FreeBSD 3.x has them too (although I think at that point they were under a restrictive license, and weren't compiled into the kernel by default. I remember recompiling, rebooting into single user mode, and enabling soft updates on most of my partitions).
There are JDKs native to FreeBSD, and you can always use the Linux JDK on FreeBSD with little fuss.
Yeah, 1.1.8 is the latest FreeBSD native JDK I've heard of. Have you tried any of the Linux Java VMs under FreeBSD's linux emulation? I never got around to it. I'm particularly interested in IBM's JDK 1.3.0 for Linux - if that runs fine, I'll have to reconsider BSD:-)
I would honestly love to run FreeBSD on my desktop, but it doesn't (currently) have a 1.2 or 1.3 Java JDK - until that point, I'll stick with Debian, thank you. I enjoy using FreeBSD as a server (when I don't need Jserv), but that's where it will stay.
That, combined with FreeBSD's inferior SMP (for now anyways - I know FBSD 5.0 will be good), is enough to convince me to stick with GNU/Linux. I would also like to see a journalling filesystem for BSD - there are at least 5 in development for GNU/Linux (Reiser, ext3, JFS, XFS, and GFS - although GFS is of course much more and a different concept altogether, it does do journalling and you can run it as a 'local machine only' FS). Do any BSD hackers know of any similar development efforts for BSD?
In my experience, Linux apps run under FreeBSD at almost exactly the same speed as native BSD apps (or Linux apps on Linux). Some Linux apps might even run faster under BSD than under Linux (not terribly likely, IMHO). I haven't tried the Linux emulation capability of the other BSDs though.
Why doesn't linux have a FreeBSD compatability feature?
Because there are very few (or zero?) apps that are available for FreeBSD and not for Linux. If this ever occurs, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to write a BSD emulation layer for Linux - definately easier than something like WINE (I know, different technically, but that's the whole point).
Through this new partnership, Loki and BSDI will work together to ensure Loki's gaming titles are compatible with FreeBSD using the Linux-compatibility features. Certified games on this configuration will be fully-supported by Loki.
This is definately good news for BSD, although it would be even better to see Loki producing BSD native binaries, or even Linux binaries 'certified' to run under the Linux emulation of other BSDs. Then again, are there really that many people gaming under BSD? I personally really like BSD, butI tend to use it 90% of the time as a server (which is what the BSD people want, anyways).
It's also good to see BSDi (and thus, FreeBSD and Walnut Creek) becoming more 'commercially' acceptable. This attention is long overdue, IMHO.
time to dist-update those boxes that aren't already running woody!
Uh Rob, it's 'apt-get dist-upgrade' . For those of you wondering what I'm nitpicking about, from man apt-get:
dist-upgrade
dist-upgrade,in addition to performing the function
of upgrade, also intelligently handles changing
dependencies with new versions of packages; apt-get
has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and it
will attempt to upgrade the most important packages
at the expense of less important ones if necessary.
The/etc/apt/sources.list file contains a list of
locations from which to retrieve desired package
files.
P.S. I love Debian, and I'm running it at home. Hmmm... last time I checked Potato was using Linux 2.2.17preX - is there a reason why the Debian developers felt it was necessary to release 2.2 now, even though it has an 'unstable' kernel. Are there some 'issues' with 2.2.16 that I should know about (of course, I run 2.4.0test on most of my home boxen, but I'm just wondering).
i didn't see who the leading proprietary databases were that they competed against....anyone else find some details?
The other 2 DBs can't be named due to their draconian licensing terms. From the article:
Postgres consistently matched the performance of the two leading proprietary database applications. The two industry leaders cannot be mentioned by name because their restrictive licensing agreements prohibit anyone who buys their closed source products from publishing their company names in benchmark testing results without the companies' prior approval."
i'm all for postgres, but doesn't it seem funny that their business is based on postgres solutions, and now they come out with this "independant benchmark" claiming that postgres is the best?
I'm not saying this benchmark wasn't biased (it may well have been, and I'm sure many in the MySQL community would like to believe that), but this benchmark was NOT performed by Great Bridge (the company you refer to). From the article:
The tests were conducted by Xperts Inc. of Richmond, Virginia, an independent technology solutions company, using Quest Software's Benchmark Factory application.
Same here in Toronto with Rogers@Home. In fact, I run NAT, Apache, BIND, sendmail, SSH, CVS, and more external services, and @Home has never bugged me. Fairly fast connection - no real complaints.
Re:You were ironic, weren't you?
on
BSD And Politics
·
· Score: 2
I mean, not even I am using Linux because I do believe in Open Source, but because I like the way it works
Okay, that's fine. I personally use Debian GNU/Linux because I believe in Free Software. Just because you're pragmatic doesn't mean everyone else should be.
Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server?
Not Nader personally, but I could imagine a campaign staffer or volunteer chose Free Software because it agrees with the Reform Party's ideas (note: I'm not American, and the only American party I know anything about is the Libertarian Party. If the Reform Party are really a bunch of authoritarian dictators, then they're being hypocritical).
That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
What's wrong with that? Not all politicians are corrupt; besides, as you say, this choice may have been entirely based on the technical quality of BSD. Hosting a political website that has to serve lots of traffic while under constant attack is a fairly strenous test. Just like hosting the website of any large company, I think this is an event the BSD community can be proud of.
why not have *no* blocking software, and only a simple request not to look at pr0n? Depending on the community, this should be deterrent enough.
That's what my high school has, and it works perfectly, even though we have 3 different computer labs, lazy and frequently absent admins, and hormone-crazed teenagers. The admin simply told everyone that looking at pornography will be strictly punished - it's pretty obvious that it's not worth the risk.
The free software community has a lot of competition
Oh no! That's horrible!
Seriously though, the Free Software community is just passionate. Most of the 'holy wars' are just uninformed trolls on Slashdot - none of this has much impact on the rest of the community. If any serious conflicts come up, they are more likely to be personality conflicts between individual developers (e.g. the recent GTK-- thing), and that's unavoidable. I strongly doubt any immoral behavior goes on. The KDE and GNOME people, for example, both aim to provide a user-friendly UNIX desktop. There is strong competition, which encourages each group to work harder. How is this bad?
I know Gnotella has spam filters for things like FlatPlanet, but there (seems to be nothing) from stopping someone from posting a useful looking file only to really be an advertisement.
These documents will probably be unpopular, and will be eventually dropped off Freenet. Also, with a rise in Freenet's popularity I expect to see a corresponding rise in the use of cryptography. I know I plan to GnuPG sign most documents I put onto Freenet.
I know the person I replied to didn't specifically mention 'interface', but that's what he was talking about. The 'interface' between the user and the system - i.e. how the user interactes with the system, is what we're discussing. This doesn't have much to do with the core of the system itself - for example, the virtual memory subsystem doesn't need to be 'user friendly', since most users will never use it directly.
And I agree, choice of interface is good. BUT - when dealing with specific apps, it is very difficult with today's technology to create 2 UIs to the same underlying code. Perhaps with Glade and similar apps this will become more convenient in the future, but for the moment programmers usually need to try to satisfy both groups of users (newbies, power users) with 1 interface.
Making a system good for beginners does not mean crippling it for advanced users.
Yes, in a perfect world you could design an interface that would be intuitive to beginners but flexible and powerful for advanced users (and wouldn't 'get in their way'). But realistically, 95% of all 'user-friendly' interfaces just present 'One True Way' to do something. This makes the interface much easier to learn (that's because there's less to learn), but it limits what the user can do. This is NOT what I want, and I think many UNIX people would agree with me. Since many Free Software programmers are have this kind of attitude, it could explain why progress on an 'easy to use' (i.e. dumbed down) UI for UNIX is coming fairly slowly.
Come up with a UI that is both easy for beginners to learn, and flexible and powerful for advanced users. If someone accomplishes that, I'll be an instant convert. But *until* that point, I couldn't care less.
I think we should be past the point where complexity for complexity's sake should be attractive...
I strongly doubt *any* designs exist where this was a design goal. Often, people design a program to be used by users like themselves - people already very familiar with the subject area. The interface is thus designed to be complex, for the sake of flexibility and ease of use (for the advanced user).
Neal Stephenson addresses this in his excellent essay, 'In the Beginning was the Commandline' (which you can get for free on the web).
Re:I have given up on Mozilla/Netscape
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
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· Score: 2
It all revolves around this page of mine...It is 100% legit HTML
Um, no, it's not. I'd suggest running it through http://validator.w3.org before you make a claim like that. Your page has numberous violations of the HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD.
what if Napster had been distributing bomb-making instructions?...what if Napster was being used to distribute your credit card number?
What if? Who cares! What if someone went around putting up large posters containing your credit card number on street corners and billboards? What if people sent spam (electronic or dead tree) to everyone in America containing bomb building instructions? In general, you deal with the criminal, not the means for committing the crime. IF either of the former activities was considered illegal (it shouldn't be, IMHO), then would you suggest outlawing mail and billboards?
Napster wasn't shut down because it did anything illegal...
Napster hasn't been shutdown.
it failed to provide a reasonable system through which someone could request the removal of material that was harmful to them
I don't know what all this stylized presentation garbage is all about, but I can imagine it's a real hog of CPU and memory resources to preview the contents of every item in a folder.
This isn't an issue with the interface design. Since neither of us have either used it we can't really speculate on how fast it will be, but I bet that won't be an issue in the future - we'll all be running 4 ghz Athlons with gigs of RAM and Nautilus will fly. Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good design. The most important thing Nautilus has to concentrate on is good user interface design, and worry about performance optimization later.
Interface experts be damned, I want my multi-panel display!
I would be very surprised if the final release of Nautilus doesn't have this in one form or another. They probably just didn't take screenshots of it.
I've heard database gurus *strongly* advise against this, but I've never heard a good explanation why it's such a bad idea. From what I've heard, the reason that fixing the PgSQL 8k row size limit hasn't been a priority is that very few people should be storing more than 8k of data in every row of the database.
Hemos mentioned this in an earlier response to the web ad user profiling YRO story earlier today:
The basic problem is that a huge percentage of advertisers outsource their advertising operations to DoubleClick. To have them advertise, you grab images off of DoubleClick. That's not anything we have control, unfortunantely, as that's the advertisers choice to go through DBL. I wish it were otherwise.
I understand the argument that Samba is a proper noun, and thus can't be copyrighted (that's how Andrew Tridgell found the name - he grepped/usr/share/dict for 's*m*b*' because he couldn't think of a good name). But other big commercial products are proper nouns - for example, Oracle or Flash. Should these names also be un-protected by trademark law?
The most obvious incremental improvement to make is to switch over as much stuff as possible to NFSv3 as possible (from what I've heard, you can get significantly better performance). I know that Linux 2.4.0-test support NFSv3 (as well as better overall NFS performance, even for v2), and there is probably a backport of v3 code to 2.2.x (if it's not already supported, I can't remember).
It may have missed everyones attention here but 99% of all major companies USE Microsoft products.
We're not stupid - of course everyone here knows that. But you're talking about a specific segment of the commercial market. Many people use MS for word processing, presentations, desktop machines, etc. But MS does not have nearly as strong a position in the server market. Most large companies still use large UNIX servers by HP, SGI, or Sun. For example, the company where I'm working has tons of Windows machines for employee use, but if you choose, you can get a Sun SPARC workstation on your desk. The internal servers are HP mostly, with the corporate website running Apache + JServ on a Sun E450 running Solaris. IMHO, open source UNIX (BSD + Linux) is in a good position to take over a lot of market share from commercial UNIX (for instance, the company where I'm at now already has 1 Linux box and 1 FreeBSD box (that I know of), and are considering adding more).
Most office people are stupid with computers. It is difficult enough to set up a printer with Windows and I know what I am doing. It would be a nightmare with RedHat
So? That's why you have IT staff. Most office employees couldn't even install Windows - so what? A non-technical employee will never have to configure a printer by themselves (and besides, they're probably using a network printer anyways).
Since I'm currently a high school student enslaved in a school without a CS program, I've got some ideas.
Get the students involved in the adminstration of the school's computer systems. They could also design the school's website, or possibly do some dynamic content (e.g. 'online report cards', etc).
Optional programming contests. Like the math department at my school does, give students the possibility to write programming contests. If you're Canadian, the CCC (run by the University of Waterloo) is a good start (and not too difficult). You could also invent your own 'contest', including fun events like Remote Controlled programmable cars, Computer Jeopardy (e.g. 'What does UNIX stand for?'), Quake deathmatch (with student designed levels), etc. These were all features at a recent programming contest I went to, and it was a blast.
Depending on how advanced the students are, you could get each to help out with the development of a Free Software project which interests them. The work woulnd't necessarily be too technical - for example, web designers could help out filing bugs and making testcases @ mozilla.org
Try introducing the students to 'Software Development', not just 'coding' (i.e. how to design a program, not just how to use a specific programming language). If you're enthusiastic, when you ask them for a relatively simple program, get them to write out an outline, object structure, design guidelines, and then finally implement it. There are plenty of books on this (sorry I can't be more specific - I've never been taught it).
A good bookshelf would be a good idea. Personally, I've had to buy more than 20 books, because the CS section of my school's library consists of 'Windows for Dummies'! I would definately appreciate having some reference material available at school. You could also give people class time to read (and possible write up book reports) on some of the books - depending on the level of the students, this might be too simplistic.
Depending on your level of ability, write some code yourself (say, from a University CS curriculm), and take your students through it. I would love a guided tour of a filesystem, for instance. A more simple topic, like Quicksorts (and optimization) would be good for less advanced students.
This isn't so much an activity as something you should be doing all the time. Critique people's coding style and design techniques. Stop bad habits from forming early - don't accept badly written or designed code. As long as the guidelines are reasonable (and don't get into religious issues like bracket placement), students will soon tire of rewriting code, and eventually learn to do things to 'write way'.
Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 3.x has them too (although I think at that point they were under a restrictive license, and weren't compiled into the kernel by default. I remember recompiling, rebooting into single user mode, and enabling soft updates on most of my partitions).
There are JDKs native to FreeBSD, and you can always use the Linux JDK on FreeBSD with little fuss.
Yeah, 1.1.8 is the latest FreeBSD native JDK I've heard of. Have you tried any of the Linux Java VMs under FreeBSD's linux emulation? I never got around to it. I'm particularly interested in IBM's JDK 1.3.0 for Linux - if that runs fine, I'll have to reconsider BSD :-)
That, combined with FreeBSD's inferior SMP (for now anyways - I know FBSD 5.0 will be good), is enough to convince me to stick with GNU/Linux. I would also like to see a journalling filesystem for BSD - there are at least 5 in development for GNU/Linux (Reiser, ext3, JFS, XFS, and GFS - although GFS is of course much more and a different concept altogether, it does do journalling and you can run it as a 'local machine only' FS). Do any BSD hackers know of any similar development efforts for BSD?
Why doesn't linux have a FreeBSD compatability feature?
Because there are very few (or zero?) apps that are available for FreeBSD and not for Linux. If this ever occurs, I would imagine it would be fairly easy to write a BSD emulation layer for Linux - definately easier than something like WINE (I know, different technically, but that's the whole point).
This is definately good news for BSD, although it would be even better to see Loki producing BSD native binaries, or even Linux binaries 'certified' to run under the Linux emulation of other BSDs. Then again, are there really that many people gaming under BSD? I personally really like BSD, butI tend to use it 90% of the time as a server (which is what the BSD people want, anyways).
It's also good to see BSDi (and thus, FreeBSD and Walnut Creek) becoming more 'commercially' acceptable. This attention is long overdue, IMHO.
Uh Rob, it's 'apt-get dist-upgrade' . For those of you wondering what I'm nitpicking about, from man apt-get:
dist-upgrade
P.S. I love Debian, and I'm running it at home. Hmmm... last time I checked Potato was using Linux 2.2.17preX - is there a reason why the Debian developers felt it was necessary to release 2.2 now, even though it has an 'unstable' kernel. Are there some 'issues' with 2.2.16 that I should know about (of course, I run 2.4.0test on most of my home boxen, but I'm just wondering).
The other 2 DBs can't be named due to their draconian licensing terms. From the article:
Postgres consistently matched the performance of the two leading proprietary database applications. The two industry leaders cannot be mentioned by name because their restrictive licensing agreements prohibit anyone who buys their closed source products from publishing their company names in benchmark testing results without the companies' prior approval."
i'm all for postgres, but doesn't it seem funny that their business is based on postgres solutions, and now they come out with this "independant benchmark" claiming that postgres is the best?
I'm not saying this benchmark wasn't biased (it may well have been, and I'm sure many in the MySQL community would like to believe that), but this benchmark was NOT performed by Great Bridge (the company you refer to). From the article:
The tests were conducted by Xperts Inc. of Richmond, Virginia, an independent technology solutions company, using Quest Software's Benchmark Factory application.
Same here in Toronto with Rogers@Home. In fact, I run NAT, Apache, BIND, sendmail, SSH, CVS, and more external services, and @Home has never bugged me. Fairly fast connection - no real complaints.
Okay, that's fine. I personally use Debian GNU/Linux because I believe in Free Software. Just because you're pragmatic doesn't mean everyone else should be.
Imagine Ralph Nader pondering night after night over what OS should he choose for his campaign website server?
Not Nader personally, but I could imagine a campaign staffer or volunteer chose Free Software because it agrees with the Reform Party's ideas (note: I'm not American, and the only American party I know anything about is the Libertarian Party. If the Reform Party are really a bunch of authoritarian dictators, then they're being hypocritical).
That a politician is using a certain operating system for his campaign?
What's wrong with that? Not all politicians are corrupt; besides, as you say, this choice may have been entirely based on the technical quality of BSD. Hosting a political website that has to serve lots of traffic while under constant attack is a fairly strenous test. Just like hosting the website of any large company, I think this is an event the BSD community can be proud of.
That's what my high school has, and it works perfectly, even though we have 3 different computer labs, lazy and frequently absent admins, and hormone-crazed teenagers. The admin simply told everyone that looking at pornography will be strictly punished - it's pretty obvious that it's not worth the risk.
Oh no! That's horrible!
Seriously though, the Free Software community is just passionate. Most of the 'holy wars' are just uninformed trolls on Slashdot - none of this has much impact on the rest of the community. If any serious conflicts come up, they are more likely to be personality conflicts between individual developers (e.g. the recent GTK-- thing), and that's unavoidable. I strongly doubt any immoral behavior goes on. The KDE and GNOME people, for example, both aim to provide a user-friendly UNIX desktop. There is strong competition, which encourages each group to work harder. How is this bad?
These documents will probably be unpopular, and will be eventually dropped off Freenet. Also, with a rise in Freenet's popularity I expect to see a corresponding rise in the use of cryptography. I know I plan to GnuPG sign most documents I put onto Freenet.
And I agree, choice of interface is good. BUT - when dealing with specific apps, it is very difficult with today's technology to create 2 UIs to the same underlying code. Perhaps with Glade and similar apps this will become more convenient in the future, but for the moment programmers usually need to try to satisfy both groups of users (newbies, power users) with 1 interface.
Yes, in a perfect world you could design an interface that would be intuitive to beginners but flexible and powerful for advanced users (and wouldn't 'get in their way'). But realistically, 95% of all 'user-friendly' interfaces just present 'One True Way' to do something. This makes the interface much easier to learn (that's because there's less to learn), but it limits what the user can do. This is NOT what I want, and I think many UNIX people would agree with me. Since many Free Software programmers are have this kind of attitude, it could explain why progress on an 'easy to use' (i.e. dumbed down) UI for UNIX is coming fairly slowly.
Come up with a UI that is both easy for beginners to learn, and flexible and powerful for advanced users. If someone accomplishes that, I'll be an instant convert. But *until* that point, I couldn't care less.
I think we should be past the point where complexity for complexity's sake should be attractive...
I strongly doubt *any* designs exist where this was a design goal. Often, people design a program to be used by users like themselves - people already very familiar with the subject area. The interface is thus designed to be complex, for the sake of flexibility and ease of use (for the advanced user).
Neal Stephenson addresses this in his excellent essay, 'In the Beginning was the Commandline' (which you can get for free on the web).
Um, no, it's not. I'd suggest running it through http://validator.w3.org before you make a claim like that. Your page has numberous violations of the HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD.
Which, of course, is the problem with the American political system. You get to choose, alright - but from the lesser of 2 evils.
I meant 'faster' in terms of performance, not how quickly you can get things done (which, again, is a function of good user interface design).
What if? Who cares! What if someone went around putting up large posters containing your credit card number on street corners and billboards? What if people sent spam (electronic or dead tree) to everyone in America containing bomb building instructions? In general, you deal with the criminal, not the means for committing the crime. IF either of the former activities was considered illegal (it shouldn't be, IMHO), then would you suggest outlawing mail and billboards?
Napster wasn't shut down because it did anything illegal...
Napster hasn't been shutdown.
it failed to provide a reasonable system through which someone could request the removal of material that was harmful to them
How can information be harmful?
That's not what I said. Quality user interface design and bloated code are 2 completely different things.
GNOME these days is reeking of Microsoft.
Microsoft dominate more than 90% of the desktop market. They must have done *something* right. And code re-use with COM+ is one of those things.
This isn't an issue with the interface design. Since neither of us have either used it we can't really speculate on how fast it will be, but I bet that won't be an issue in the future - we'll all be running 4 ghz Athlons with gigs of RAM and Nautilus will fly. Think about it - Explorer is *much* slower than MC, but you seem to think it's a good design. The most important thing Nautilus has to concentrate on is good user interface design, and worry about performance optimization later.
Interface experts be damned, I want my multi-panel display!
I would be very surprised if the final release of Nautilus doesn't have this in one form or another. They probably just didn't take screenshots of it.
I've heard database gurus *strongly* advise against this, but I've never heard a good explanation why it's such a bad idea. From what I've heard, the reason that fixing the PgSQL 8k row size limit hasn't been a priority is that very few people should be storing more than 8k of data in every row of the database.
The basic problem is that a huge percentage of advertisers outsource their advertising operations to DoubleClick. To have them advertise, you grab images off of DoubleClick. That's not anything we have control, unfortunantely, as that's the advertisers choice to go through DBL. I wish it were otherwise.
I understand the argument that Samba is a proper noun, and thus can't be copyrighted (that's how Andrew Tridgell found the name - he grepped /usr/share/dict for 's*m*b*' because he couldn't think of a good name). But other big commercial products are proper nouns - for example, Oracle or Flash. Should these names also be un-protected by trademark law?
The most obvious incremental improvement to make is to switch over as much stuff as possible to NFSv3 as possible (from what I've heard, you can get significantly better performance). I know that Linux 2.4.0-test support NFSv3 (as well as better overall NFS performance, even for v2), and there is probably a backport of v3 code to 2.2.x (if it's not already supported, I can't remember).
We're not stupid - of course everyone here knows that. But you're talking about a specific segment of the commercial market. Many people use MS for word processing, presentations, desktop machines, etc. But MS does not have nearly as strong a position in the server market. Most large companies still use large UNIX servers by HP, SGI, or Sun. For example, the company where I'm working has tons of Windows machines for employee use, but if you choose, you can get a Sun SPARC workstation on your desk. The internal servers are HP mostly, with the corporate website running Apache + JServ on a Sun E450 running Solaris. IMHO, open source UNIX (BSD + Linux) is in a good position to take over a lot of market share from commercial UNIX (for instance, the company where I'm at now already has 1 Linux box and 1 FreeBSD box (that I know of), and are considering adding more).
Most office people are stupid with computers. It is difficult enough to set up a printer with Windows and I know what I am doing. It would be a nightmare with RedHat
So? That's why you have IT staff. Most office employees couldn't even install Windows - so what? A non-technical employee will never have to configure a printer by themselves (and besides, they're probably using a network printer anyways).