It doesn't beg any questions at all. To "beg the question" means to assume the thing that you're trying to prove. The common usage of it as "leads to the question of" is completely wrong.
True, but it makes the kernel tarball bigger whether or not you compile it in. Current kernels are already about 13-14MB compressed; I wouldn't be surprised if people complain about including large chunks of code that not everyone will want.
Note that I'm not claiming it _won't_ be added or that no one will want it; all I'm claiming is that it's not necessarily just a matter of "cool! when will it be in the kernel!". Nothing is guaranteed.
Thanks, I have looked at the kernel. But thanks for being condescending anyway! I appreciated it.
Where did I say that there's no chance XFS will go into the kernel? All I said was that it's not guaranteed to go in and that it's too early to give time estimates.
XFS is a lot of code; some time back, one of the SGI folks working on it estimated that it was around a hundred thousand lines. That's a lot of code. Assuming that Linus et al do want it in the kernel, that's still a lot of code to check through and test. Filesystems are hard, especially filesystems as complex as XFS. It's not like dropping in another driver for a random piece of hardware; there's a _lot_ of work that needs to be done to get XFS to the point where it could even be considered for inclusion in a mainline kernel.
Why do people seem to expect that XFS will automatically be added to the main kernel tarball? Nobody outside of SGI has even seen the code yet; it's far too early to speculate on whether or not it'll be added to the mainline kernel, let alone when.
Sure, maybe it'll be a great feature that everybody wants. Or maybe it'll be 100k lines of heavyweight filesystem code that very few people want, and others will whine about how much it bloats the kernel. There's no way to tell yet. Give it time, okay?
What does this have to do with the First Amendment? Schools have every right to limit what you can do with their equipment.
Remember, the First Amendment says "Congress may make no law...". It places limitations on what Congress can do; it does not guarantee that citizens can read or say whatever they want in any circumstance. It certainly does not say that people aren't allowed to restrict how equipment they own is used.
And how is this not true of the Linux community? Things get cast in a Linux vs. the world light very often; it's Linux against Microsoft, Debian against Redhat, Slackware against the known world. When groups in the community get too large, people turn on them -- witness all the "Redhat is the next Microsoft" flames.
Linux folks seem to _love_ having a big bad enemy to fight against just as much as any other minority OS community.
It makes sense, too. After all, if you happen to think that your pet system is the best thing since sliced bread, then you needa reason why everyone isn't using it. It clearly can't be because something else is better, and it clearly can't be due to a flaw in your perfect system, so all that's left is finding an enemy to blame it on.
We don't know of any Linux RAIDframe ports; we've occasionally toyed with the idea of doing one, but we really don't have time to do it now (our efforts are focused on the NASD project these days). If you're interested in porting it to Linux, though, please let us know.
Re:Userland threads is faster
on
*BSD News
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· Score: 1
So if FreeBSD's threads are implemented entirely in userland, how do they avoid putting all of a process's threads to sleep when one thread blocks on IO?
Not all of your bandwidth is going to go to data. Remember that you have protocol overhead to deal with -- ethernet packets have headers, TCP packets have headers, and so forth. All of those headers take up some of your precious bandwidth, so you don't really have 1.25MB/sec to play with.
The fact that new users keep showing up doesn't mean that the rabid advocates aren't scaring people off or causing other problems. It just means that they aren't scaring _everyone_ off. I think there are probably more people discouraged by the advocates than encouraged, but as you say there's no proof. Unfortunately, it's something that's hard to get proof for.
Much of the negative effect of flaming is probably indirect -- people don't go away just because there are flames, but because the flames can drown out the more civil discussions. For example, I know a lot of people who either don't read Slashdot anymore or don't read the comments anymore because of the number of flames and uninformed rants. These aren't clueless newbies being scared off; these are knowledgeable, intelligent people who could potentially contribute a lot being driven away because they don't want to take the effort to wade through a pile of flames to get interesting comments. I doubt that this is an isolated occurence; anywhere that you have a lot of rabid flaming you probably lose a good deal of useful content because people aren't willing to deal with the flames.
This sort of reluctance ends up hurting newbies and the community in general. When you start losing contributors, you lose the sort of help and information that new users need.
And as far as your later points about how Linux users don't get converted to Windows because Linux is so much better, I wouldn't be so sure. I know a lot of people who've used Windows, Linux, and many other Unix flavors extensively who've decided on Windows for their machines because it serves their purposes better. Better for you is not the same as better for everyone.
I disagree. It's true that commercial acceptance isn't as crucial with Linux as with commercial systems, but commercial acceptance isn't the only thing that advocacy affects. Rabid advocates can drive off users even if there aren't any commercial concerns.
You may not care about commercial success or world domination or defeating Microsoft or whatever the trendy goal of the moment is, but the simple fact that more users is better remains. A bigger user base means more testing, more software, more support, and a generally better system.
Rabid advocates may never be able to drive everyone away and completely kill Linux, but they can certainly drive away enough people to damage it. Remember, every potential user driven away is a potential contributor lost.
Actually, AIX really isn't too bad once you get used to it.
In my experience, it's quite stable, not too slow, and has a number of nice features. I liked having a good journalling filesystem and being able to resize disk partitions on the fly. I also liked being able to use SMIT (the graphical admin tool) to figure out how to do some of the more obscure things.
It does have some downsides, though; it was often hard to port software to AIX from other unixes, error messages were often surprisingly cryptic, and sometimes things seemed to be done a particular way for no other reason than to be different.
But, overall, it was actually pretty good. Sometimes I miss having an RS6K on my desk, even though the Linux box that replaced it is much, much faster.
I'm not sure calling this "the" press release for linux 2.2.0 is accurate; it's really more of a proposal for a press release that's been tossed around on linux-kernel for a while. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been officially blessed by Linus at all.
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It doesn't beg any questions at all. To "beg the question" means to assume the thing that you're trying to prove. The common usage of it as "leads to the question of" is completely wrong.
Sorry, it's a pet peeve.
True, but it makes the kernel tarball bigger whether or not you compile it in. Current kernels are already about 13-14MB compressed; I wouldn't be surprised if people complain about including large chunks of code that not everyone will want.
Note that I'm not claiming it _won't_ be added or that no one will want it; all I'm claiming is that it's not necessarily just a matter of "cool! when will it be in the kernel!". Nothing is guaranteed.
Thanks, I have looked at the kernel. But thanks for being condescending anyway! I appreciated it.
Where did I say that there's no chance XFS will go into the kernel? All I said was that it's not guaranteed to go in and that it's too early to give time estimates.
XFS is a lot of code; some time back, one of the SGI folks working on it estimated that it was around a hundred thousand lines. That's a lot of code. Assuming that Linus et al do want it in the kernel, that's still a lot of code to check through and test. Filesystems are hard, especially filesystems as complex as XFS. It's not like dropping in another driver for a random piece of hardware; there's a _lot_ of work that needs to be done to get XFS to the point where it could even be considered for inclusion in a mainline kernel.
Why do people seem to expect that XFS will automatically be added to the main kernel tarball? Nobody outside of SGI has even seen the code yet; it's far too early to speculate on whether or not it'll be added to the mainline kernel, let alone when.
Sure, maybe it'll be a great feature that everybody wants. Or maybe it'll be 100k lines of heavyweight filesystem code that very few people want, and others will whine about how much it bloats the kernel. There's no way to tell yet. Give it time, okay?
What does this have to do with the First Amendment? Schools have every right to limit what you can do with their equipment.
Remember, the First Amendment says "Congress may make no law...". It places limitations on what Congress can do; it does not guarantee that citizens can read or say whatever they want in any circumstance. It certainly does not say that people aren't allowed to restrict how equipment they own is used.
And how is this not true of the Linux community? Things get cast in a Linux vs. the world light very often; it's Linux against Microsoft, Debian against Redhat, Slackware against the known world. When groups in the community get too large, people turn on them -- witness all the "Redhat is the next Microsoft" flames.
Linux folks seem to _love_ having a big bad enemy to fight against just as much as any other minority OS community.
It makes sense, too. After all, if you happen to think that your pet system is the best thing since sliced bread, then you needa reason why everyone isn't using it. It clearly can't be because something else is better, and it clearly can't be due to a flaw in your perfect system, so all that's left is finding an enemy to blame it on.
We don't know of any Linux RAIDframe ports; we've occasionally toyed with the idea of doing one, but we really don't have time to do it now (our efforts are focused on the NASD project these days). If you're interested in porting it to Linux, though, please let us know.
So if FreeBSD's threads are implemented entirely in userland, how do they avoid putting all of a process's threads to sleep when one thread blocks on IO?
Not all of your bandwidth is going to go to data. Remember that you have protocol overhead to deal with -- ethernet packets have headers, TCP packets have headers, and so forth. All of those headers take up some of your precious bandwidth, so you don't really have 1.25MB/sec to play with.
The fact that new users keep showing up doesn't mean that the rabid advocates aren't scaring people off or causing other problems. It just means that they aren't scaring _everyone_ off. I think there are probably more people discouraged by the advocates than encouraged, but as you say there's no proof. Unfortunately, it's something that's hard to get proof for.
Much of the negative effect of flaming is probably indirect -- people don't go away just because there are flames, but because the flames can drown out the more civil discussions. For example, I know a lot of people who either don't read Slashdot anymore or don't read the comments anymore because of the number of flames and uninformed rants. These aren't clueless newbies being scared off; these are knowledgeable, intelligent people who could potentially contribute a lot being driven away because they don't want to take the effort to wade through a pile of flames to get interesting comments. I doubt that this is an isolated occurence; anywhere that you have a lot of rabid flaming you probably lose a good deal of useful content because people aren't willing to deal with the flames.
This sort of reluctance ends up hurting newbies and the community in general. When you start losing contributors, you lose the sort of help and information that new users need.
And as far as your later points about how Linux users don't get converted to Windows because Linux is so much better, I wouldn't be so sure. I know a lot of people who've used Windows, Linux, and many other Unix flavors extensively who've decided on Windows for their machines because it serves their purposes better. Better for you is not the same as better for everyone.
I disagree. It's true that commercial acceptance isn't as crucial with Linux as with commercial systems, but commercial acceptance isn't the only thing that advocacy affects. Rabid advocates can drive off users even if there aren't any commercial concerns.
You may not care about commercial success or world domination or defeating Microsoft or whatever the trendy goal of the moment is, but the simple fact that more users is better remains. A bigger user base means more testing, more software, more support, and a generally better system.
Rabid advocates may never be able to drive everyone away and completely kill Linux, but they can certainly drive away enough people to damage it. Remember, every potential user driven away is a potential contributor lost.
Actually, AIX really isn't too bad once you get used to it.
In my experience, it's quite stable, not too slow, and has a number of nice features. I liked having a good journalling filesystem and being able to resize disk partitions on the fly. I also liked being able to use SMIT (the graphical admin tool) to figure out how to do some of the more obscure things.
It does have some downsides, though; it was often hard to port software to AIX from other unixes, error messages were often surprisingly cryptic, and sometimes things seemed to be done a particular way for no other reason than to be different.
But, overall, it was actually pretty good. Sometimes I miss having an RS6K on my desk, even though the Linux box that replaced it is much, much faster.
I'm not sure calling this "the" press release for linux 2.2.0 is accurate; it's really more of a proposal for a press release that's been tossed around on linux-kernel for a while. As far as I can tell, it hasn't been officially blessed by Linus at all.
I could be wrong about that, though.