) while adopting other concepts, helps it progress towards perfection. Its not stagnate, its not stable. It never said it was.
Besides, stability is often your perception. What if X locks up and your system was secured to prevent you access to the terminal? What if you're playing a fullscreen 3D video game and your proprietary nVidia driver locks up the display? Do you blame Linus?
There are specialized situations where I would not use Linux today, such as single-point-of-failure fileserver or database on SATA, because until recently the SATA implementation was incomplete and buggy.. and I have yet to verify this has been resolved sufficiently, because I'm lazy, so I'd suggest something other than Linux 2.6.0-12 in that situation, but SCSI, EIDE, or all the old tried and true stuff works great. Nothing has changed there, nothing I've noticed anyway, just bug fixes.
There are the occational bastard driver, drivers written without specs or documentation, reverse engineered, etc. But those can be replaced. And you can always do a little research and avoid that hardware.
You gave me some ideas... how's about a competition. A website that highlights these difficult bugs from all the FOSS projects and sorts them by popularity/votes, and displays all this data in nice happy pastels or something easy on the eyes, and fun, like ajax. So we can have a sort of game/competition on who can takle the hard bugs and do it right and make the most points..
What makes FOSS great is the free flow of ideas and info. I encourage code sharing with extreme prejudice!
What's funny is BSD folks seem to agree with RMS about everyone calling the GNU system Linux.
Very little software on Linux is BSD in origin. Most of it is GNU. And GNU is the real competition for BSD, not Linux. But that's a philosophical debate.
One thing the "Duh Factor" overlooked is all those developers getting paid to fix bugs and improve stability.
My company hires Linux kernel developers. They don't work for Linus, they work for us, and they improve the stability and efficiency of our kernel. And they do it whether they want to or not, its their job and our product.
Don't assume so much, you know what that does..
If you're being pushed to a new kernel because of hardware compatibility, perhaps your hardware isn't so compatible with Linux. In that case is hardly fair to blame Linux when you could have purchased compatible hardware with support, if you cared.
I spend much of my day troubleshooting hardware problems on Linux. Very very rarely do I find a bug in the kernel. Whole subsystems like SATA needed to be fixed, but it sounds like they've taken care of that now. So I'm not worried.
I have more problems with Fedora Core's kernel and its buggy vlan support than I do with our home grown, heavily modified, hacked up kernels. I trust Linus's kernel and the kernel devs more than I trust software from most corps. In fact, I trust the kernel more than I trust gcc and binutils. Why aren't we so concerned about the problems with binutils never being stablized?
Because we're sensationalists, not computer scientists.
That's funny. You think Linux is a house of cards..
Perhaps NetBSD will be number 1 when Linux falls apart. Then FreeBSD when NetBSD falls apart, then OpenBSD. Maybe it will be OpenSolaris that steals the crown from Windows, nah, it'll probably be Solaris, the commercial version.
Anyway, its fun to speculate.
I think anyone who supports "Open Source" but is against Linux in any way is retarded. Linux isn't here to take anything away from the BSDs, its complimentary, not only competitive.
There was talk that the activists were going to identify us and attack us another time away from the store to get back at the "establishment" and those of us who were helping the "establishment".
Paranoid much?
You know about 60-70% of the population will obey an order from a superior in a position of authority even if they know the order is wrong and they could be jeopardizing an innocent person's life.
You seem to fall into the majority.
I would suggest you spend more time questioning authority and thinking for yourself, as opposed to letting them do your thinking for you.. it means you can't trust any single source of information, and you can't trust authority. Because to do so would be foolish. But don't take my word for it.
The government is supposed to be bogged down in all kinds of inefficienes so that they are too sluggish to impose any tyranny over the people.
Why do we want to pass more laws if we're so worried about tyranny? How many Americans are worried about tyranny? My guess is not that many. I bet if they lost all their rights today they'd go home and cry in front of their TVs.
Oh really? You must not keep a close eye on your representative Democrates. They'll only vote against something if its highly unpopular, as in the average joe understands the issue and has an opinion about it. Otherwise they tow the party line, alone with the Reps, pro-corporate all the way.
How many Dems voted against the DMCA? How many against the PATRIOT act? How many think for themselves instead of do what they're told?
Might as well put children up there. At least they would really be ignorant. These folks are playing a game, its called politics.
Then there might be no one left to protect you're American Dream.
Its about time America woke up.
I think a real threat to our way of life, a direct threat to our liberty, is required.. Copyright law is not enough, the PATRIOT act doesn't go far enough, we need to lose the first amendment, or the second.
Only then might we begin to question authority..
I think it really could be that simple, we just need to learn how to QuestionAuthority !
While Linux has little or nothing to do with UNIX, GNU does, even though it has expanded that definition to include a lot of other protocols and concepts. But what the hell is UNIX anyway? Is it all those old memes like "everything is a file" or is it C or the shell or what?
It used to be UNIX and C, or etc. But now I just think of it as a collection of concepts that evolve over time. UNIX is getting more LinuxOS-like, IMO, because of the competition of a non-tradition/free-thinking open implementation.
Hint: there are more Albertsons stores (2500) than WM Supercenters (2000), therefore Albertsons has MORE buying power and should be able to charge LESS for everything.
This makes sense to you?
I would rather talk about Wal-Mart. They could have openned a Supercenter in the valley any time. They didn't. You know why? I don't either. But I bet they considered it at least one time and decided against it.
They aren't here to lower prices and be my best friend. They're here to outcompete Albertsons by paying their own employees poorly and outsourcing to businesses with questionable employment practices, using their buying power, which I can only assume is greater than Albertson's, to strongarm them out of the market. They're not a friendly business at all. Not to Albertsons, not to mom'n'pop grocers. The only benefit they give me is cheap goods, which I can almost as easily obtain online. But their net effect on the economy could possibly be bad because of their extremely competitive nature.
Wal-Mart doesn't have a Supercenter in the valley, but Albertsons is here selling those strawberries you mentioned right now, today. Its conveniently located for me to consume. Now imagine what it would be like without the Albertsons.
Some would call the facts "negative bias", but I call a fact a fact. And I think all the facts need to be included in the Wikipedia article. The biased opinions can be left up to some discussion page, but if Wal-Mart commits to actions that reflect negatively on its image, I'm sorry, but maybe they just aren't as nice as their reputation would have you believe. Which do you want to believe, the facts or your version of reality? Choose now and let it be stated for the record.
you can't throw your lowmemory applications at the systems and say that damn ultrasparc is slow and x86 is fast
Sure you can, and for real-world desktop/workstation price/performance both AMD and Intel smoke Niagara.
The ONLY reason to buy them is if you have a datacenter with many web servers and space/heat problems and want to pay a little extra up front. But you got to admit, at even 2x the cost of AMD boxes it would take many years to make your money back. Its an investment that must be weighed carefully.
That's right, parents should be charged with physical abuse of their child for showing them violent content and sexual abuse for showing them anything indecent.
We should lock these parents up and throw away the keys.
I'm all for blaming people until we run out of people to blame.
But wouldn't it be easier to hand everyone a.357 and yell "Fight!"? Life would be so much more fun if I could kill everyone, legally. Wouldn't want to break a law, y'know..
But anyway, Linux isn't a reimplementation of UNIX, that's GNU. And GNU's not UNIX. Its more like innovation on top of the old UNIX design pricipals, merging Plan 9, Windows, Novell, Apple, *BSD with UNIX.. independantly nothing new, but when its all put together into a GNU system its like nothing else.
And CFQ is better for some workloads because its not specialized..
"It tries to optimise for physical disks by avoiding head movements if possible - one downside to this is that it probably give highly erratic performance on database or storage systems." - link
I think keep it simple stupid should be common sense by now. But sometimes it takes calling people idiots to get them to think about it.
I don't know who's right in this case, but I like the way Linus called those devs idiots. That makes me smile. People should drop their egos and get back to debating.. the gloves are off, Fight!
No, if they embed commercials in DVDs they'll lose sales, the same way they are losing viewers..
Besides, once the content is digital its trivial to remove unwanted garbage.
I'm all for violating the DMCA like some 13 year old step child. Its beggin for it. Just look at the way its written. It says in all caps, "Violate me, pleeeeease... you know you wanna.."
I don't promote the use of marijuana, Cannabis Sativa or Indica. I do, however, promote the concept of Freedom, which should mean I have the right to smoke it if I choose.
Do you disagree with this concept of Freedom? Should I conform because you say it makes me slow, as if that matters to me.
Its not cool to promote weed. Just like its not cool to promote advertisement, TV, and many other psychologically harmful experiences. Why are you so concerned about weed, in light of the rest of our lives?
I recently learned that THC cured brain tumors in rats, with no physically addictive changes in blood or brain chemistry. I also recall other studies have shown growth of brain cells when mixed with other substances.
I don't think its cool to lie, mislead or misjudge.
Corps get tax breaks to build infrastructure, then use this infrastructure to kill off competition, lockin customers, and illegally raise their new found monopoly prices.
Sometimes customers revolt. Sometimes they look for alternatives. Usually they baah like sheep.
Government lets this happen.
Media promotes it.
Eventually you're left with only a few services to choose from, most of which suck and are fundamentally pro-business/anti-consumer, and an uneducated population that's blissful to consume all remaining resources until there's nothing left.
I honestly believe the only way to fix this system is to let it collapse under its own weight.
Why keep fighting it? Let them win. Let them own the lines we paid for. Let them charge us whatever they want. Let them build the most protected DRM system ever.
I don't care.
Just let me smoke my weed, if Freedom is really what you stand for.
A place where government types can go to learn about the brave new world they are facing and how they can effect a stable government within it.
Didn't they teach that stuff in school? If kids can do it effortlessly what excuses do these government types have? Perhaps they should do us all a favor and resign.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly!
These flawed modules will be replaced when the better implementation is ready for production beta release, but certainly not when they're being drafted. This software evolves towards perfection and has been designed to do so. Its not perfect, nobody ever said that, but its focus on being open minded to new ideas, accepting of experimentation and exploration, free thinking, modular and UNIX (KISS, everything is a file, etc) while adopting other concepts, helps it progress towards perfection. Its not stagnate, its not stable. It never said it was.
Besides, stability is often your perception. What if X locks up and your system was secured to prevent you access to the terminal? What if you're playing a fullscreen 3D video game and your proprietary nVidia driver locks up the display? Do you blame Linus?
There are specialized situations where I would not use Linux today, such as single-point-of-failure fileserver or database on SATA, because until recently the SATA implementation was incomplete and buggy.. and I have yet to verify this has been resolved sufficiently, because I'm lazy, so I'd suggest something other than Linux 2.6.0-12 in that situation, but SCSI, EIDE, or all the old tried and true stuff works great. Nothing has changed there, nothing I've noticed anyway, just bug fixes.
There are the occational bastard driver, drivers written without specs or documentation, reverse engineered, etc. But those can be replaced. And you can always do a little research and avoid that hardware.
You gave me some ideas... how's about a competition. A website that highlights these difficult bugs from all the FOSS projects and sorts them by popularity/votes, and displays all this data in nice happy pastels or something easy on the eyes, and fun, like ajax. So we can have a sort of game/competition on who can takle the hard bugs and do it right and make the most points..
What makes FOSS great is the free flow of ideas and info. I encourage code sharing with extreme prejudice!
Microkernels are more reliable because of drivers running on userspace.
References? So Mac OSX is more stable than Linux? News to me.
Yeah, that's true.
What's funny is BSD folks seem to agree with RMS about everyone calling the GNU system Linux.
Very little software on Linux is BSD in origin. Most of it is GNU. And GNU is the real competition for BSD, not Linux. But that's a philosophical debate.
I am a righteous GNU zealot. I long for combat.
Linux never breaks backwards compatibility..
2.6 is more reliable for me.
One thing the "Duh Factor" overlooked is all those developers getting paid to fix bugs and improve stability.
My company hires Linux kernel developers. They don't work for Linus, they work for us, and they improve the stability and efficiency of our kernel. And they do it whether they want to or not, its their job and our product.
Don't assume so much, you know what that does..
If you're being pushed to a new kernel because of hardware compatibility, perhaps your hardware isn't so compatible with Linux. In that case is hardly fair to blame Linux when you could have purchased compatible hardware with support, if you cared.
I spend much of my day troubleshooting hardware problems on Linux. Very very rarely do I find a bug in the kernel. Whole subsystems like SATA needed to be fixed, but it sounds like they've taken care of that now. So I'm not worried.
I have more problems with Fedora Core's kernel and its buggy vlan support than I do with our home grown, heavily modified, hacked up kernels. I trust Linus's kernel and the kernel devs more than I trust software from most corps. In fact, I trust the kernel more than I trust gcc and binutils. Why aren't we so concerned about the problems with binutils never being stablized?
Because we're sensationalists, not computer scientists.
That's funny. You think Linux is a house of cards..
Perhaps NetBSD will be number 1 when Linux falls apart. Then FreeBSD when NetBSD falls apart, then OpenBSD. Maybe it will be OpenSolaris that steals the crown from Windows, nah, it'll probably be Solaris, the commercial version.
Anyway, its fun to speculate.
I think anyone who supports "Open Source" but is against Linux in any way is retarded. Linux isn't here to take anything away from the BSDs, its complimentary, not only competitive.
There was talk that the activists were going to identify us and attack us another time away from the store to get back at the "establishment" and those of us who were helping the "establishment".
Paranoid much?
You know about 60-70% of the population will obey an order from a superior in a position of authority even if they know the order is wrong and they could be jeopardizing an innocent person's life.
You seem to fall into the majority.
I would suggest you spend more time questioning authority and thinking for yourself, as opposed to letting them do your thinking for you.. it means you can't trust any single source of information, and you can't trust authority. Because to do so would be foolish. But don't take my word for it.
Google it.
Then google some of this.
The government is supposed to be bogged down in all kinds of inefficienes so that they are too sluggish to impose any tyranny over the people.
Why do we want to pass more laws if we're so worried about tyranny? How many Americans are worried about tyranny? My guess is not that many. I bet if they lost all their rights today they'd go home and cry in front of their TVs.
Oh really? You must not keep a close eye on your representative Democrates. They'll only vote against something if its highly unpopular, as in the average joe understands the issue and has an opinion about it. Otherwise they tow the party line, alone with the Reps, pro-corporate all the way.
How many Dems voted against the DMCA? How many against the PATRIOT act? How many think for themselves instead of do what they're told?
Might as well put children up there. At least they would really be ignorant. These folks are playing a game, its called politics.
So open hardware really does mean something to somebody..
Thus we deserve neither liberty nor safety. Duh.
/grinz/
Can't wait 'til they come for me.
Then there might be no one left to protect you're American Dream.
Its about time America woke up.
I think a real threat to our way of life, a direct threat to our liberty, is required.. Copyright law is not enough, the PATRIOT act doesn't go far enough, we need to lose the first amendment, or the second.
Only then might we begin to question authority..
I think it really could be that simple, we just need to learn how to Question Authority !
But can we? Can we, as Americans, think?
While Linux has little or nothing to do with UNIX, GNU does, even though it has expanded that definition to include a lot of other protocols and concepts. But what the hell is UNIX anyway? Is it all those old memes like "everything is a file" or is it C or the shell or what?
It used to be UNIX and C, or etc. But now I just think of it as a collection of concepts that evolve over time. UNIX is getting more LinuxOS-like, IMO, because of the competition of a non-tradition/free-thinking open implementation.
Hint: there are more Albertsons stores (2500) than WM Supercenters (2000), therefore Albertsons has MORE buying power and should be able to charge LESS for everything.
This makes sense to you?
I would rather talk about Wal-Mart. They could have openned a Supercenter in the valley any time. They didn't. You know why? I don't either. But I bet they considered it at least one time and decided against it.
They aren't here to lower prices and be my best friend. They're here to outcompete Albertsons by paying their own employees poorly and outsourcing to businesses with questionable employment practices, using their buying power, which I can only assume is greater than Albertson's, to strongarm them out of the market. They're not a friendly business at all. Not to Albertsons, not to mom'n'pop grocers. The only benefit they give me is cheap goods, which I can almost as easily obtain online. But their net effect on the economy could possibly be bad because of their extremely competitive nature.
Wal-Mart doesn't have a Supercenter in the valley, but Albertsons is here selling those strawberries you mentioned right now, today. Its conveniently located for me to consume. Now imagine what it would be like without the Albertsons.
Some would call the facts "negative bias", but I call a fact a fact. And I think all the facts need to be included in the Wikipedia article. The biased opinions can be left up to some discussion page, but if Wal-Mart commits to actions that reflect negatively on its image, I'm sorry, but maybe they just aren't as nice as their reputation would have you believe. Which do you want to believe, the facts or your version of reality? Choose now and let it be stated for the record.
you can't throw your lowmemory applications at the systems and say that damn ultrasparc is slow and x86 is fast
Sure you can, and for real-world desktop/workstation price/performance both AMD and Intel smoke Niagara.
The ONLY reason to buy them is if you have a datacenter with many web servers and space/heat problems and want to pay a little extra up front. But you got to admit, at even 2x the cost of AMD boxes it would take many years to make your money back. Its an investment that must be weighed carefully.
That's right, parents should be charged with physical abuse of their child for showing them violent content and sexual abuse for showing them anything indecent.
.357 and yell "Fight!"? Life would be so much more fun if I could kill everyone, legally. Wouldn't want to break a law, y'know..
We should lock these parents up and throw away the keys.
I'm all for blaming people until we run out of people to blame.
But wouldn't it be easier to hand everyone a
But anyway, Linux isn't a reimplementation of UNIX, that's GNU. And GNU's not UNIX. Its more like innovation on top of the old UNIX design pricipals, merging Plan 9, Windows, Novell, Apple, *BSD with UNIX.. independantly nothing new, but when its all put together into a GNU system its like nothing else.
FUD
sorry for feeding..
And CFQ is better for some workloads because its not specialized..
"It tries to optimise for physical disks by avoiding head movements if possible - one downside to this is that it probably give highly erratic performance on database or storage systems." - link
I think keep it simple stupid should be common sense by now. But sometimes it takes calling people idiots to get them to think about it.
I don't know who's right in this case, but I like the way Linus called those devs idiots. That makes me smile. People should drop their egos and get back to debating.. the gloves are off, Fight!
No, if they embed commercials in DVDs they'll lose sales, the same way they are losing viewers..
Besides, once the content is digital its trivial to remove unwanted garbage.
I'm all for violating the DMCA like some 13 year old step child. Its beggin for it. Just look at the way its written. It says in all caps, "Violate me, pleeeeease... you know you wanna.."
I don't promote the use of marijuana, Cannabis Sativa or Indica. I do, however, promote the concept of Freedom, which should mean I have the right to smoke it if I choose.
Do you disagree with this concept of Freedom? Should I conform because you say it makes me slow, as if that matters to me.
Its not cool to promote weed. Just like its not cool to promote advertisement, TV, and many other psychologically harmful experiences. Why are you so concerned about weed, in light of the rest of our lives?
I recently learned that THC cured brain tumors in rats, with no physically addictive changes in blood or brain chemistry. I also recall other studies have shown growth of brain cells when mixed with other substances.
I don't think its cool to lie, mislead or misjudge.
No one in Sun "believes" in this DRM stuff.
;)
Its nice to assume they're on our side, but I disagree.
I think Sun does believe in DRM. They believe in patents and copyrights, why wouldn't they believe in protecting them?
I want a list of all DRM-friendly companies, so I can avoid their products:
Sun
Microsoft
Apple
HP?
IBM?
Novell?
RIAA and members..
MPAA and members..
Creative Labs
anyone else?
I'm just going to pretend they don't exist. Maybe if I'm lucky, one day, they won't.
Any anti-DRM businesses want my money? Its right here. I got lots of it after taxes and almost nothing to spend it on..
I think we the people should take all harddrives away from the military until they can prove they understand things like security.
We have had too many security breaches lately. Its time we start expecting more accountability.
Trends:
Corps get tax breaks to build infrastructure, then use this infrastructure to kill off competition, lockin customers, and illegally raise their new found monopoly prices.
Sometimes customers revolt. Sometimes they look for alternatives. Usually they baah like sheep.
Government lets this happen.
Media promotes it.
Eventually you're left with only a few services to choose from, most of which suck and are fundamentally pro-business/anti-consumer, and an uneducated population that's blissful to consume all remaining resources until there's nothing left.
I honestly believe the only way to fix this system is to let it collapse under its own weight.
Why keep fighting it? Let them win. Let them own the lines we paid for. Let them charge us whatever they want. Let them build the most protected DRM system ever.
I don't care.
Just let me smoke my weed, if Freedom is really what you stand for.
When all of the hardware is "Trusted" then who will you trust at all?
"Think for yourself, question authority." - Dr. Timothy Leary.
Its such a simple statement, can you figure out what it means? I bet you can't. I bet you don't.
A place where government types can go to learn about the brave new world they are facing and how they can effect a stable government within it.
Didn't they teach that stuff in school? If kids can do it effortlessly what excuses do these government types have? Perhaps they should do us all a favor and resign.